Mindfulness
Does time feel slower to experienced meditators?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Experienced mindfulness meditators felt that time passes more slowly and that recent weeks lasted longer, yet they were no more accurate than non-meditators at lab timing tasks.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session two-site comparison of experienced mindfulness meditators with age-, sex- and education-matched non-meditators on questionnaires and psychophysical timing tasks.
- N
- N=84 · 42 experienced meditators and 42 matched controls.
- Population
- German adults aged 21-50: meditators with at least 3 years of continuous practice, and meditation-naive controls
- Outcome
- Subjective passage of time ratings, and accuracy/precision on duration discrimination, reproduction, estimation and production tasks
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
Meditators reported less time pressure, more feeling of time expansion and a slower general passage of time, and judged the past week and month as having passed more slowly, with medium-to-large effects. They also scored much higher on mindfulness and lower on past-negative time perspective. However, there were no group differences in accuracy or precision on any psychophysical timing task, and none on the attention network test. Unexpectedly, meditators scored higher on motor impulsivity, which the authors attribute partly to ambiguous translated items.
Methodology
The researchers compared 42 long-term mindfulness meditators (on average about 10 years of practice) with 42 controls matched on age, sex and education, in labs in Freiburg and Munich. Everyone rated how fast time usually passes and how long past and future periods seemed, filled in mindfulness, impulsiveness and time-perspective questionnaires, and completed timing tasks from milliseconds to a minute plus an attention test.
Limitations
Because it is a one-time comparison of self-selected groups, it cannot show that meditation causes the slower sense of time; people who already experience time this way may be drawn to meditation. The subjective time effects rest on self-report ratings that meditators might answer in line with their beliefs, while the objective tasks showed nothing. The proposed memory explanation (richer episodic memories lengthen retrospective duration) was not tested, and the higher impulsivity scores hint that the meditator group may be unusual in other ways.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Not yet placed on a claim. This paper has study layers, but no concept page yet cites it as support, challenge, or qualifier.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.
- Do women and men get different benefits from meditation training?
- Do different types of meditation train different mental skills?
- Why are more mindful people less depressed and anxious?
- Does mindfulness training help college rowers sleep and perform?
- Does meditation training improve young children's attention?