Study: Just 5 minutes of meditation boosts cognition, learning

A recent study has uncovered that short meditation sessions, lasting just five minutes, can significantly enhance one’s learning capabilities, openness to new experiences, and decision-making skills.

Earlier research had successfully linked mindfulness meditation with enhanced cognitive flexibility, emotional balance, and stress reduction. This new research aimed to investigate if these benefits could also be achieved with minimal meditation practice.

Marius Golubickis, a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and leader of the Aberdeen Computational Social Cognition Lab, shared that the study was inspired by the powerful effect mindfulness meditation has on cognitive functions and its ability to alter ingrained social biases. Golubickis emphasized the convenience and effectiveness of short meditation practices, making them a feasible tool for individuals with hectic schedules. This finding, as Golubickis noted to Psypost, opens up exciting possibilities for personal growth and learning enhancement through simple meditation techniques.

In this study, 60 participants with varied educational backgrounds and minimal meditation experience were divided into two groups. One group engaged in a 5-minute guided mindfulness meditation focusing on present-moment awareness and non-judgmental breathing observation. The other group was assigned a neutral task involving solving Tangram puzzles.

Following these activities, participants were asked to complete a Probabilistic Selection Task designed to test decision-making under uncertainty, requiring choices between symbol pairs with feedback on their selections.

The findings revealed that participants from the meditation group were better at learning from positive feedback in this decision-making task compared to those engaged in the neutral task.

This suggests that even brief mindfulness meditation sessions can significantly improve an individual’s ability to assimilate new information and make more informed decisions in situations of uncertainty.