For more than a year, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been trying to find the best way to frame a provocative question: How good can human beings be — how focused, how calm, how kind?

In seeking the answer, they plan to use an audacious tool. Think of it as a little like brain science meets reality television.

They will gather 30 people for a yearlong meditation retreat, then watch what happens.

With electroencephalogram caps, attention measurements, emotion testing and a form of meditation called Shamatha, researchers hope to answer a key question about the brain systems that regulate attention and emotion.

How much can those systems change with effort, how much — in the Silly Putty neuroscience term applied to our malleable brains — is plasticity at work?

“Is attention plastic? We have a hunch that it’s trainable, but there is very limited research on training of attention,” said Clifford Saron, an assistant research scientist at the university’s Center for Mind and Brain.

Dr. Bennett Shapiro, who follows meditation research as a board member of the Mind and Life Institute, a collaboration of scientists and Buddhists, calls the upcoming study “pioneering work.”

It’s uncommon to sequester 30 people for a year and probe them so intensively, said Shapiro.

Meditators will be trained in a technique of refining their attention that has its roots in India and is known in Tibet as Shamatha.

Jocelyn Sy, left, and Dorothee Heipertz apply salt gel with pumice to the cap of David Horton, a research assistant for the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The cap measures brain activity during meditation.

The act of paying attention to something, picking it out of the stream of sensations that bombards our brains, is critical to remembering it, said Ewa Wojcuilik, an assistant professor who specializes in visual attention.

But paying attention can be tough. Give people something simple and boring to do, and their distractibility zooms. Ask them to be alert to small, sporadic changes in a stream of data, and they manage for 10 or 20 minutes, then fumble badly.

But is this truly the best we can do, or can some specially trained individuals go further, breaking through mental barriers the way Olympic athletes surge past physical ones?

Wojcuilik is among more than a dozen researchers who have met regularly to design the Shamatha project, a collaboration of a half-dozen arms of the university and the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.

While the group’s primary focus is on attention, it also will explore whether meditators become calmer, kinder and more compassionate.

Phil Shaver, who chairs the university’s psychology department, will look at how quickly meditators get their equilibrium back after viewing upsetting movie scenes, whether disturbing words disrupt their focus and if their health seems to indicate lower stress.

Horton, 22, waits while Heipertz hooks up nodes to the cap. It takes about an hour to prepare the cap and then another hour to apply the gel. The small testing room has controlled light and sound for the experiment.

The target start date is Sept. 22, 2006, so many details aren’t resolved, but some outlines are emerging.

B. Alan Wallace, who has trained as a Buddhist monk and has a doctorate in religious studies from Stanford, will take 30 people to some quiet corner of California.

They will rise at 6 a.m. for cycles of group and private meditation that continue until 10 p.m., punctuated by silent meals and breaks of unstructured time.

Wallace, who heads the Santa Barbara institute, has recruited participants from Europe, Mexico and the United States.

As often as every two weeks, live-in research assistants will take some study participants to an on-site lab to probe their minds and hearts, their health and behaviors.

Their performance will be tracked on standard attention tasks and on some created for the project.

And in a twist that brings a whiff of being voted off the island, they may be asked to report on each other, assessing who is the most compassionate or how fellow participants’ behaviors change over time.