You may have heard of a little thing called mindfulness, a meditation style that focuses on being aware and accepting of thoughts, feelings, and sensations you have in the present moment. Oprah loves it. Tech CEOs love it. It might make you less obese. It’ll probably make you less stressed. But it might also tamper with your memory, new research finds.
In one of the few pieces of evidence that suggests mindfulness is not the perfect solution to all problems, a study in the journal Psychological Science finds that the practice might make people more susceptible to false memories. The research found that people who were instructed to focus their attention on their breathing, a common mindfulness practice, were more likely to invent memories, perhaps because of that whole “judgment free” approach to thinking. Mindfulness “may also increase false-memory susceptibility by affecting the cognitive operations needed to distinguish between internal and external sources of information,” the experts wrote.
via Mental Floss
