How Meditation Affects Time Perception

This piece, by Onno Berkan, was published on 01/28/25. The original text, by Carlton Moeller, was published by Impulse in 2021.

This Colorado College study investigated how different types of meditation affect our perception of time. The researcher examined two main meditation styles: Open Monitoring (OM) meditation, where practitioners observe their thoughts without judgment, and Focused Attention (FA) meditation, which involves concentrating on a specific mantra or object.

The experiment involved 14 experienced meditators who participated in three different sessions: OM meditation, FA meditation, and a control condition in which they simply listened to an audiobook. Before each session, participants completed a mood assessment since their emotional state can influence both meditation and time perception. During the sessions, participants wore EEG equipment to monitor their brain activity while performing a time-judgment task called temporal bisection.

The temporal bisection task required participants to listen to audio tones ranging between 4 and 6 seconds and decide whether each tone was closer to the "short" (4-second) or "long" (6-second) reference tone. This task was specifically chosen because it allowed participants to keep their eyes closed and required minimal movement, helping them maintain their meditative state. Participants clicked right or left on a mouse to indicate whether they thought the tone was short or long.

A key finding was that during OM meditation, participants tended to underestimate the duration of the tones compared to the control condition, while no such difference was found during FA meditation. The researchers suggested this difference occurred because OM meditation creates a broader scope of attention that requires more mental resources to switch between tasks.

Interestingly, the study also found that specific brain wave patterns, specifically low theta waves (4-6 Hz) in the back of the head, were linked to how people perceived time across all conditions. However, this finding should be viewed cautiously, as the study had limitations, including the relatively small number of EEG electrodes and the OpenBCI headset used.

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