Mindfulness Meditation Can Trigger False Memories, Study

The current buzzword is 'mindfulness'. It is a popular meditation technique that encourages "judgment-free awareness and acceptance" with benefits that include "increased concentration, stress reduction, and even slowing the aging of the brain".

But researchers from the University of San Diego and University of London showed that it also leads to an increased "susceptibility to false memories", according to the Daily Mail.

Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Sciences, the study revealed that after practicing mindfulness meditation, people were "less able to distinguish between internal and external memories".

For example, if you visualise drinking coffee differently from actually drinking it, you might be able to store the two scenes in your brain differently.

"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.

Three experiments were conducted. In the first one, there were 153 undergraduate students divided into two groups. Each had to take a 15-minute induction of either "mindfulness" or "mind-wandering." The first team listened to a "guided, focused breathing exercise", that told them to practice thinking without judgment. The mind-wandering team was told to think about whatever occurred to them, according to Neuroscience News.

They were then shown a list of words that were related to the concept of trash (i.e. garbage, refuse, waste, rubbish), but excluded the word "trash" from the list. When asked to recall, 39 percent of those in the mindfulness group said they saw the word "trash" compared to only 20 percent of those who were in the "mind-wandering" team.

The second experiment asked 140 participants to finish a baseline recall task before they went through a "mindfulness or mind-wandering exercise". The experiments showed that the same participants, after finishing the mindfulness exercise tended to falsely recollect the critical word in the list.

The third experiment showed 215 students with series of words. Each word was from a strongly associated pairing, such as "foot and shoe" or "sediment and fossil." Participants were then shown a second list and asked to identify whether they had seen the word earlier. After the task, they were all then taken through the mindfulness meditation, according to Memory Improvement Tips.

Later, after a repetition of the experiment, the conclusion was clear: "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" according to HNGN.

"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.

While the benefits of mindful meditation cannot be undermined, the results show that they may also have less desirable benefits.