PLX Academy · Patient Experience · 08 February 2022
MEDITATION CAN HELP YOU MAKE FEWER MISTAKES
If you are forgetful or make mistakes when in a hurry, a study from Michigan State University found that meditation could help you to become less error prone.
The research, published in Brain Sciences, shows that open monitoring 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.
If you meditate you pay more attention, particularly to errors, and are more likely to learn from them and make fewer mistakes in the future, a study shows. Improving our focus in this way also helps us to listen, pay attention at work and manage our thoughts, emotions and impulses.
The findings suggest that different forms of meditations can have different neurocognitive effects. “Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring is a bit different,” said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author.
“It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your 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.”
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 participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditations exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography or EEG. Then they completed a computerized distraction test.
“Our 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.