Doing regular mindfulness meditation would help our brain to be more attentive, and therefore to make fewer errors.
Relieve chronic pain, reduce tinnitus and stress, treat addictions or even stimulate memory. In recent years, many studies have looked at the benefits of mindfulness meditation on our health.
This practice, which consists of focusing only on the present moment by being attentive to our breathing, our thoughts and our sensations, would not only be relaxing, but would also have the power to modify our brain activity.
Mindfulness meditation, at the heart of neuroscience research
This is according to a new study – the largest of its kind conducted to date – by Michigan State University (MSU), published in the journal Brain Science. According to its authors, mindfulness meditation would help our brain to be more alert and to recognize mistakes more quickly.
“People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is beyond what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,” says Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and co-author of the study. It’s amazing that we were able to see how a guided meditation session can produce changes in brain activity in non-meditators.”
According to him, mindfulness mediation is different from other forms of meditation. While most of them “lead you to concentrate on a single object, usually your breathing”, mindfulness meditation goes further since it makes the person who practices it pay attention “to everything that is happening. passes through his mind and his body.”
Improved immediate error detection
According to the authors, this focus on feelings and thoughts would profoundly change the way the brain works. To prove it, they recruited over 200 participants who had never practiced meditation before.
Each of them took part in a 20-minute mindfulness meditation exercise, while the researchers measured their brain activity using electroencephalography, or EEG. They then took a computerized distraction test.
“EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got accurate measurements of neural activity right after errors versus correct responses,” says Lin. A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called error positivity, which is related to the conscious recognition of errors. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in meditators compared to controls.”
For the researchers, these results are promising, although the participants did not see immediate improvements in task performance. “These results clearly demonstrate what 20 minutes of meditation can do a lot to improve the brain’s ability to detect errors and pay attention to them,” says Jason Moser, co-author of the work.
Scientists’ research is not over. The next step will be to include more participants to test different forms of meditation to determine if changes in brain activity can translate into behavioral changes with longer-term practice.
“It’s great to see the public enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there’s still a lot of work to be done from a scientific perspective to understand the benefits it can have and, just as important, how it actually works, concludes Jeff Lin. It’s time we started to look at it with a more rigorous eye.
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