The ability to pay attention may not have a fixed capacity, as many people believe, says a UW-Madison study suggesting that meditation can improve people's knack for focusing their minds.

Before and after receiving three months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation, volunteers underwent a test in which numbers flashed on a screen mixed with a series of distracting letters. Brain activity was recorded by electrodes on the subjects' scalp. Sometimes two numbers appeared less than one-half second apart.

Participants' ability to detect the second number in a pair improved after the meditation training. Furthermore, the amount of brain activity required to identify the first number in a pair was reduced.

"The decrease (of brain activity associated with the first target) strongly predicted the accuracy of their ability to detect the second target," said Richard Davison, a UW-Madison professor of psychology and psychiatry who conducted the study with postdoctoral fellow Heleen Slagter.

"The conventional view is that attentional resources are limited," Davison said. "This shows that attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning."

The study appeared in last week's online version of the journal PLoS Biology.

SCREENING MAY CUT DEATHS FROM BLADDER CANCER

Urine screening for bladder cancer in men may reduce mortality from the disease, according to a study that involved nearly 1,600 men from the Madison area beginning in the late 1980s.

Starting in 1987, the men were asked to test their urine regularly with a clinical strip that detects blood. The 258 men with positive tests saw urologists; 21 of them were diagnosed with bladder cancer.

Researchers compared those men to all unscreened men whose bladder cancers had been reported to the state's tumor registry in 1988. After 14 years of follow-up, none of the screened men with bladder cancer had died; 20 percent of the unscreened men with bladder cancer had died.

"Screening ... may reduce mortality from (bladder cancer)," the researchers wrote.

The study is published in the May-June issue of the journal Urologic Oncology.

Led by Dr. Edward Messing, previously at UW-Madison and now at the University of Rochester in New York, the study also involved several researchers still at UW-Madison: Lora Bram, Jason Gee, E. Barry Greenberg, W. Kennedy Gilchrist, John Wegenke and Teresa Young. Laura Stephenson from the state Department of Health and Family Services also participated.

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