By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“mindfulness meditation promotes metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination via disengagement from perseverative cognitive activities and enhances attentional capacities through gains in working memory. These cognitive gains, in turn, contribute to effective emotion-regulation strategies.” – Daphne Davis
Human life is one of constant change. We revel in our increases in physical and mental capacities during development, but regret their decreases during aging. The aging process involves a systematic progressive decline in every system in the body, the brain included. This includes our mental abilities which decline with age including impairments in memory, attention, and problem solving ability. It is inevitable and cannot be avoided. There is some hope for age related cognitive decline, however, as there is evidence that it can be slowed. There are some indications that physical and mental exercise can reduce the rate of cognitive decline and lower the chances of dementia. For example, contemplative practices such as meditation, yoga, and tai chi or qigong have all been shown to be beneficial in slowing or delaying physical and mental decline with aging. Indeed, mindfulness practices have been shown to improve cognitive processes.
We spend a tremendous amount of time with our minds wandering and not on the task or the environment at hand. We daydream, plan for the future, review the past, ruminate on our failures, exalt in our successes. In fact, we spend almost half of our waking hours off task with our mind wandering. Mindfulness is the antithesis of mind wandering. When we’re mindful, we’re paying attention to what is occurring in the present moment. In fact, the more mindful we are the less the mind wanders and mindfulness training reduces mind wandering. You’d think that if we spend so much time with the mind wandering it must be enjoyable. But, in fact research has shown that when our mind is wandering we are actually unhappier than when we are paying attention to what is at hand.
It is unclear as to what role mind wandering plays in age related cognitive decline and what influence mindfulness may have on it. This question was explored in today’s Research News article “Dispositional mindfulness and the wandering mind: Implications for attentional control in older adults.” See:
or see summary below, Fountain-Zaragoza and colleagues recruited 60-74-year old participants and measured mindfulness, mind wandering, inhibitory and sustained attention, proactive attention, reactive attention and working memory. They found that in these elderly participants the higher the levels of mindfulness the lower the levels of task-unrelated thoughts and task-related interference and the higher the levels of reactive attention. That is high mindfulness was associated with less mind wandering and greater attention in reaction to the environment. It was also found that mindfulness appeared to affect proactive attention by way of mind wandering particularly in participants with low levels of working memory.
These results suggest that in older adults, mindfulness helps to control mind wandering, but when the mind wanders mindfulness appears to be able to elicit proactive attentional mechanisms. That is to work ahead of time to insure, that attention is focused on the task at hand in spite of the tendency for the mind to wander. In other words, mindfulness appears to keep the individual attending appropriately by reducing mind wandering and by working ahead of time to counteract the effects of mind wandering.
So, improve attention by reducing mind wandering with mindfulness.
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
“Mindfulness is a valuable practice for improving the cognitive symptoms of depression, such as distorted thinking and distractibility. It helps individuals recognize these more subtle symptoms, realize that thoughts are not facts and refocus their attention to the present.” – Margarita Tartakovsk
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Study Summary
Fountain-Zaragoza S, Londerée A, Whitmoyer P, Prakash RS. Dispositional mindfulness and the wandering mind: Implications for attentional control in older adults. Conscious Cogn. 2016 Aug;44:193-204. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2016.08.003.
Highlights
- Mindfulnessand task-unrelated thought are negatively associated in older adults.
- Mindfulness is differentially related to types of attentional control.
- No association was found between mind-wandering and cognitive performance.
- Task-unrelated thought mediates mindfulness-proactive control associations.
Abstract
Age-related cognitive decline brings decreases in functional status. Dispositional mindfulness, the tendency towards present-moment attention, is hypothesized to correspond with enhanced attention, whereas mind-wandering may be detrimental to cognition. The relationships among mindfulness, task-related and task-unrelated thought, and attentional control performance on Go/No-Go and Continuous Performance tasks were examined in older adults. Dispositional mindfulness was negatively associated with task-unrelated thought and was positively associated with reactive control, but not proactive control or Go/No-Go performance. Although mind-wandering was not directly associated with performance, task-unrelated thought mediated the mindfulness-proactive control relation. Fewer task-unrelated thoughts were associated with lower proactive control. Interestingly, this effect was moderated by working memory such that it was present for those with low-average, but not high, working memory. This study highlights the importance of dispositional mindfulness and mind-wandering propensity in accounting for individual differences in attentional control in older adults, providing important targets for future cognitive remediation interventions.