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People who practice meditation are better at coping with stress and anxiety. Maybe it’s because they just don’t remember them? Research shows that meditation can actually change our memories of the recent past.
Meditation has many beneficial properties: it relieves anxiety, stress, fatigue, improves sleep and protects our brain from premature aging. This list goes on and on. But even this barrel of honey seems to have at least one fly in the ointment… “Our research shows that, in addition to the obvious benefits, mindfulness meditation also has mixed effects,” says Brent Wilson, a psychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Diego (USA). His team found that meditation practices can affect the accuracy of our memories and even make us remember things that weren’t there.1.
Read more:
- False memories: can we trust our memory?
Brent Wilson and his team conducted two experiments involving 300 people. All of them were divided into two groups. The first was asked to meditate for 15 minutes or focus on their breathing. Participants from the second group had to just sit quietly and think about whatever came to mind. Then all the participants had a memory test: they had to read the same list of 15 words. At the same time, the words were not chosen by chance, but according to a certain logic – so that they could all be described by one common word “garbage” (although this word itself did not appear on the list). For example, among them were words like “dirt”, “garbage”, “leftovers”. Participants were then given a test, asking them to recall as many words as they could from a list. And here the organizers were in for a surprise. Although everyone performed at about the same level overall, 39% of the participants in the meditating group (nearly twice as many as in the control group) named the word “garbage” among those mentioned in the list. According to Brent Wilson, meditation somehow makes us predisposed to creating false memories.
M. Goding “Meditation. General leadership”
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Comment from Mindfulness Meditation Therapist Yasmine Lienard:
“I am not surprised by this result. During a meditation session, a person experiences a state of internal shock. He learns to free himself from the burden of personality, to forget who he is. It can disorganize his mind. Deep meditation in one way or another causes us to temporarily lose our habitual reference points in space and time. Our well-being is improving, but our relationship with the world is changing. Therefore, it is better to engage in real meditation under the supervision of a specialist. Good preliminary preparation is also needed in order to avoid shocks and maintain the stability of consciousness and personality. Fortunately, these cognitive impairments rarely occur, because it takes a lot and regular practice to achieve a state of deep meditation. As for me, I really notice that my long-term memory is not working as well now as it did 10 years ago. But I’m not sure if it has anything to do with meditation. On the other hand, I feel improvements in my instant memory area. I think memory rebuilding is a normal process, given that every day I train to forget the troubles from the past and live in the present.
1 Psychological Science, online publication September 4, 2015.