Even if you only meditate once, it makes a
difference.
If you're forgetful or make mistakes when
you're in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University, the largest of
its type to date, discovered that meditation can help you become less prone to
making mistakes.
The study, which was published in the
journal Brain Sciences, looked at how open monitoring meditation (meditation
that focuses awareness on feelings, ideas, or sensations as they develop in
one's mind and body) changed brain activity in a way that suggested greater
mistake recognition.
"In terms of impacts and advantages,
people's interest in meditation and mindfulness is exceeding what research can
establish," said Jeff Lin, an MSU psychology doctorate candidate and study
co-author. "However, it's remarkable to me that we were able to show how
one session of guided meditation might cause changes in non-meditators' brain
activity."
The findings show that different types of
meditation can have varied neurocognitive effects, and Lin noted that little
study has been done on how open monitoring meditation affects mistake
recognition.
"Some types of meditation require you
to concentrate on a single item, such as your breath, but open monitoring
meditation is different," Lin explained. "It requires you to focus
within and pay attention to everything that is happening in your mind and body.
The idea is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind goes
without becoming distracted by the surroundings."
More than 200 people were recruited by Lin
and his MSU co-authors, William Eckerle, Ling Peng, and Jason Moser, to see if
open monitoring meditation improved people's ability to recognise and respond
to mistakes.
The individuals, who had never meditated
before, were led through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while
electroencephalography, or EEG, was used to assess brain activity. They were
then placed through a computerised distraction test.
"Because the EEG can detect brain
activity at the millisecond level, we were able to compare accurate estimates
of neural activity following errors to correct replies," Lin explained.
"The error positivity is a brain signal that arises around half a second
after a mistake and is associated to conscious error identification. The
intensity of this signal is stronger in meditators than in controls, according
to our findings."
While the meditators' work performance did
not improve immediately, the researchers' findings provide a promising glimpse
into the potential of continuous meditation.
"These findings show that only 20
minutes of meditation may significantly improve the brain's ability to
recognise and pay attention to errors," Moser stated. "It gives us
more faith in what mindfulness meditation can do for performance and daily
functioning right now."
Lin is one of a small number of academics
who use a neuroscientific approach to analyse the psychological and performance
consequences of meditation and mindfulness, which has received widespread
interest in recent years.
In the future, Lin says the research will
expand to include a larger sample of people, test other types of meditation,
and see if changes in brain activity might lead to behavioural changes with
more long-term practise.
"It's wonderful to see the public's
excitement about mindfulness," Lin said, "but there's still a lot of
work to be done from a scientific standpoint to understand the advantages it
may have, and, more importantly, how it actually works." "It's past
time for us to take a more critical look at it."
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