Just 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation can improve learning and memory

New scientific research published in the journal Memory & Cognition provides evidence that a brief mindfulness meditation exercise can enhance verbal learning.

“A number of studies have shown that mindfulness can improve cognitive abilities, including certain verbal abilities. However, little research has examined how mindfulness can affect verbal learning and memory. Furthermore, no research has examined the mechanism by which mindfulness may improve learning and memory,” said study author Adam Lueke, an assistant teaching professor at Ball State University.

“We reasoned that, since mindfulness often works to quiet down thoughts which may occupy phonological loop resources, then it should be able to improve the learning of new verbal information, likely by allowing information to be better absorbed through the encoding process of memory.”

For their study, the researchers randomly assigned 142 undergraduate university students to one of two groups. One group listened to a 10-minute mindfulness meditation audio tape while the other group listened to a 10-minute audio tape that described an English countryside.

The participants completed four neuropsychological tests: the Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test, the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, the Trail Making Test, and the Color-Word Interference Test.

The researchers found that the mindfulness exercise increased verbal learning and memory encoding capabilities despite not improving general attention abilities or general verbal fluency. In other words, participants who listened to the 10-minute mindfulness exercise tended to be better at recalling newly learned words — but they were not any better at retrieving verbal material stored in long-term memory.

“Mindfulness can potentially make studying more efficient, can help you retain and utilize important information in your work, or even help remember something as simple as a person’s name or a story they shared with you. In essence, the ability of mindfulness to improve learning and memory can help improve people’s lives in myriad ways.”