© Time Life Pictures/Mansell via Getty Images A drawing of
Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget from 1891 in The Strand
Magazine.    Now we're learning that the benefits may reach
further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer
could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can
effect impressive changes in how we feel and think - and it does
so at a basic neural level.  In 2011, researchers from the
University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like
thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that
is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive,
approach-oriented emotional states - states that make us more
likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An
exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern
existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe
that our attention is infinite, but it isn't. Multitasking is a
persistent myth. What we really do i