Meditating just once proves to make a difference
Michigan State University
The
research, published in Brain Sciences, tested how open monitoring meditation --
or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as
they unfold in one's mind and body -- altered brain activity in a way that
suggests increased error recognition.
"People's
interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in
terms of effects and benefits," said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral
candidate and study co-author. "But it's amazing to me that we were able
to see how one session of a guided meditation can produce changes to brain
activity in non-meditators."
The
findings suggest that different forms of meditation can have different
neurocognitive effects and Lin explained that there is little research about
how open monitoring meditation impacts error recognition.
"Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is a bit different," Lin said. "It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery."
Lin
and his MSU co-authors -- William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser --
recruited more than 200 participants to test how open monitoring meditation
affected how people detect and respond to errors.
The
participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute
open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain
activity through electroencephalography, or EEG. Then, they completed a
computerized distraction test.
"The
EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise
measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct
responses," Lin said. "A certain neural signal occurs about half a second
after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error
recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the
meditators relative to controls."
While
the meditators didn't have immediate improvements to actual task performance,
the researchers' findings offer a promising window into the potential of
sustained meditation.
"These
findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can
do to enhance the brain's ability to detect and pay attention to
mistakes," Moser said. "It makes us feel more confident in what
mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily
functioning right there in the moment."
While
meditation and mindfulness have gained mainstream interest in recent years, Lin
is among a relatively small group of researchers that take a neuroscientific
approach to assessing their psychological and performance effects.
Looking
ahead, Lin said that the next phase of research will be to include a broader
group of participants, test different forms of meditation and determine whether
changes in brain activity can translate to behavioral changes with more
long-term practice.
"It's
great to see the public's enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there's still plenty
of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it
can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works," Lin said.
"It's time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens."
