The Effect of Meditation on Memory Consolidation

To reveal if one’s attentional state during consolidation contributes to the underlying mechanism for memory consolidation, we observed memory effects of two differing attentional states; mindfulness meditation and quiet eyes-closed rest. Sleep and quiet eyes close rest have both been shown to be beneficial to the consolidation of memory. Perhaps crucial to their memory enhancing effects, both of these activities involve a reduction of interference to the outside world. An aspect of quiet rest is mind-wandering, or a state of low attention to any one thing, when one will often think many unrelated things within a short period of time. Meditation is like rest because one’s eyes are closed and body is still, but it also, converse to rest, involves focused attention. Despite the similar outward appearance of these two states, the high level of attention during meditation and low level of attention during rest may cause differing effects on memory consolidation. To test our hypothesis that high attention during mindfulness interferes with memory consolidation, and that low attention during rest has the opposite effect, we compared memory scores on an Icelandic word-pairing task before and after participants meditated or rested. We found no significant difference between the meditation and resting conditions overall, but when controlling for the word list used and compliance with instructions, we found that those participants who followed instructions more than 50% of the time did worse on the memory task during meditation, and better on the memory task during rest (F(1, 29) = 11.67, p = .002). This supports our hypothesis that meditation would be detrimental and rest beneficial to memory consolidation, likely due to the differing attentional focus between these states