Longtime readers know that I’m obsessed with working memory — typically abbreviated as WM. This cognitive capacity allows people to hold information in mind, mentally move it around, and combine ideas and procedures together. Of course, learning requires students to execute all those mental operations. Simply put: successful school learning requires successful working memory function.
Here’s the catch: humans just don’t have very much working memory. The bottleneck on this vital cognitive capacity creates strict limits on the learning that students — and all of us — can do.
For this reason, anyone in favor of learning would LOVE to find ways to increase working memory capacity. Despite the obvious appeal of this idea, we just haven’t found ways to accomplish that goal.
For instance: practice usually increases our cognitive capacities. If I want to get better at speaking Spanish, solving calculus problems, or programming in Java, I can develop those abilities by chatting with my friends in Spanish, seeking out calculus problems to solve, and writing Java programs. Sadly, this strategy just doesn’t work with working memory. No matter how much WM practice we do, students don’t see benefits of that training in their academic work. (Trust me: researchers have tried!)
Attuned to my interest in working memory, a friend recently pointed out an intriguing possibility…
Memory Meets Mindfulness
I typically define working memory with four verbs: a cognitive capacity that selects, holds, reorganizes, and combines ideas from multiple sources. Note: before WM does the “reorganizing and combining” necessary for learning, it must first “select and hold” the relevant facts, concepts, and procedures.
If we can’t get better at reorganizing and combining, can we get better at selecting and holding? Specifically, can mindful meditation help us hone those mental skills? After all, mindfulness typically invites meditators to focus on a particular stimulus — say, the breath — and to maintain that object of focus. “Focus and maintain” sounds a lot like “select and hold.” In theory, mindfulness training could very well increase WM capacity if it helps us get better at those first two verbs.
My friend pointed me to this review article by Dr. Amishi Jha and colleagues. In it, Team Jha summarizes several studies showing that — sure enough — mindful meditation can preserve WM function in high-stress situations.
Given both my focus on WM and the potential benefits of mindfulness, I’m an obvious candidate to be all in on Team Mindfulness. A mindfulness practice costs nothing, and – if it increases WM capacity – could very well help students learn almost anything. Perhaps – at last! – we’ve found the solution to this vexing cognitive problem.
Having looked over this article (and several others), I want to explain why I’m not yet convinced.
In the first place: a quick review of the research summarized by Jha raises important concerns:
- Much of this research focuses on military personnel. For many (many) reasons, I don’t think we should extrapolate from military training to PK-12 education. While the stress of school can be pressing, I’m confident it doesn’t reach the stress of active combat.
- The research in this review focuses less on increasing WM capacity than on preserving WM performance in highly stressful situations. The working memory bottleneck isn’t widening; instead, mindfulness helps people use WM more effectively when highly stressed.
Simply put, an initial review of these studies doesn’t align with our hopes to increase our students’ overall WM capacity.
Further Concerns
We also have some practical reasons to hesitate before requiring mindfulness in schools.
For instance: some of the research that Jha discusses includes 30 minutes of mindfulness training per day. I wonder: what would school leaders take out of a school day to make room for 30 minutes of meditation?
We might hope that a short period of training would launch students on an independent mindfulness practice. If students meditate at home, we wouldn’t need significant time investment in school. Sadly, a study from the UK with 8,000+ participants found that – even after ten weeks of training – most students just didn’t continue meditating on their own.
Another concern: relatively little mindfulness research asks participants about negative experiences during or after their training. When we do ask, however, we find that a meaningful percentage of meditators report some level of distress. (If you’re curious about this research pool, you can look here and here.)
If we’re going to require mindfulness, we should – at a minimum – be well trained in identifying and supporting students who have adverse reactions.
Hopeful Directions?
For all these reasons, I’m not yet sold on the idea of incorporating mindfulness in schools to enhance students’ working memory. At the same time, I think we can ask a helpful related question: if mindfulness doesn’t improve students’ WM, could it instead strengthen their attention? If they maintain focus more effectively in class, it certainly seems plausible to hope that students will learn more.
We do in fact have some helpful studies pointing this direction (here). Alas, the bigger picture isn’t as persuasive (here).
Although this blog post has largely doubted the benefits of school-based mindfulness, I am in fact quite enthusiastic about an individual’s decision to meditate. Many meditators report genuine benefits: feeling calmer, more focused, more clear-headed. If students want to meditate at school, we should be as helpful and encouraging as we reasonably can be.
At the same time, we should have different standards of evidence for allowing individuals to do something they want to do and requiring students to do something whether they want to or not. As I understand the research so far, we don’t have enough clear evidence of benefit to move beyond permission to requirement.
Jha, A. P., Denkova, E., Zanesco, A. P., Witkin, J. E., Rooks, J., & Rogers, S. L. (2019). Does mindfulness training help working memory ‘work’better?. Current opinion in psychology, 28, 273-278.
