| A lot of people and so many of us are suffering from short term memory or weak working memory, which means our difficulty to grab and hold on to incoming information. How many times have we walked into our rooms, thrown our phone, keys, or sunglasses away, and then a few minutes later we can’t remember where, how, and when did that happen? Many types of research and studies carried out by neuroscientists have proven that practicing mindfulness meditation can potentially reduce the impact of proactive interference. This means reducing the impact of your memories interfering with your ability to retrieve recent information from your memory. By strengthening the ability to stay focused on a single thought while ignoring other distracting thoughts, we can improve our working memory skills. Practicing meditation every day can help increase the blood flow to the brain, meaning an even stronger network of blood vessels in the cerebral cortex that reinforces memory capacity. It can also reduce stress and anxiety that affect and deteriorate our cognitive capacity. According to a study cited in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Journal, it was discussed that working on meditation training can enhance various cognitive processes, such as emotional regulation, executive control, and attention, and particularly sustained attention. A study carried in Montclair State University New Jersey, has investigated the effects of mindfulness meditation on cognitive functions. The study collected two groups in which one was assigned to a four-week online mindfulness course and the other one to a creative writing course. The first team spent the trial period learning meditation and how to focus on their breath or body sensations and learning about being aware of what was happening around them. Whilst the second team was practicing both journalistic-style writing and academic writing. Participants have completed a memory test before and after going through the training, and the results of the analyses have shown that the team who practiced mindfulness meditation has significantly less proactive interference during the memory test compared to the writing group, thus indicating an improvement in short-term memory. ⇒ So basically, the working memory is very essential for learning and seeing how we can stay concentrated. Selecting important from distracting information and store it in mind are useful skills in situations where information is overloaded. |
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_mindfulness_improve_your_bad_memory
