After only eight weeks of training, testing revealed that the stu- dents who were taught to meditate could intentionally direct and focus their attention more quickly than a matched group of un- trained students. Another study used similar tests to investigate the effects of a monthlong intensive group meditation retreat at shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. These participants had considerably more practice experience than the students, and practiced for eight to ten hours each day during the retreat.
Interestingly, the more experienced retreat participants did not demonstrate the increase in capacity to direct and fo- cus attention that was seen in the novice meditators; they were pretty good at that when the retreat started. Instead, the retreat participants had a change in the nature of their atten- tion. Their awareness became much more open and alert. This finding seems to describe the transition from focused mind- fulness to broader and deeper insight and awareness described in traditional meditation teachings. As expected, the retreat participants also had substantially less mental wandering, and more insight into wandering and distraction when it occurred.
Other testing from Jha’s lab has demonstrated that meditation improves working (or short-term) memory as well as the ability to resist distraction. This has very significant implications for im- proving our ability to accomplish our goals in everyday life. she has found that even very short periods of regular practice, as little as twelve minutes a day, are associated with significant improve- ments in working memory. More practice is associated with better results, including both improved accuracy and reduced wandering.
 
A Different Experience of Self 
Another recent stream of research on meditation has explored the way that practice affects the experience of the self. One recent set of reports from the university of Toronto explores the way medi- tation affects the way we construct a self out of our experience and the relationship between the narration we use to create a self and our direct moment-to-moment experience. Two distinct neural networks in different parts of the brain contribute to our experi- ence of a “self.” Activity in one region is associated with a descrip- tive narrative: thoughts about what is happening and how we are. The other region is associated with a more direct experience of sensation and emotion in the present moment.
The two areas are linked so that activity in the “present- moment” awareness region activates the storytelling region. so a shift away from more direct sensory awareness into thinking is not just random; it is literally built into the nervous system. This might explain why the experience of nonconceptual mindfulness and awareness is often so fleeting. A moment of nonthought jump-

starts the storytelling areas of the brain. In the study, participants were asked to employ different types of focus, cor- responding to the two distinct modes of self-reference. “narrative focus” calls for elaborating mental constructs within our minds, weaving a story as it were, which reduces attention toward sensory objects available in our immediate experience. By contrast, “experiential focus” calls for inhibiting our elaboration on any given mental event in favor of broadly attend- ing to the objects in our experience and “canvassing thoughts, feelings, and physi- cal sensations without selecting any one sensory object.” narrative focus is associated with ruminative thoughts about the self, while experiential focus avoids rumination. It disengages the brain networks that lead to self-referential story-making. The re- searchers noted that while a focus that cen- ters on experience in the present includes a strong component of paying attention to bodily sensations, meditation practice is associated with developing moment-to- moment awareness of all available stimuli. Accordingly, when participants were in- structed to maintain an experiential focus, they were encouraged to include “internal thoughts, emotions, and external sensory events, in addition to bodily sensations.” A mindfulness-trained group was compared with a novice group in how they performed in working with these different types of focus and, by extension, the two different neural regions: the one associated with story-making about the self and the other associated with immediate experience.
The Toronto group demonstrated that meditation practice enhances the ability to disconnect these two regions and engage more robustly in experiential focus. As a result, the likelihood that an experience of present-moment awareness will auto- matically be followed by a self-centered monologue is reduced. even the habitual patterns that are deeply built into the body can be changed with practice. norman farb, the lead investigator of the study, says that the work demonstrates how “mindful- ness changes the very ground of the way that we experience the self.” ♦