Thinking of adding meditation to your daily routine in 2022? Well, this study out of Michigan State University might just make meditation one of your new years resolutions.

Researchers carried out the largest study of its kind and discovered that mediation can make you less error-prone.

“People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,”

said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author.

“But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.”

There is a wide variety of meditation practices that you can take up. This study focused on a method known as open-monitoring meditation.

“Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open-monitoring meditation is a bit different,”

Lin said.

“It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.”

Some two hundred participants (all non-meditators) took part in the study that looked at how open-monitoring meditation changed how people responded to errors. Lin said.

“A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.”

They found that just 20 minutes of this sort of meditation enhanced the brain’s ability to detect mistakes. Lin and his team are now looking to study the long term effects of meditation to discover how it actually works from a scientific perspective. 

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