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Be calm and carry on
View(s):Living in the moment will improve your memory, working life and relationships, researchers say
By Fiona Keating
Just two weeks of mindfulness training on how to ‘live in the momemt’ can significantly improve reading comprehension, memory capacity and the ability to focus. Many psychologists define mindfulness as a state of non-distraction characterised by full engagement with our current task or situation.
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For much of our waking hours, however, we are anything but mindful. We replay past events — like the fight we’ve just had or daydream over holidays or think ahead to future circumstances, such as our plans for the weekend.
‘What surprised me the most was actually the clarity of the results,’ said Michael Mrazek, graduate student researcher in psychology and the lead and corresponding author of the paper, Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering.
‘Even with a rigorous design and effective training program, it wouldn’t be unusual to find mixed results. But we found reduced mind-wandering in every way we measured it.’ Their findings were recently published online in the empirical psychology journal Psychological Science.
Mind-wandering may not be a serious issue in many circumstances, but in tasks requiring attention, the ability to stay focused is crucial. To investigate whether mindfulness training can reduce mind-wandering and thereby improve performance, researchers at the UC Santa Barbara randomly assigned 48 undergraduate students to either a class that taught the practice of mindfulness or a class that covered fundamental topics in nutrition.
Both classes were taught by professionals with extensive teaching experience in their fields. Within a week before the classes, the students were given two tests: a modified verbal reasoning test from the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and a working memory capacity (WMC) test.
Mind-wandering during both tests was also measured. The mindfulness classes provided practical instruction on how to practice mindfulness in both targeted exercises and daily life. Meanwhile, the nutrition class taught nutrition science and strategies for healthy eating, and required students to log their daily food intake.
Within a week after the classes ended, the students were tested again. Their scores indicated that the mindfulness group significantly improved on both the verbal GRE test and the working memory capacity test. They also mind-wandered less during testing.
Crucially, none of these changes were true of the nutrition group.
‘This is the most complete and rigorous demonstration that mindfulness can reduce mind-wandering, one of the clearest demonstrations that mindfulness can improve working memory and reading, and the first study to tie all this together to show that mind-wandering mediates the improvements in performance,’ said Mrazek.
He added that the research establishes with greater certainty that some cognitive abilities often seen as immutable, such as working memory capacity, can be improved through mindfulness training. The research team are extending their work by investigating whether similar results can be achieved with younger populations, or with web-based mindfulness interventions.
They are also examining whether or not the benefits of mindfulness can be compounded by a program of personal development that also targets nutrition, exercise, sleep, and personal relationships. Mindfulness is also thought to help with depression and stress. The University of Oxford’s Centre for Suicide Research found that mindfulness meditation can cut the recurrence of depression by 50 per cent, and neuroimaging scans have shown significant positive change in brain activity of long-term meditators.
Professor Willem Kuyken from the University of Exeter believes that mindfulness is a form of mental training that teaches children to be aware of their feelings. He has conducted a study that shows both boys and girls report improved well-being and lower levels of stress after undergoing nine-week mindfulness programme as part of the school curriculum.
© Daily Mail, London
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