Mindfulness meditation is associated with benefits to mental and physical well-being, but a new study suggests that it may also come with a particular downside for memory. The findings show that participants who engaged in a 15-minute mindfulness meditation session were less able to differentiate items they actually encountered from items they only imagined.
Wilson and colleagues wondered whether the very mechanism that seems to underlie the benefits of mindfulness – judgment-free thoughts and feelings – might also affect people’s ability to determine the origin of a given memory. “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,” Wilson explains.
3 Experiments: In the 1st 2, participants were randomly assigned to undergo a 15-minute guided exercise: Participants in the mindfulness group were instructed to focus attention on their breathing without judgment, while those in mind-wandering group were told to think about whatever came to mind. After the exercise, 153 participants studied a list of 15 words related to the concept of trash (e.g., garbage, waste, can, refuse, sewage, rubbish, etc.) – importantly, the list did not actually include the critical word “trash.” Participants were then asked to recall as many of the words from the list as they could remember.
RESULTS: 39% of the mindfulness participants falsely recalled seeing the word “trash” on the list compared to only 20% of the mind-wandering participants.
2nd expt: 140 participants completed a baseline recall task before undergoing the guided exercise. The participants were more likely to falsely recall the critical word after mindfulness meditation than before; in other words, mindfulness increased rates of false recall.
3rd Expt: 215 undergraduate participants had to determine whether a word had been presented earlier – some words had, while others merely related to words that had been presented. Participants who engaged in mindfulness and those who hadn’t were both highly accurate in recognizing the words they had actually seen. However, participants were more likely to falsely identify related words after completing the mindfulness exercise.
CONC: Mindfulness might hamper the cognitive processes that contribute to accurately identifying the source of a memory. After mindfulness training, memories of imagined experiences become more like memories of actual experiences, and people have more difficulty deciding if experiences were real or only imagined. ie false-memory susceptibility
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/mindfulness-may-make-memories-less-accurate.html
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