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Meditation and science may not be two things immediately associated with each other (except for when you’re taking deep breaths and thinking of your happy place after another failed experiment), but contemplative science is an emerging interdisciplinary approach to studying how cognitive and emotional processes are affected by contemplative experience.

Erika Scilipoti, a cognitive scientist at Boston University, has studied visual perception learning and how the brain changes in response to experience; she describes how after starting to practice meditation and yoga she became more convinced of a relationship between plasticity and contemplative practices.

Previous studies showing that meditative practices can enhance visuospatial working memory were thought to be explained by enhanced attention to a given task, but it was not clear whether meditation may facilitate other forms of implicit processing when not directly related to attention.

“With this idea I started to focus on Zen Meditation Open Monitoring (OM) practice and studied its effects on learning consolidation (poster), with Professor Takeo Watanabe at Boston University,” Scilipoti explains. OM meditation is characterized by ‘effortless’ sustaining of an open background of awareness without an explicit attentional selection ^[1]. The preliminary data gathered by Scilipoti showed that OM meditation plays a role in protecting against the interference effect; enhancing the consolidation processes of perceptual learning not directly related to attention.

Having recently presented her work at the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting 2011, Scilipoti further plans to investigate how different types of meditative practices affect plasticity in the visual system with focus on the neural correlates involved in the consolidation process of perceptual learning.