Science Daily: How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes

"If you are forgetful or make mistakes when in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University -- the largest of its kind to-date -- found that meditation could help you to become less error prone.

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.

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.

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 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.""

Read the full article here!

Reflection:

Do you meditate? And if so, how has it changed your life?

#Meditation #Mindfulness #MentalHealth