The Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Time Perception

Abstract

Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to "short" and "long" standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment.

The bright side of negative experience: Preexposure to negative image improves non-judging attitude in mindfulness meditation

“…We used FFMQ that measured trait mindfulness, and hence it is plausible that trait mindfulness was improved in the present study. However, several previous studies have revealed that short exercises promoted state mindfulness (Kramer et al, 2013;Schofield et al, 2015;Arch & Craske, 2006). It is possible that exposure to negative events and meditation exercise modulate state mindfulness, and this modulation is, in turn, involved with in our results.…”

“…The experimenter sat with the participants to ensure task compliance. This exercise was designed for individuals with no prior experience of mindfulness meditation and has been used in extensively in previous studies (Kramer et al, 2013;Erisman & Roemer, 2010;Mirams et al, 2013;Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002). After engaging in mindfulness meditation, the participants again responded to the Japanese version of the FFMQ in the post-questionnaire block.…”

“…For example, meditation practice has been found to improve attentional performance (MacLean et al, 2010;Zeidan et al, 2010), cognitive flexibility (Moore & Malinowski, 2009) and working memory capacity (Mrazek et al, 2013). Although the participants in most of these studies experienced meditation training for as long as 4 days, recent studies have shown that just a few minutes of meditation influenced cognitive performance such as time perception (Kramer, Weger, & Sharma, 2013), inattentional blindness (Schofield, Creswell, & Denson, 2015), and emotion regulation (Arch & Craske, 2006). Therefore, it is believed that mindfulness exercise has a big impact on our mental processing.…”

When meditators avoid counting during time production things get interesting

“…In agreement with that, longer subjective time units were shown in Mindfulness Meditation practitioners compared to control participants (Berkovich‐Ohana et al, ). In later studies, control participants as well as experienced meditators showed a relative time expansion for stimuli in the millisecond‐to‐second range directly after a mindfulness meditation session (Droit‐Volet et al, ; Kramer, Weger, & Sharma, ). Recent cross‐sectional studies comparing experienced meditators with meditation‐naive controls in the ability to judge duration showed how subjective time in everyday experience is slowed in mindfulness meditators (Wittmann et al, ) while the accuracy in time perception is increased in Transcendental Meditation practitioners (Schötz et al, ).…”

Updating and reasoning: Different processes, different models, different functions

“…When a conscious state varies, psychological time is experienced differently. For example, time dilation is experienced when an organism is aroused (e.g., threat, van Wassenhove et al 2008), or experiences heightened consciousness (e.g., during meditation, Kramer et al 2013). Temporal duration also fluctuates in altered states of consciousness (e.g., near-death experiences, Wittmann & Paulus 2008).…”