Mindfulness may make memories less accurate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/afps-mmm090915.php

Public Release: 9-Sep-2015
Mindfulness may make memories less accurate
Association for Psychological Science

Mindfulness meditation is associated with all sorts of 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, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 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.

"Our results highlight an unintended consequence of mindfulness meditation: memories may be less accurate," says psychology doctoral candidate Brent M. Wilson of the University of California, San Diego, first author on the study. "This is especially interesting given that previous research has primarily focused on the beneficial aspects of mindfulness training and mindfulness-based interventions."

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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.

Together, the findings suggest that 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.

"As a result, the same aspects of mindfulness that create countless benefits can also have the unintended negative consequence of increasing false-memory susceptibility," Wilson and colleagues conclude.

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tags: influence