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"The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately 10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one." I call bullshit. Nor
by goodside 17y ago
"The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately 10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one."
I call bullshit. Normal untrained adults would do far better than this on adaptive n-back. If this is true, it means sitting and listening to Tolkien is more damaging to your working memory than having a screwdriver jammed into your prefrontal cortex.
- gwern 17y agoThere is something off; I'm not sure what the article is talking about. The study is available from http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training Reading it, I see significant advantage for the meditating group on the 'Computer Adaptive 2-back task', but not the 1 v 10 difference cited. Specifically, it seems that according to figure 1, before the intervention, the average 'extreme hit rate' on the n-back was ~2 for the meditating group and ~3.5 for the Tolkienists, but after 4 sessions, the meditating group was scoring >9 while the Tokienists were ~5. The only significant discussion of the 2-back is on pg 6: > "Fig. 1 shows the significant group by session interaction found in the analysis on the extended hit rate from the computer adapted n-back task, F(1, 47) = 6.76, p = .01, g2 = .12. The meditation group, in contrast to the control group, had more extended hit runs. There was also a significant session effect, F(1, 47) = 18.78, p < .001, g2 = .29. Follow-up analyses on the speed measure of the n-back task did not show any evidence of an interaction effect F < 1, or an effect of session or group, Fs < 1."