A 17-minute session of quiet interoception can rewire the brain to improve attention and potentially offset age-related attentional drift.

“There are now published accounts in the literature of a simple practice done for about 15 minutes, where subjects were asked to just sit quietly eyes closed and do what is sort of akin to meditation, but to not direct their mind into any particular state or place, but simply to think about their breathing and to focus on their so-called interoception, focus on how their body feels, your mind drifted to bring it back, okay? So it's basically meditation for about 15 minutes. But remarkably, just doing that once for 17 minutes, significantly reduced the number of attentional blinks that people would carry out. In other words, their focus got better in a near permanent way without any additional training.”

“This seems to be it and in addition, the ability to engage in panoramic vision, to dilate our gaze, the so-called open monitoring that allows the brain to function in a way that it can detect more information faster, that's a powerful tool as well and the beauty of that tool is that it works the first time and it works every time. Now, how exactly it works is a little bit unclear. Is it for instance, orchestrating this synchrony or asynchrony between the default mode network and the task related networks we don't know. Those studies have not yet been carried out. Nonetheless, the effects are significant, they are long lasting and they appear to exist after just one session of this quiet 17 minute interoception, which to me makes it seem like a very worthwhile thing to do for everybody.”