In 1890, legendary American psychologist William James wrote: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”

Little did James know, that education already existed, and in fact had been practiced for thousands of years in the East. It’s called concentration meditation (traditionally, shamatha).

Studies have confirmed the incredible attentional skills of practiced meditators.

But you don’t have to spend months in a cave to begin these benefits from concentration meditation. As it turns out, researchers found that even just a few minutes of meditation each day can improve your attention skills. Furthermore, one study found that a short 10-minute meditation practice has been shown to undo the negative effects of multitasking.

So how does meditation actually train attention?

2 Types of Attention

First, it helps to understand how attention works in the brain.

Just as with physical fitness, your attention consists of both strength (selective attention) and endurance (sustained attention).

1. Selective Attention

Selective attention is like strength. It involves voluntarily choosing what to pay attention to. Taking active control of your attention deploys executive functions of the brain in the anterior cingulate cortex and lateral frontal cortex.

As an example of selective attention in action, you may have come across the Monkey Business Video (see below):

The monkey business illusion is an example of selective attention in action.

In this famous experiment, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris created a skit called “the monkey business illusion,” in which players wearing either black or white clothes pass a basketball back and forth to their same-colored teammates.

Your job as the viewer is to count how many times the white-clothed basketball players pass the ball back and forth. But the real test (spoiler alert) is to see whether you notice the man in a black gorilla suit insert himself into the game, or whether your attention selectively removes all black stimuli. About half of viewers fail to see the gorilla, meaning that their selective attention appropriately filters out the irrelevant information.

Experienced meditators have shown a heightened selective attention skills, easily tuning down the “noise,” in the form of extraneous background information, so that they can perceive more “signal,” the object they intend to pay attention to. [Source: Altered Traits, p. 130, Dr. Richard Davidson’s dissertation]

2. Sustained Attention

Sustained attention involves maintaining constant vigilance toward an object. If selective attention is your strength, then sustained attention is your endurance.

The problem is that your attention is normally a subconscious mental faculty when you’re not taking volitional control of it.

When you encounter something novel, like a stick that could be a snake, the reticular activating system (RAS), located in your brainstem, automatically alerts your conscious mind of something that might be dangerous or interesting. Our brains evolved such that the RAS gets habituated to an object of attention that it no longer deems interesting, allowing the mind to then wander off toward the next useful item.

After seeing a stick for the first time, your RAS gets bored and begins to filter out redundant information.

This habituation process explains why you can’t stay interested in one object for long before craving something new, and why your attention grows weak about four times per second.

When you learn to stabilize your attention in meditation, it becomes clear that nothing is inherently boring. Rather, boredom is simply habituation due to a lack of sustained attentional strength. When you develop single-pointed attention, whatever your attention rests on can become interesting. (Without going into detail here, this can lead to some extremely pleasurable states of concentrative absorption in meditation.)

Studies have confirmed that meditation trains your brain to get less habituated, allowing practiced meditators to experience consistent, unwavering attention.

How to Begin Training Attention

Here are the basic steps for a strong focused-attention meditation technique.

The objective here is to rest your attention in one location for as long as possible without getting lost in thought.

Observe the sensations of breath at your nostrils. See how closely you can observe it. If your breath had pixels like a television screen, see if you can go into high-def. The sharper your attention, the more of the breath there is to perceive. Set a strong intention to keep your attention stabilized on the breath. Since your “attention muscles” are normally controlled by a subconscious component of your mind, the way to train it is by setting a strong intention. Try to cultivate an attitude of curiosity. What does it feel like to breathe? You might imagine yourself as a newborn baby, curiously taking its first sip of air. Curiosity is a powerful tool for training the mind because it taps into your brain’s natural reward system. Try counting the breath to see if you can follow 10 breaths in a row without forgetting about your object of meditation. This sounds simple enough, but I urge you to close your eyes and try to focus on the breath for 10 breaths in a row. It is very difficult at first to do so without your mind wandering off. If you get this down, go to two sets of 10 and so on. Whenever the mind wanders, just return to “1.” Don’t become frustrated with yourself, because this realization is in fact the “bicep curl” of meditation — you’re strengthening your introspective metacognitive awareness every time you recover your attention to the breath.

Here are some measures of progress in training your attention: