Mindfulness meditation (MM) did not reduce the perceived duration of experimental pain. In a two-session experiment, participants verbally estimated the duration of painful, non-painful tactile, and neutral visual stimulations before and after a one-week MM or control intervention. Contrary to expectations, the results showed no evidence that MM alters the temporal dimension of pain. The effects of MM on pain experience do not appear to extend to how long pain is perceived to last.
A brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training reduced the misperception of touch and increased tactile sensitivity in healthy participants, compared with a control group that listened to a recorded story. Sixty-two participants completed a somatic signal detection task before and after the intervention. The meditation group reported fewer false perceptions of near-threshold vibrations that were not actually present. This suggests that the nature of interoceptive attention matters for perceptual accuracy, and body-scan meditation might help reduce misperception of physical symptoms in people with medically unexplained symptoms.