A digital meditation training program that is continuously tailored by an algorithm to suit a user's habits was shown to improve memory and attention control in healthy young adults in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour on June 3.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco enlisted participants between the ages of 18 and 35 to use the university's patented MediTrain intervention every day for six weeks. Afterward, those participants performed better than a control group on tests of sustained attention and working memory.
MediTrain is meant to be used for a total of 20 to 30 minutes every day, broken down into shorter periods to guide users through learning to focus only on breathing. Over time, a closed-loop algorithm suggests longer or shorter meditation periods based on a user's self-reported performance after each session. Using this system, though the study participants could initially focus on their breath for just 20 seconds, after 30 days, they had reached an average of six minutes.
"We thought it was a long shot to see these types of improvements in a group this young and healthy," said David Ziegler, PhD, director of multimodal biosensing at UCSF's Neuroscape center and the first author of the paper. "But it speaks to the power of the method."
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