We all make errors in our daily life – but what if there was a way to avoid them?
A new study from Michigan State University – the largest of its kind to date – discovered meditation could help you to become less error prone.
The research, published in Brain Sciences, tested how open monitoring meditation – or, 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.
Jeff Lin, Michigan State University psychology doctoral candidate and his co-authors – William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser – recruited more than 200 participants to test how this style of meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.
The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography, or EEG. Then, they completed a computerised distraction test.
They found a certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. The strength of this signal increased in the meditators relative to controls.
The researchers’ findings suggest just 20 minutes of meditation can enhance the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes.
Perhaps it is time to look at meditation as a mind and body benefit.
