Research links mindfulness meditation with everything from metacognition to cortical thickness in the brain, says APS Fellow Tania Singer. She and other psychological scientists impart the latest findings from the science of paying attention.
Tang’s research on a particular form of mindfulness training, integrative body–mind training (IBMT), suggests that five 20-minute training sessions may be enough to improve attention and cause changes in underlying brain activity.
These findings are tantalizing, but Tang noted that future research should examine the effects of different types of mindfulness programs to isolate the specific components of mindfulness.
It’s exactly this kind of isolation on which APS Fellow Tania Singer (Max Planck Institute for Higher Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany) has focused her efforts.
In an ongoing effort called the ReSource Project (see www.resource-project.org/en/home.html), Singer and colleagues have been trying to tease apart the various cognitive, affective, and metacognitive processes involved in practices that people generally associate with “mindfulness meditation.”
