The Effectiveness of Short Meditation on Attentional Performance: A Quick Classroom Activity

Abstract

Undergraduate students suffer from stress and attention problems throughout their academic career. This is a great time for students to learn a new skill; meditation practices have been shown to improve mental and physical health and our activity can introduce them to this beneficial practice. Utilizing the learning-cycle approach, we had students first engage with a problem, explore interpretations, conduct a meditation experiment, and then interpret and explain results. This short activity investigates the impact of focused-breathing meditation on the attention of students using the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT). The within subjects' design showed that a majority of students see reaction time improvements with just 5-minutes of meditation or 5-minutes of being sedentary. This has been repeated over many years and in both an introductory biology course and as well in a 300-level neuroscience techniques course. We also investigated if the amount of sleep the previous night would impact performance changes, but this was found to have no effect. Our 5-minute meditation activity taught with the learning-cycle approach can be quickly added to any neuroscience, biology, behavior, or psychology course. Further discussion focuses on the stress response, the neurophysiology of meditation, brain electrical activity, brain regions, and impact of behaviors on physiology.