By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Meditation directly affects the function and structure of the brain, changing it in ways that appear to increase attention span, sharpen focus, and improve memory.” – Walter Zimmerman
Memory is absolutely essential to human existence. Without it there is no learning. We would not be able to benefit from our past successes and failures. We’d be constantly “reinventing the wheel.” Fortunately, we do have the ability to store and remember information. This storage includes a variety of different types of information in our memories. One form, is a storage of events that occur in our lives, remembering them in great detail and in temporal order. For example, remember getting out of bed this morning and what you did up to the point of getting dressed. You might find that recalling these events involves reconstruction. That is, you put together the events using one event as a cue to the next one, perhaps filling in material from what you know already about your bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, etc. This is called episodic memory. We store almost an infinite amount of information about past events in this way.
A key to memory is storing the information. This involves attention. If you’re not paying attention to the events that are happening, you’ll never store the memory of them. Take for example driving while immersed in thought planning for the day and realizing that you don’t remember driving the last several miles. The episodic memory of what happened during that time was never stored as you were paying attention to something else. In other words, being in the present moment and paying attention to what’s going on is necessary for episodic memory storage. Since, mindfulness involves paying attention in the present moment, it would seem reasonable to expect that mindfulness would be associated with episodic memory, the greater the mindfulness, the better the storage and later recall of events.
Indeed, mindfulness has been found to be associated with memory ability. In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness Enhances Episodic Memory Performance: Evidence from a Multimethod Investigation.” See:
or below or view the full text of the study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846034/
Brown and colleagues explored in depth the association of mindfulness with episodic memory in three studies. In the first they investigated the relationship between the overall mindfulness of college students and their episodic memory ability. The students were presented a sequence of 60 pictures of familiar objects and later asked to identify those that were presented from entirely new pictures. They found that the students’ overall mindfulness was not related to episodic memory ability, but their mindfulness state at the beginning of the test was, with higher mindfulness associated with better performance at the episodic memory task. Since, the immediate state of mindfulness and not the overall mindfulness was associated with memory, they concluded that a brief mindfulness induction would be sufficient to improve episodic memory.
In the second study, Brown and colleagues randomly assigned students to either receive a very brief (40 second) mindfulness instruction or an equally brief instruction on “putting first things first.” Both groups were then tested for episodic memory. They found the mindfulness instruction group were significantly superior at the episodic memory task. Because of the manipulation of mindfulness, the authors concluded that momentary mindfulness was the cause of the improved memory.
In a third experiment, they tested the students with a free recall task, remembering details from a read story. Again the mindfulness instruction improved memory demonstrating that the improvement in memory ability occurs with different types of episodic memory tasks. But, they also measured how interesting the task was for the students (intrinsic motivation) and found that the mindfulness instruction increased intrinsic motivation and this in turn improved memory. Hence, it appeared that inducing momentary mindfulness makes the task more interesting and this produces improved memory.
These results are interesting and suggest that momentary mindfulness may be effective in facilitating episodic memory storage but does so by increasing the level of interest in the task. So, if we’re mindful, and therefore we’re more interested in our driving, it’ll be less likely that the mind will wander and as a result tend to remember better the events that occurred during the drive. By improving intrinsic motivation momentary mindfulness improves episodic memory.
So, improve memory with momentary mindfulness.
“Meditation requires sustained attention. Not only do participants have to focus their attention, but they also have to notice distractions. Then they must choose to ignore those distractions, redirecting their attention back to the current experience. In that way, the practice is closely related to the function of working memory. That’s because working memory requires holding on to thoughts and not letting other things distract from them.” – Jastrowski Mano
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Brown, K. W., Goodman, R. J., Ryan, R. M., & Anālayo, B. (2016). Mindfulness Enhances Episodic Memory Performance: Evidence from a Multimethod Investigation. PLoS ONE, 11(4), e0153309. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153309
Abstract
Training in mindfulness, classically described as a receptive attentiveness to present events and experiences, has been shown to improve attention and working memory. Both are key to long-term memory formation, and the present three-study series used multiple methods to examine whether mindfulness would enhance episodic memory, a key form of long-term memory. In Study 1 (N = 143), a self-reported state of mindful attention predicted better recognition performance in the Remember-Know (R-K) paradigm. In Study 2 (N = 93), very brief training in a focused attention form of mindfulness also produced better recognition memory performance on the R-K task relative to a randomized, well-matched active control condition. Study 3 (N = 57) extended these findings by showing that relative to randomized active and inactive control conditions the effect of very brief mindfulness training generalized to free-recall memory performance. This study also found evidence for mediation of the mindfulness training—episodic memory relation by intrinsic motivation. These findings indicate that mindful attention can beneficially impact motivation and episodic memory, with potential implications for educational and occupational performance.