Mindfulness meditation may make memories less accurate

Mindfulness meditation is associated with all sorts of benefits to mental and physical well-being but it may make memories less accurate, a new study has found.
Participants who engaged in a 15-minute mindfulness meditation session were less able to differentiate items they actually encountered from items they only imagined, researchers have found.
"Our results highlight an unintended consequence of mindfulness meditation: memories may be less accurate," said psychology doctoral candidate Brent M Wilson of the University of California, San Diego, and first author on the study.
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.

Some memories originate from an external source, such as an actual experience of eating an omelet for breakfast. But other memories originate from an internal source, such as imagining the experience of eating an omelet for breakfast.
Researchers conducted a series of three experiments. In the first two experiments, undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to undergo a particular 15-minute guided exercise.

Participants in the mindfulness group were instructed to focus attention on their breathing without judgment, while those in the mind-wandering group were told to think about whatever came to mind.
After the guided exercise in the first experiment, 153 participants studied a list of 15 words related to the concept of trash - importantly, the list did not actually include the critical word "trash."

The researchers found that 39 per cent of the mindfulness participants falsely recalled seeing the word "trash" on the list compared to only 20 per cent of the mind-wandering participants.
In the second experiment, 140 participants completed a baseline recall task before undergoing the guided exercise. This experiment showed that participants were more likely to falsely recall the critical word after mindfulness meditation than before.
Mindfulness participants were more likely to falsely recall the critical word than those who engaged in mind wandering, even after the researchers took baseline recall performance into account.
In the third experiment, 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 had not were both highly accurate in recognising the words they had actually seen. However, participants were more likely to falsely identify related words after completing the mindfulness exercise.
The findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.