Mindfulness and cognition: 111 randomized trials
A 2024 meta-analysis of 111 trials found small-to-moderate gains in executive and sustained attention and working memory for people new to meditation.
The short version
This is the broadest look yet at whether mindfulness training changes how well people think. Pooling 111 randomized controlled trials with 9,538 people who had not meditated before, it found small-to-moderate improvements in overall cognition and in several specific abilities, including executive attention, sustained attention and working memory. Mindfulness did not improve processing speed or episodic memory. The gains held up against active control groups, not just against doing nothing.
What the researchers did
Nur Hani Zainal and Michelle Newman collected randomized trials of mindfulness-based interventions in meditation-naïve participants. Each trial had to measure at least one objective or self-reported cognitive outcome, and the intervention had to be primarily about teaching mindfulness skills. They excluded single-session studies and trials whose control condition included any mindfulness component. They then estimated effects on global cognition and on 15 separate cognitive subdomains, and tested what made effects bigger or smaller.
What they found
- Where it helped: global cognition, executive attention, working memory accuracy, inhibition accuracy, shifting accuracy, sustained attention and people's own ratings of their cognitive functioning.
- How much: against waitlist or no-treatment groups, effect sizes ranged from g = 0.26 to 0.64; against active controls, from g = 0.19 to 0.39. The active-control comparison is the more conservative and more meaningful one.
- Where it did not help: speed-based measures of executive function, verbal fluency, processing speed, episodic memory and cognitive errors.
- Who benefited most: effects were stronger in people with elevated psychiatric symptoms and in medical samples than in healthy participants, and stronger for face-to-face than self-guided training.
Limits and caveats
The improvements were in accuracy, not speed: mindfulness seems to make people steadier rather than faster. Effects were smaller for healthy people, who are most of the people reading a productivity site. Effects were also larger in studies that analysed only completers rather than everyone randomized, which can flatter results. And the trials vary widely in length and format, so this tells you mindfulness training helps on average, not what dose you need.
What it means for how you work
If you want to train attention directly, mindfulness practice is the option with the most consistent randomized evidence — unlike brain-training games. Expect modest gains in staying on task and avoiding errors, not a transformation, and expect them over weeks of practice. Guided, in-person or live sessions may work better than practising alone from an app. For how short a daily practice can be, see Basso et al. (2019).