Meditating now helps you pay better attention later

If you're looking to improve your focus and train your brain to filter out passing distractions then meditation may be able to help you do that. Recent research from the University of Wisconsin Madison shows that intensive meditation training may help people pay better attention to tasks at hand -- even when they aren't actively meditating.

But I'm not sure it sounds like a realistic method to practice for many of us, as the participants went to a 3 month intensive meditation retreat and practiced Vipassana meditation for 10-12 hours per day. That's a lot of vacation time and a lot of meditating. I wonder if they considered that maybe just "getting away from it all" for that long was enough to refresh their minds?