Locked your keys in the car or forgot to turn the oven off? Do you find yourself getting lost in forgetfulness or making little mistakes throughout the day? A new study from Michigan State University has found that meditation can help train the mind to become less error-prone.
The research, among the largest of its kind to date, tested how open monitoring meditation altered brain activity in a way that suggests increased error recognition. This specific type of meditation focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts, or sensations as they unfold in one’s mind and body
“People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,” says Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author, in a statement. “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 says. “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.”
Testing the effectiveness of meditation
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 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 says. “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.”
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 says. “It’s time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens.”
This study is published in the journal MDPI.
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