Mindfulness

An exciting advance in the lab’s research agenda has been an examination of the impact of meditation and mindfulness techniques on attenuating mind-wandering. Conceptually speaking mind-wandering, which entails the mind’s drifting away from the here and now, can be conceived of as something akin to the opposite of mindfulness, in which the mind is focused on the present. An article by Mrazek, Smallwood, and Schooler (2012) demonstrated that individuals who show a penchant for mindfulness (as measured by a variety of pre-existing self report measures) are less inclined to mind-wander in the laboratory. Perhaps even more importantly this study further demonstrated that a simple technique for enhancing mindfulness (attending to the breath for 10 minutes) reduces the behavioral consequences of mind-wandering. We are also extremely encouraged by results of a meditation training study (Mrazek et al, 2013) in which undergraduates received either a two week meditation class or a two week nutrition class. Comparisons between performance on pre and post test measures of both mind-wandering and reading comprehension revealed a marked reduction in mind-wandering and improvement in reading performance for participants in the meditation training condition, but no change for participants in the nutrition condition. More recently, a similar study found that a multifaceted intensive six week mindfulness program led to marked reductions in stress as indexed by an assortment of measures including subjective, behavioral, neuroendocrine, neural, genomic, and third-party ratings of stress (Mrazek et al., 2021).