First post!
Brief intro: in this blog, I will document pseudo “experiments” I will run on myself to test methods of personal improvement that I find interesting. As a PhD student in cognitive psychology, I will mostly be testing out methods of cognitive enhancement, but maybe I will try some physical or mood/emotion ones as well.
For my first “N of 1” experiment, I will be doing a self-replicable version of the mindfulness meditation training in Zeidan et al., 2010.
In their study, they had meditation-naive (but meditation-interested) subjects do four days of mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes, each session. They had some cognitive and mood-related pre and post-tests - check out the paper for the deets. Their training resulted in some small improvements in the streak-correct in the N-back and a few other statistically significant (but small effect) results.
I’m mostly interested in whether meditation can improve sustained attention at tasks that require working memory. So, I will just use the N-back as my formal measure, and as an informal measure I will be tallying the instances I am distracted or mind-wandering during reading. I read one academic paper a day, so with this simple 4-day training, I would be surprised and skeptical to see too much improvement, but this is my first self-experiment so I wanted to start small.
What I will do:
Pre-test: N-back, # of mind-wanders during that day’s reading
20 minutes of mindfulness-meditation-inspired meditation for 4 days
Post-test: N-back, # of mind-wanders during that day’s reading
Summary of # of mind-wanders from previous four days
In my next post, I will report the results!
