Previous investigations examining salient memories have demonstrated that personal memories that are important to individuals and contain emotional information are better remembered than neutral events.Using behavioral and brain-imaging experiments,the present studies explored whether the previous finding was applicable imagined loss.In a behavioral experiment,a free recall paradigm was used to compare the memory performance of individuals who imagined loss with that of individuals who imagined importance.The superior memory performance conferred by imagining loss was constrained to ordinary items of low to medium importance and did not generalize to vital items.Moreover,brain imaging evidence revealed that the activation in certain brain regions was stronger when participants were imagining the loss of ordinary items of low to medium importance compared to vital items.These brain regions included cognitive effort-related areas(such as the parietal cortex and middle prefrontal cortex) and areas related to emotional experiences and emotion-related memories(such as the amygdala,parahippocampal gyrus,and posterior cingulate gyrus).Our study provides a new way of exploring the superior memory performance when imagining loss and enriches the literature on memory enhancement by contributing to a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms related to the imagining of vital losses.
Although previous studies have shown that sleep can inspire insight,it is still unclear whether meditation can promote insight.Meditation differs from other types of passive rest such as relaxation and sleep because it requires full consciousness andmindfulness of targets such as one's breathing.Forty-eight university students without meditation experience were recruited to learn a simple meditation technique.They were given a list of 10 insight problems to solve (the pre-test session).In this study,we focused on the unsolved problems and examined if they could be successfully solved after a 20min rest interval with or without meditation.Results showed that relative to the control group that listened to Chinese or English words and made a language judgment,the groups who learned meditation successfully solved significantly more failed problems from the pre-test session,providing direct evidence for the role of meditation in promoting insight.Further analysis showed that maintaining amindful and alert state during meditation (raising a hand to report every 10 deep breaths compared to every 100 deep breaths) resulted in more insight regarding the failed items from the pre-test session.This implies that it was watchfulness in meditation,rather than relaxation,that actually contributed to insight.Consistently,in the meditation session or control task,the percentage of alpha waves—a brain index of mental relaxation—was negatively correlated with insight.These results suggest a meditation-based insight-promoting mechanism different from that involved in passive rest such as relaxation and sleep.
