Does Mindfulness Meditation improve your Intelligence and Happiness? (Psychology, Brain, Science)

[Music] hello and welcome to the world of psychology does mindfulness meditation improve intelligence and happiness [Music] in 2012 a pretty interesting study was published in the Journal of experimental Psychology by Michael mik and colleagues and the title of this study was the role of Mind wandering in measurements of General aptitude so the idea was when you are trying to solve difficult cognitive tasks and your mind is wondering it's not concentrated on the task so your performance going to deteriorate and in fact razek and colleagues really found strong evidence for this hypothesis by letting participants solve working memory tasks namely the operation span task and fluid intelligence tasks namely The Raven metries and during these cognitive tests participants were frequently Asked well to what extent was their attention focused either on on task or on task unrelated concerns and participants could answer from one well I'm completely uh cons con rated on the task to five my attention is completely on unrelated concerns and from these answers they calculated a mind wandering score which was remarkably correlated negatively correlated with the outcomes in these cognitive tests and the results in the SAT the Scholastic aptitude test test so the more mind wandering the worse the performance in tests on General aptitude but of course this is just a correlation it doesn't tell anything about the direction of the causality maybe mind wandering is the reason for the bad performance but on the other hand bad performance and this is quite logical as well and to some extent this is certainly the case maybe bad performance is the reason for mind wandering if I realize that I'm quite bad I begin to have negative thoughts I begin to worry so The Logical consequence of this study of these interesting results was to develop an intervention which reduces mind wandering to see if this could boost the results in cognitive tests because this would be an direct evidence that mind wandering is really the reason or at least one reason for bad performances in such demanding tasks and this brings us to the main study of the day maybe one of the most influential and very often cited studies in 2013 published in the maybe most important Journal of Psychology the journal psychological science and the title of the study is mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and gr performance while reducing mind wandering so obviously the intervention Ric and colleagues chose was the mindfulness meditation which is quite rich in Tradition and in their study 48 students were divided into two groups one group was trained on mindfulness meditation and the control group which was an active control group which is really important because maybe one group is just outperforming the other because the participants are more motivated due to the fact they are getting much more attention and they are much more cared of so from a research methodological point of view this is really important and both groups the mindfulness meditation group and the other group the control group was a nutrition group they were informed about fundamental issues of nutritional science both groups attended 4 45 minute lasting lessons a week and the whole intervention lasted just two weeks during the mindfulness meditation sessions the participants exercised for 10 to 20 minutes the rest of the time they were informed about concepts of mindfulness meditation and they were also asked to practice and to integrate mindfulness into their daily activities by completing 10 minutes of daily meditation outside of class so during the lessons 10 to 20 minutes and outside of Class 10 minutes every day this is really not very much but what was this training this this mindfulness TR raining about well participants had to focus on sensory experiences like the taste of a fruit the sounds of an audio recording or just to focus on their breathing so all it takes is just to let go for a moment and just feeling the air coming in through your nostrils directing your attention to the touch of the air as it comes in and then just breathe out and let it [Music] go just being with your breathing for a few moments some other key learnings of the mindfulness meditation training were of course sitting in an upright position legs crossed gaze lowered learning to distinguish between naturally emerging thoughts and elaborated thinking reframing and I think this is quite important re def framing of worries and anxieties as mental projections allowing the mind to rest in a natural way rather than trying to suppress emerging thoughts and when you realize well my mind is wondering participants were taught you can use your breath as an anchor for attention so after the two weeks of training both groups the mindfulness meditation and the nutrition group were retested and their performance in a working memory task the so-called operation span task and their performance in the verbal gr The Graduate record examination which was a little bit modified so it could be best described as a reading comprehension test and in both tests even though the training was really not very long the mindfulness meditation group significantly outperformed the nutrition group and the meditation group reported significantly less mind wondering so it seems like the mindfulness meditation training led to to less mind wandering which in turn led to improvements in these by the way really important cognitive tests because they are really good predictors for other achievements which in turn led to improvements in these cognitive tasks if these results should be replicated at best also from other research teams this would be a really interesting progress because from the theoretical point of view this would prove mind wandering really is a reason for deteriorated performances in cognitive tests and of course from a practical point of view this would have an impact on education as well maybe in some years they're going to be mindfulness meditation at schools but also at un universities or at the workplace [Music] by reducing mind wandering mindfulness meditation might boost your scores on demanding cognitive tests but maybe there are also some collateral benefits at least this is suggested by a study from Killingsworth and jilbert published in science 200 named a wondering mind is an unhappy mind in this study 2,250 adult subjects from many countries of the world but most of them about 74% residing in the US used an iPhone app which was developed by the study authors to track their happy so from time to time their iPhone gave a signal and participants were asked some questions like how are you feeling right now what are you doing right now and whether the mind has just wondered and in almost 50% of the time participants reported mind wandering so almost 50% of the time our mind is not concentrated on what we are doing right now our mind is not in the Here and Now mind wandering occured especially during self-care and grooming in 65% of the times people were brushing their teeth or taking a shower their mind had wandered away mind wandering occurred during work 50% of of the time when people exercised um during Sports mind wandering occurred about 40% of the time and even during sex people were 10% of the time absentminded but the really exciting result of this study was that during mind wandering people on average were significantly less happy happy and this was even the case during unpleasant activities this is really surprising because even if we are doing something we dislike we don't use mind wandering to dream ourself to a better place no even when we're doing something we dislike like being in a traffic jam mind wandering makes us on average this is it's not always the case but on average it makes us feel unhappy and the reason probably is when we mind wonderand we are often focused on the bad stuff we are focused on worries fears and regrets so we think of things like what if I fail in this project will I lose my job or why did I say this to my friend what is he going to think of me this was so stupid or did I take my pills yesterday and who are the two girls lying in my bed whoa and what about the summer ringer and the squirrel lying next to them so at least some of these thoughts have the potential to make us unhappy and in fact Killingsworth and jilbert could show that it's the Mind wandering that occurs before the bad mood and it's not the bad mood that occurs before the Mind wandering so it really seems as the title of the study says a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind but and now we turn to our last study published by Smallwood and Andrew Hana and called not all Minds that wander are lost the importance of a balanced perspective on the Mind wandering state but we shouldn't paint a too dark picture of Mind wandering of course mind wandering May deteriorate performance in demanding cognitive tasks and of course mind wandering might make us unhappy might play a role in respect to depressive disord orders in Clinical Psychology we speak of rumination but there is no doubt that there are also positive aspects of Mind wandering because it's important for creative thinking for Creative problem solving and a lot of inventions of mankind have been discovered by great Wandering Minds and think of it almost 50% of the time we are absentminded so mind wandering daydreaming is definitely a evolutionary winner and probably because it helps us to come up with really good Solutions even without having to be aware of it so there is a lot of subconscious processing taking place by the way neuros scientists suppose that it's the so-called default mode Network that might play a real important role in this game mind wandering also seems to be important for memory consolidation especially for memories related to ourself and this is not surprising because during mind wandering a lot of Replay is taking place and the more often you think something the deeper memory traces can become so that's it for today hope to see you next time and don't forget to live the moment [Music]