Source: Thailand Medical News Nov 24, 2019 5 years, 4 weeks, 1 day, 9 hours ago
The largest study of its kind by lead by medical researchers from
Michigan State University found that
meditation could help you to become less error prone.
The new 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.
Dr Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author told
Thailand Medical News, "People's interest in
meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits.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 new 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.
Dr Lin added, "Some forms of
meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring
meditation is a bit different. 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."
Dr 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 study 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.
Dr Lin explains, "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. 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."
Although the meditators didn't have immediate improvements to actual task performance, the researchers' findings offer a promising window into the potential of sustained meditation.
Jason Moser, coauthor commented, "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.It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness
meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily funct
ioning right there in the moment."
Although
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.
Dr Lin said,"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. It's time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens."
Dr 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.
The team is initiating three different studies by early 2020.
Reference: Lin et al, On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring, Brain Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.3390/brainsci9090226
