How mindfulness plays havoc with memory

Mindfulness, the form of meditation embraced by business leaders, celebrities and the NHS, might not be so beneficial for the mind after all, according to research.

The practice, which emphasises paying deliberate attention to the present moment, can implant false memories, a study found.

Participants who engaged in a 15-minute meditation sessions were less able to distinguish between words they had seen written down, and those they had only thought about in their heads.

“Our results highlight an unintended consequence of mindfulness meditation: memories may be less accurate,” said Brent Wilson, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of California.

“This is especially interesting given that previous research has primarily focused on the beneficial aspects of mindfulness training and mindfulness-based interventions.”

Mindfulness has become widespread in academic research and popular culture.

Numerous studies have reported its benefits for physical and psychological disorders. Celebrities such as Emma Watson and Gwyneth Paltrow, the actresses, have extolled its merits.

Proponents say it focuses the mind, improves concentration and boosts productivity.

Corporations such as Google run mindfulness courses, and the popular Headspace app, launched by a former monk from Bristol, is now worth £25 million. Many schools offer mindfulness courses, believing it calms and focuses students.

However, the researchers said 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 memories.

While some memories occur because of events which actually happen, others are only experienced in the mind.

The new study suggests that mindfulness can disrupts the brain’s ability to tell the two scenarios apart. Put simply, it can stop people realising what is real and what is imagined.

The findings could have important consequences for students revising or witnesses in trials who may think they saw words on a page that were not there, or remembered incidents that did not happen.

In a series of experiments, 153 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to spend 15 minutes either in mindful meditation – focusing on their breathing – or just thinking naturally.

They were asked to study and then recall a list of 15 words related to the concept of “rubbish”, such as garbage, waste, can, refuse, sewage. Crucially the list did not actually include the critical word “trash.”

The results showed 39 per cent of the mindfulness participants falsely recalled seeing the word “trash” on the list compared to 20 per cent of the mind-wandering participants. Two other experiments gave similar results.

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The researchers said the findings suggest 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.

In July the Oxford academic Theodore Zeldin said too many people were avoiding using their brains through mindfulness and instead escaping into a state of blank mental oblivion.

However, a study by Oxford University found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy stopped as many people from sliding back into depression as strong medication.

The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.