Mindfulness Practitioners Show Sharper Working Memory Backed by Prefrontal Gamma Rhythms

Could a few minutes of daily meditation quietly rewire the way the brain holds onto information? A new study published in Current Psychology by researchers at Bar-Ilan University suggests that the answer may be yes. The team, led by Rabin Vanda together with Oded Meiron and Nira Mashal, set out to answer a question that has divided the mindfulness literature for years: does long-term mindfulness practice actually improve working memory, and if so, can the fingerprint of that improvement be seen in the brain’s fast electrical rhythms? Their findings, drawn from fifty adults whose brain activity was recorded with electroencephalography while they performed a demanding verbal memory task, point to a striking behavioral advantage among practitioners and a revealing role for prefrontal gamma oscillations in predicting who performs well.

The study focused on working memory, the mental workspace that allows us to temporarily hold and manipulate information, whether we are remembering a phone number long enough to dial it or keeping a friend’s argument in mind while formulating our reply. Verbal working memory in particular depends on sustained attention and on the phonological loop, the system that keeps speech sounds active through silent rehearsal. Because mindfulness training is thought to sharpen attentional control and reduce mind wandering, the researchers hypothesized that people who practice mindfulness regularly would outperform matched non-practitioners on a verbal working memory task, and that this advantage would be reflected in gamma-band activity over the prefrontal cortex, the frequency range previously linked to successful information maintenance in the brain.

To test these ideas, the team recruited twenty-five mindfulness practitioners and twenty-five non-practitioners matched for age, gender, and education. The practitioners had been meditating for an average of just over four years, typically a few times per week, with sessions averaging around fifteen minutes. All participants were healthy, free of psychiatric or neurological history, and reported similar levels of depressive symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory, ensuring that mood differences could not explain any group differences in cognition. Each participant completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, a standard questionnaire measuring dispositional mindfulness, before entering the electrophysiological session.

The working memory challenge was a modified verbal n-back task, a paradigm beloved by cognitive neuroscientists because it taxes the ability to update and monitor information held in mind. Participants viewed sequences of word pairs on a screen, and later a single word appeared; they had to decide whether that word had appeared two encoding events earlier. Crucially, between the encoding displays and before each retrieval, a fixation cross appeared on screen, creating well-defined retention intervals during which participants had to actively maintain the verbal material. The researchers recorded brain activity throughout with a wireless fourteen-channel EEG system, extracting quantitative measures of oscillatory power in several frequency bands, including the low-gamma range between 25 and 43 hertz, during rest, encoding, and those critical pre-retrieval retention windows.

The behavioral results were clear. Mindfulness practitioners achieved significantly higher overall accuracy than controls, both in correctly identifying target words and in correctly rejecting non-targets. Interestingly, their reaction times were no faster than those of non-practitioners. This dissociation between accuracy and speed is theoretically meaningful. It suggests that mindfulness does not simply make people quicker at executing motor responses; rather, it appears to strengthen the top-down regulation of attention, allowing practitioners to sustain task goals and resist interference from irrelevant information more effectively. The pattern fits neatly within the executive-attention framework of working memory, which holds that individual differences in memory capacity reflect the quality of attentional control rather than the sheer size of a storage buffer.

At the neural level, the story became more nuanced. Contrary to the researchers’ initial hypothesis, the two groups did not differ significantly in frontal gamma power during rest, encoding, or pre-retrieval intervals, and occipital gamma showed no group differences either. Nor did self-reported mindfulness scores on the MAAS correlate with task performance within either group, a null result the authors attribute to the questionnaire’s limited sensitivity to moment-to-moment executive attention during a computerized task, and to the known biases inherent in self-report measures. The practitioners’ advantage, in other words, was visible in behavior even when it was not visible as a simple group difference in brain rhythm strength.

Yet gamma activity was far from irrelevant. When the researchers entered group membership and event-related gamma power into regression models predicting accuracy across all fifty participants, a compelling picture emerged. Resting gamma contributed nothing beyond group status. But when gamma power measured during the pre-retrieval retention interval, immediately before correct responses, was included alongside group membership, the model explained 34 percent of the variance in working memory accuracy. Group membership alone accounted for 27 percent, and pre-retrieval gamma at the left anterior frontal electrode AF3 added a further 7 percent, with higher gamma power predicting higher accuracy. Notably, a hierarchical regression found no significant interaction between group and gamma, indicating that the gamma-accuracy relationship held across both practitioners and non-practitioners rather than being exclusive to meditators.

These findings converge with a substantial body of neuroscience showing that gamma oscillations, fast rhythmic brain waves in roughly the 30 to 80 hertz range, support the active maintenance and integration of information during working memory. Prior magnetoencephalography work has shown that increasing verbal working memory load modulates high-gamma power along the dorsal speech stream, including Broca’s region, consistent with a reverberating buffer that coordinates the storage of speech sounds with articulatory rehearsal. The new study extends this framework by showing that gamma measured during the retention interval preceding a correct response, rather than during rest, is the oscillatory signature that matters for accuracy, suggesting that mindfulness practitioners recruit prefrontal control mechanisms more effectively precisely when the brain must hold verbal material active and prepare for retrieval.

The authors are careful to flag the limitations of their design. The wireless EEG system, downsampled to 128 hertz for online analysis, cannot fully rule out contamination of the gamma signal by muscle or eye movements, so the neural findings await replication with research-grade wired systems and independent component analysis. The mindfulness group was heterogeneous in practice style, frequency, and lifetime hours, the electrode array offered limited spatial resolution, and the cross-sectional design leaves open the possibility that people with naturally better working memory are simply more likely to sustain a meditation habit. Longitudinal and randomized controlled studies, ideally combining EEG with fMRI or MEG, will be needed to establish causality.

Even with those caveats, the implications are considerable. If regular mindfulness practice genuinely strengthens verbal working memory by stabilizing goal maintenance and sharpening prefrontal gamma dynamics during retention, mindfulness-based interventions could become a practical cognitive enhancement tool for students, healthcare professionals, and clinical populations whose prefrontal function is compromised by stress or trauma, such as patients with PTSD. The study also hints at future combinations with prefrontally targeted noninvasive brain stimulation, potentially offering new cross-modality approaches to bolster attentional control. For now, the message is quietly remarkable: a modest daily habit of present-moment awareness, sustained over years, appears to leave measurable traces in both behavior and the brain’s fastest rhythms, traces that surface exactly when the mind works hardest to hold a thought in place.

Subject of Research: The relationship between long-term mindfulness practice, prefrontal gamma oscillatory activity, and verbal working memory performance in adults.

Article Title: Exploring the relationship between mindfulness, prefrontal gamma activity, and working memory performance

Article References: Vanda, R., Oded, M., & Mashal, N. (2026). Exploring the relationship between mindfulness, prefrontal gamma activity, and working memory performance. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10007-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10007-w

Keywords: mindfulness, working memory, gamma oscillations, EEG, prefrontal cortex, n-back task, executive attention, cognitive neuroscience, qEEG, meditation, attentional control, Current Psychology