What I Learned While Writing Focus

I have been tracking the field of attention for about 30 years. My dissertation as a graduate student was actually on meditation, and meditation as a way of managing stress reactivity.

A lot of us who were interested in it were trying to shoehorn it in, but the faculty wasn’t interested. They thought it was a crazy topic, and that there was no point in pursuing it.

What I’ve seen now from Richard Davidson’s research, who I talked to extensively for the book, are really gold-standard studies: brain imaging of highly advanced meditators that shows something we all maybe suspected way back when. Western psychology and western culture had too limited a view of human potential in transforming the mind and in how far attentional training could go. Meditation from a cognitive science point of view is the retraining of attention.

Read the full article at Mindful.org

 

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