"Lantern" meditation

The past week I've been trying a new meditation technique that is unlike any others I've played around with. I was inspired by a recent conversation with my CDS mentor, Alison Gopnik (the Cognitive Development Society's mentorship program is great for students, check it out if you haven't). She describes children's attention to be more like a "lantern" than like a "flashlight" - unfocused, but broad. Kids and babies notice things about the world that us adults take for granted. Mindfulness meditation can bring us back to the moment, but it often involves focusing on a mantra or focusing on the breath or focusing on focusing - when maybe we should stop trying to focus on anything in the first place.

Alison described her meditation practice to be like a "lantern" meditation. I didn't get many details about her specific technique, but it inspired me to test out my own interpretation of it.

For 20 minutes a day (sometimes broken up into two 10-minute sessions) I sat outside and let my attention be captured by anything and everything. Birds singing, bugs crawling, the wind, weird cracks in the pavement, dogs running up for a scratch. I didn't fight distractions, and I also didn't focus on anything. No mantra, no specific breathing, no "trying not to think". I think by being passive about the state of my mind, I was able to reach a meditative state faster than usual.

I'm going to stick with this technique for a bit, and I'll update the blog later on if I notice any additional benefits. Thank-you to Alison, if you somehow haven't heard of her, you should check her out (countless talks on Youtube and epic podcast appearances). 

Debrief: short-term meditation training results

 To recap, this is what I did: 

• Pre-test: N-back until failure (did not make it past 3-back)
• 20 minutes of mindfulness-meditation-inspired meditation for 4 days
• (Always between 1 and 4pm, set a timer for 20 minutes, sat outside, focused and redirected mindfulness on the breath)
• Post-test: N-back until failure (made it through 3-back, failed 4-back miserably)

Inspired by the short-term meditation training in Zeidan et al., 2010 where they recorded improvement in N-back after 4 days of 20-minute mindfulness meditation sessions. 

I also (somewhat) kept track of how often I mind-wandered during my daily reading, but I didn't see noticeable improvement there. (~5-8 mind-wanders per hour of reading). 

I would be surprised if getting a bit better at the N-back (making it through the 3-back in the post-test) was actually due to the meditation. I will be more convinced after I try some more meditation training routines and continue to see positive results. 

Overall, I actually hated the mindfulness meditation method of just focusing on the breath in silence. I found it excruciatingly boring and honestly was checking the timer a couple times in the last two sessions. I'm excited to try the next one though, and if it's another meditation one, hopefully I will have more patience for it!