William James wrote that controlling attention is at ‘the very root of judgement, character and will’. He also noted that controlling attention is much easier said than done. This is unfortunate because almost every impressive human achievement is, at heart, a feat of attention. Art, science, technology — you name it — someone, somewhere had to concentrate, and concentrate hard. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to concentrate without effort? Not to feel the strain of directing attention, just to experience a relaxed, intense, deep focus? So naturally the million dollar question is: how can attention be improved? Psychologists are fascinated by the sometimes fantastical claims made for meditation, particularly in its promise of improving attention. It certainly seems intuitively right that meditation should improve attention — after all meditation is essentially concentration practice — but what does the scientific evidence tell us? Does meditation improve attention? The problem with attention is that it naturally likes to jump around from one thing to another: attention is antsy, it won’t settle — this is not in itself a bad thing, just the way it is. Attention’s fidgety nature can be clearly seen in the phenomenon of ‘binocular […]