I don't know anything about the neurological side of things, but many forms of meditation are all about attention management.

Put another way: if meditation doesn't boost attention, you're probably not doing it right.

Your probably correct; "if meditation doesn't boost attention, you're probably not doing it right."

As an EEG tech, the stories from the 70s were somewhat legendary, about meditation and EEG. Alpha training was considered almost magical.

What were these stories?

After upvoting this comment I had a second thought: I think the hypothesis of meditation is that it improves attention, (and that is indeed the point). But has that hypothesis been proved? I can provide my own anecdotal evidence that indeed, it seems as if a meditation practice has boosted my attention span. But this is not really science.

Yes, there are dozens of studies on the effects of meditation. Here's one specifically on attention span: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100714121737.ht...

This google talk by Dan Siegel (a neuroscientist & psychiatrist) talks about mindfulness training causing beneficial structural changes in the frontal lobes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr4Od7kqDT8&feature=relat...

The ACC is important to attentiveness. It's almost a lower-level to the frontal lobe, connecting it to the emotional and reward areas of the brain. George Bush et al saw poor ACC activation in ADHD subjects while performing the counting stroop:

http://www.citeulike.org/user/xinian/article/1366138