Meditation reduces errors?

 How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes

Meditating just once proves to make a difference

The title of the news item expresses much more confidence in the ability of meditation to reduce error than the actual study ... 

On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring

 Most notably, the unexpected nature of our results (i.e., inconsistency with our a priori hypotheses) in conjunction with the small effect size of the reported Pe modulation and lack of behavioral performance discrepancies across groups challenge the strength of our findings and cast doubt over the postulations advanced above. Such skepticism is compounded by our EEG methodology,

I'm struggling to believe that just 20 minutes of meditation can have a real world effect on error monitoring. The results in Table 2 are not that pronounced so I am surprised to read in the news article:

These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain's ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes," Moser said. "It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there in the moment."

That is even more surprising given the paragraph above states there was no improvement in actual task performance!

Of course ... more research is needed. Unfortunately so much meditation research is poorly funded, has conflicts of interest(meditation teachers being involved) and even the participants in the study might have self selection issues because of the all the publicity about meditation over recent years. 

I get it, I'm sounding cynical about meditation. I'm not. I advise many people to try meditation because meditation is like antidepressants: when it works for someone it works well. So give it a go but I'd advise to treat it as a very individual matter. Joining groups, seeing teachers(as if one needs to be taught how to meditate!), doesn't seem necessary to me but then I've always been something of an autodidact and a loner so keep that in mind. 

In my youth I joined a meditation group near home. It was a beautiful inner city Buddhist temple. I stopped going when after one meditation session the participants started discussing "big spiritual dreams". At that point I knew it was time to leave but I continued meditating until something happened. I still don't know what that was but my memory improved and and found concentration much easier. However I was practicing what back then was referred to as zazen, or concentration meditation. Today the trend is towards open monitoring meditation which is about observing without interference or reflection the ebb and flow of sensations. Whatever rocks your boat. Try it and see if it works for you. It seemed to help me.