Meditation Helps You Make Fewer Mistakes, Scientists Find In New Study

News: Researchers from Michigan State University found that If you are forgetful or make mistakes, meditation can help you become less error-prone.

Researchers examined the effects of a brief open-monitoring meditation — or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as they unfold in one’s 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,” said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author.

The team recruited more than 200 participants – who never meditated before – to test how such 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 team 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,” Lin said.

The findings published in Brain Sciences demonstrates that 20 minutes of meditation can enhance the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes in non-meditators. Mindfulness meditation seems to be an incredible tool to boost our performance and daily functioning right there in the moment.

To Know More You May Refer To:

Lin, Eckerle, Peng, & Moser. (2019). On variation in mindfulness training: A multimodal study of brief open monitoring meditation on error monitoring. Brain Sciences, 9(9), 226. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9090226