10 Minutes Of Mindfulness Improves Learning & Memory, New Research Finds

If you have ever had that word at the tip of your tongue or left your keys somewhere but you just can’t remember, then you will find this information quite useful in your everyday life.

The simple act of spending just 10 minutes a day practicing mindfulness meditation can enhance verbal learning and memory, according to new scientific research published in the journal of Memory & Cognition.

While a number of studies in the past found that mindfulness can improve cognitive abilities, little research had truly examined the practice’s effects on verbal learning and memory.

How does this work? Since mindfulness works to quiet your thoughts, this frees the resources in your mind to improve your ability to learn and retain recently learned information.

As part of the study, researchers randomly assigned 142 undergraduate students to either listen to a 10-minute mindfulness meditation or a 10-minute audio describing the English countryside. They found that those who listened to the mindfulness audio tended to be better at recalling newly learned words.

“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,” said study co-author Adam Lueke to Psypost.

Despite this, the study found it did not improve their general attention abilities or verbal fluency. Additionally, more studies are being done to fully understand the complete benefits of mindfulness practice and its ability to improve the absorption of visual information, as well.

“The fact that mindfulness can help with this after only 10 minutes is an important finding that people can use in their everyday lives when they know they will need to rely on these abilities,” Lueke said.

The study, titled Mindfulness improves verbal learning and memory through enhanced encoding, was authored by Adam Lueke and Niloufar Lueke.

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