Abstract
Experienced meditators typically report that they experience time slowing down in meditation practice as well as in everyday life. Conceptually this phenomenon may be understood through functional states of mindfulness, i.e., by attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and enhanced memory. However, hardly any systematic empirical work exists regarding the experience of time in meditators. In the current cross-sectional study, we investigated whether 42 experienced mindfulness meditation practitioners (with on average 10 years of experience) showed differences in the experience of time as compared to 42 controls without any meditation experience matched for age, sex, and education. The perception of time was assessed with a battery of psychophysical tasks assessing the accuracy of prospective time judgments in duration discrimination, duration reproduction, and time estimation in the milliseconds to minutes range as well with several psychometric instruments related to subjective time such as the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, the Barratt Impulsivity Scale and the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. In addition, subjective time judgments on the current passage of time and retrospective time ranges were assessed. While subjective judgements of time were found to be significantly different between the two groups on several scales, no differences in duration estimates in the psychophysical tasks were detected. Regarding subjective time, mindfulness meditators experienced less time pressure, more time dilation, and a general slower passage of time. Moreover, they felt that the last week and the last month passed more slowly. Overall, although no intergroup differences in psychophysical tasks were detected, the reported findings demonstrate a close association between mindfulness meditation and the subjective feeling of the passage of time captured by psychometric instruments.
Highlights
One aspect that is noticed by individuals during mindfulnessoriented meditation and thereafter in daily life is that they frequently experience subjective time slowing down considerably and the present moment feels expanded (Kabat-Zinn, 2005)
We present results from a cross-sectional study, where we systematically investigated whether individuals with extensive mindfulness meditation training are more precise and accurate in psychophysical time perception tasks assessing different modalities and different time ranges in a series of prospective time judgment tasks
In order to assess an extensive profile of psychological factors, which has shown to be related to subjective time, we measured momentary subjective well-being, general physical activity, and personality indices such as subjective ratings of mindfulness, impulsiveness, as well as objective indices of attentional capacities (Wittmann et al, 2014). The latter capacity is included in this study since attention strongly modulates time perception (Droit-Volet and Meck, 2007) and attention is affected by mindfulness meditation practice (Jha et al, 2007; Wittmann and Schmidt, 2014)
Summary
One aspect that is noticed by individuals during mindfulnessoriented meditation and thereafter in daily life is that they frequently experience subjective time slowing down considerably and the present moment feels expanded (Kabat-Zinn, 2005). We present results from a cross-sectional study, where we systematically investigated whether individuals with extensive mindfulness meditation training are more precise and accurate in psychophysical time perception tasks assessing different modalities and different time ranges in a series of prospective time judgment tasks We employed those temporal processing tasks which have proven to reveal inter-individual differences in various subject groups (Wittmann et al, 2011; Pütz et al, 2012), but in a recent study have shown to be sensitive to variations in self-rated mindfulness (Wittmann et al, 2014). The latter capacity is included in this study since attention strongly modulates time perception (Droit-Volet and Meck, 2007) and attention is affected by mindfulness meditation practice (Jha et al, 2007; Wittmann and Schmidt, 2014)
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