Thirty experienced meditation practitioners, each with at least two years of regular practice, completed two tests in one day: a thirty-minute session of breath-focused meditation alone and the same session in a group with all participants. At every moment when attention drifted from the sensations of the breath, the participant pressed a button on a device—the instrument recorded the event with millisecond precision, creating a detailed portrait of mind wandering on a time scale.
The statistics were unexpected: in both conditions, participants recorded approximately the same number of distractions. However, their distribution over time differed fundamentally. In the solo session, waves of distractions accumulated smoothly, without obvious jumps—like noise, uniform over the half hour.
In the group session, the picture was different: distractions became more frequent gradually, reaching a peak at the end of the session. However, where one might expect to see fatigue and irritation, the researchers discovered a paradox: after group meditation, participants reported a significant reduction in anxiety and less pronounced mental inertia, as assessed by the POMS scale—an indicator of well-being, despite the growing "noise" in the head.
The study was published on 28 August 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The authors—Alessio Matiz, Sara Sorella, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Franco Fabbro, and Cristiano Crescentini—developed the project within the framework of the MOM (Mindfulness-Oriented Meditation) program, which focuses on measuring and understanding directed attention. All participants were experts, not novices, in meditation practice, and the study used a rigorous design: within-subject (each participant underwent both conditions), crossover (the order of sessions varied), with control for acoustic interference and without any instructions during the practice itself. At the same time, the authors honestly emphasize limitations: the sample of thirty people is quite small, each scenario was tried only once, and only behavioral measurements were used without recording brain activity.
These results call into question the classical view of meditation as a purely individual process, where society supposedly only distracts and hinders achieving a deep state.
According to the global workspace theory, the presence of other people may increase the overall level of arousal and wakefulness, making involuntary thoughts more noticeable—not because they appear more often, but because the mind is more sensitive to their occurrence in a social context. This is like turning on a light in a dark room: the objects were always there, but now you see them.
An alternative view, based on the theory of predictive processing, offers a more subtle mechanism: the presence of other people changes the accuracy of internal predictions about signals from one's own body (interoception). Alone, the mind may rely primarily on an internal model of bodily sensations; in a group, this model shifts toward accounting for external signals—the sounds of companions' breathing, movements, the overall rhythm. The balance between internal and external information transitions to a different state, and this can both distract and, paradoxically, order the experience.
A figurative analogy helps capture the essence: imagine an orchestra where each musician listens not only to their own part but also to the whole sound. Even with the same number of mistakes, their distribution over time changes because the collective rhythm sets a different scale of attention and perception. So here: the group does not reduce the waves of involuntary thoughts but restructures their temporal dynamics, simultaneously creating a favorable background for emotional recovery.
The limitations of the study are important for honest interpretation. Neural correlates—brain activity—were not measured; novices were not compared with experienced practitioners under the same conditions; long-term effects of regular practice in different formats or the influence of group size were not tracked. The study captured a microscopic slice: how social context reformats the dynamics of spontaneous thought during focused breath practice.
If these differences prove stable when repeated with larger samples, then clinical and educational meditation programs will require reconsideration. They must take into account not only breathing techniques and attention direction but also the format—solo or group—especially for people who struggle with motivation for independent practice.
