That's called learning how to meditate. And yes, it works wonders with cognitive ability and control of cognitive ability. The standard efficient process of learning how to meditate is:

Focus attention somewhere for as long as possible.
Move focused attention around from subject to subject, including inside your own body.
Spread your attention outward from the focused point, making sure to maintain attention on the focused point.
Scan your body. Just become aware of everything you observe when scanning; don't try to change anything.
Scan again and again. Keep trying to become aware of more and more, deeper and deeper, each time; until your get tired, or can't seem to find anything new.
Try to maintain awareness of your body and your surroundings in the present during daily life, while doing other things.
Continue doing the previous step for your entire life.
You have now completed the prerequisite to learn Taoist meditation, which is about learning how to directly change the things which you are able to pay attention to.

If you do this up to step 7, you will exponentially improve your ability to do everything and learn everything. If you choose to go on through step 8, you will continue exponentially increasing your ability to do and learn everything.

You may have noticed that I never mentioned "Quiet the mind/stop thinking". That's because the only reason most people should try to do that is to be able to focus their attention better. There's not really any other reason to quiet the mind. At the beginning level of Taoist meditation, uncontrolled thoughts are just another layer to pay attention to and observe. At the medium level of Taoist meditation, uncontrolled thoughts point to deep habits and tendencies which cause all of the social problems and drama everyone has, which the individual will then fix/remove.

heath

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