Mindfulness, an increasingly popular meditation technique encouraging judgment-free awareness and acceptance, has been in the spotlight for its multitude of benefits, including but not limited to, increased concentration, stress reduction, and even slowing the aging of the brain.
However, a recent study out of the University of San Diego and University of London demonstrated that the very practice that offers such incredible benefits also has a downside: an increased susceptibility to false memories.
Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Sciences, the study revealed that after practicing mindfulness meditation, individuals were less able to distinguish between internal and external memories. For instance, thinking about drinking a cup of coffee versus actually drinking the cup of coffee would typically be stored in the brain differently, but mindfulness meditation might interfere with the ability to distinguish between the two.
"When memories of imagined and real experiences too closely resemble each other, people can have difficulty determining which is which, and this can lead to falsely remembering imagined experiences as actual experiences," explained psychology doctoral candidate, lead researcher and author of the study, Brent M. Wilson.
The study included three experiments, each designed to test and measure memory accuracy.
In the first experiment, 153 undergraduate students were randomly divided into two groups for a fifteen-minute induction of either "mindfulness" or "mind-wandering." The mindfulness group listened to a guided, focused breathing exercise, instructing them to practice thinking without judgment. The mind-wandering group was instructed to think about whatever came to mind, according to Neuroscience News.
Following the induction, participants were shown a list of fifteen words. The words each were related to the concept of trash (i.e. garbage, refuse, waste, rubbish), but the list purposely excluded the word "trash" from the list. When asked to recall as many words from the list as possible, 39 percent of those in the mindfulness group recalled seeing the word "trash" compared to only 20 percent of those in the mind-wandering cohort.
The second experiment instructed 140 participants to complete a baseline recall task before being split into two groups to go through a mindfulness or mind-wandering exercise. The results showed that even the same individuals, after completing the mindfulness exercise, were more likely to falsely recall the critical word in the list.
Finally, in the third experiment, 215 students were each presented with a series of words. Each word presented was one word from a strongly associated pairing - for example, "foot and shoe" or "sediment and fossil." After seeing the initial words, participants were then shown a second list of words and were asked to identify whether they had seen the word previously. After completing this task, all participants were then guided through the mindfulness meditation, according to Memory Improvement Tips.
Afterwards, participants completed the task for a second time. The results echoed those of the initial experiments: after practicing mindfulness meditation, participants were more likely to recall seeing a word they had not actually been presented with, but one that has been associated strongly with the word actually presented.
"The same aspects of mindfulness that create countless benefits can also have the unintended negative consequence of increasing false-memory susceptibility," Wilson and the researchers concluded, according to the Daily Mail.
The results certainly do not take away the multitude of benefits of mindfulness but can serve as a reminder that the practice may also alter our brains in ways that are less desirable.
