Open Monitoring Meditation May Help People Be Less Error-Prone, Study Finds

Some people are more forgetful or prone to errors than others. Fortunately, researchers from Michigan State University just found that a type of meditation might actually help people become less error-prone.

For their study, researchers recruited 200 participants who have never meditated before and subjected them to a 20-minute open-monitoring meditation session to see how it would impact their error recognition. Unlike other types of meditation that make the participant focus on a single object such as their breathing, participants of open-monitoring meditation pay attention to everything that is going on in their body.

Participants’ brain activities were measured via electroencephalography (EEG) during the meditation session as well as during the computerized distraction test they took after.

“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," study co-author Jeff Lin, who is one of the small number of researchers taking a neuroscientific approach to assessing the performance and psychological effects of meditation techniques, said.

Simply put, the signal that triggers people to detect mistakes and fix it became stronger after they participated in open-monitoring meditation. While the participants did not show immediate improvements to their actual performance, the results show promising potential for open-monitoring meditation to help reduce mistakes, especially since the increase in signal strength happened after just one 20-minute session.

The study suggests that different mindfulness meditation techniques might have different results or benefits. In this case, open-monitoring meditation seems to help participants have fewer mistakes -- but, of course, other techniques may have other benefits. As such, the researchers’ next step is to conduct the test on a larger group of participants, use other types of meditation and even try to see whether the changes in brain activity could really lead to behavioral changes through long-term practice.

“It's great to see the public's enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there's still plenty of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works,” Lin said.

The study is published in Brain Sciences.