title: The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception.
abstract: Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to "short" and "long" standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Keynes College, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NP, Kent, UK. Electronic address: R.S.S.Kramer@kent.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Robin S S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Kramer
authors.forename: Ulrich W
authors.initials: UW
authors.lastname: Weger
authors.forename: Dinkar
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sharma
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation; D064866:Mindfulness; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Arousal; Attention; Meditation; Mindfulness; Temporal bisection; Time perception