Sharpening Your Memory With Meditation

Meditation may help hone your visual memory, suggests a new study. For their research, scientists zeroed in on two types of Buddhist meditation: Deity Yoga (in which participants focus on an image of a deity) and Open Presence (in which participants avoid concentrating on any specific image and attempt to evenly distribute their attention while meditating).

In a series of experiments, both types of meditation practitioners (along with a group of nonmeditators) engaged in tasks that tested their visual memory (e.g., the ability to hold an image in memory and then identify it among other similar images later on). After finishing up their first round of tasks, the meditation practitioners meditated for 20 minutes while the nonmeditators rested. Both groups then completed a second round of tasks.

The study's results showed that all the participants performed similarly on the first round of tests. However, in the second round, practitioners of Deity Yoga had a remarkable improvement in performance. According to the study's authors, these findings hint that meditation may show promise in treatment of memory loss.