Meditation and IQ: Can Meditating Make You Smarter?

There is no good evidence that meditation raises IQ. Across 45 randomized trials, mindfulness programs improved scores on cognitive tests by a small amount (g = 0.15, roughly 2 points if expressed on an IQ-style scale), and when they were compared with an equally engaging control activity the advantage shrank to a statistically non-significant g = 0.07.

The meditation IQ claim rests mostly on one set of Transcendental Meditation experiments from 2001 and on brain-imaging studies that have not held up well. This page covers what the randomized trials show, who ran the study that claimed IQ gains, what happened when researchers tried to confirm that meditation thickens the brain, and why the idea remains popular. Effect sizes are given as "Hedges' g", a standardized difference between groups; multiplying g by 15 gives a rough IQ-point equivalent, though none of these trials measured full-scale IQ.

The most complete summary is a 2022 meta-analysis by Whitfield and colleagues in Neuropsychology Review. The team searched seven databases for randomized trials of "mindfulness-based programs", structured courses such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), that measured cognition with objective tests. They found 56 trials with 2,931 adults and pooled 45 of them.

• Overall effect: Pooling all cognitive domains, mindfulness programs beat comparison groups by g = 0.15 (95% CI 0.05 to 0.24). That is a small effect, about one-seventh of a standard deviation.

• Domains that improved: The advantage was significant for executive function (g = 0.15) and for working memory (g = 0.23, about 3.5 points on an IQ-style scale). It was not significant for attention, declarative memory or cognitive aging.

• Type of comparison group: Against inactive controls such as waitlists, the effect was g = 0.20. Against active controls, people doing another structured activity like health education, it fell to g = 0.07 (95% CI -0.04 to 0.19), which is not statistically different from zero.

• Standard courses: Unmodified eight-week MBSR or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) courses showed no significant advantage (g = 0.04).

The authors rated the risk of bias as unclear in most trials and described their results as only partly corroborating a link between mindfulness and cognition. An earlier systematic review by Lao, Kissane and Meadows (2016) of 18 studies of eight-week MBSR and MBCT courses reached a similar view: the studies did not support improvements in attention or executive function, with preliminary evidence for working memory and autobiographical memory.

The gap between active and inactive controls matters. People on a waitlist know they are not receiving anything, while people in a course expect to improve. An effect that appears against a waitlist and disappears against another class is what expectation, practice with the tests and general engagement would produce.

The main source for "meditation raises IQ" is a 2001 paper in the journal Intelligence by K. T. So and David Orme-Johnson. It reported three experiments with 362 high school students at three schools in Taiwan. Students practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM), a mantra-based technique, for 15 to 20 minutes twice a day for 6 to 12 months. The outcomes included the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, a nonverbal reasoning test, along with measures of creativity, anxiety, embedded figures and "inspection time", a measure of how quickly people take in a simple visual stimulus.

The paper reported that TM improved every measure compared with no-treatment controls, that napping for the same amount of time had no effect, and that a contemplation-meditation group improved on only two measures. It is a published, randomized study in a respected journal, and it deserves to be described accurately.

Context matters too. Orme-Johnson was a psychology professor at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, the institution associated with the TM movement, and he has written more than 100 papers on the technique. That is a potential conflict of interest, and it does not by itself make the results wrong. What weakens the claim is the wider evidence. Independent reviews of randomized meditation trials, summarized above, report small and uneven cognitive effects, and the Whitfield review found no advantage over active controls. A single team's positive result on a reasoning test is a hypothesis to test, and the broader trial evidence has not confirmed it.

Brain-imaging studies are often cited as indirect evidence that meditation builds intelligence. The best-known is Lazar and colleagues (2005), who scanned 20 experienced Insight meditators and matched controls. Regions linked to attention and bodily awareness, including parts of the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula, were thicker in the meditators. The study was cross-sectional, meaning it compared two groups at one point in time, so it could not show whether meditation caused the difference or whether people with those brains were more drawn to meditation.

The direct test came in 2022. Kral and colleagues combined two randomized trials in which 218 people with no meditation experience were assigned to an eight-week MBSR course, a matched active control program, or a waitlist, with MRI scans before and after. In what they described as the largest and most rigorously controlled study to date, they failed to replicate earlier findings and found no evidence that MBSR changed gray matter volume, gray matter density or cortical thickness compared with either control group.

A similar caution applies to Gard and colleagues (2014), who reported that fluid intelligence, measured with items from Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, declined more slowly with age in 32 long-term yoga practitioners and meditators than in 15 controls. The authors noted that their cross-sectional design could not establish causality and that people with higher fluid intelligence may be more interested in practicing yoga and meditation. That self-selection problem runs through most meditation research that compares practitioners with non-practitioners.

Part of the appeal is that meditation does help many people with things they care about, such as stress and mood, and it is easy to assume that a calmer mind is a smarter one. Anxiety can drag down test performance, a topic covered in our article on IQ and anxiety, so a person who feels less anxious on test day may score a little higher. That would be a change in test performance, with no change in the underlying ability.

The meditation evidence also follows the pattern seen in other training research. People improve on tasks close to what they practice, and the gains rarely spread to general reasoning, the same conclusion reached in our review of whether brain training programs can raise IQ. Mindfulness practice trains sustained attention to the present moment, and the small working memory gains in trials fit that.

No good evidence shows that it does. Randomized trials of mindfulness find small gains on some cognitive tests, mainly working memory, and those gains are not significant against active control activities.

A 2001 study of 362 Taiwanese high school students reported gains on a nonverbal reasoning test after 6 to 12 months of TM. One co-author was a long-time researcher at the TM movement's university, and independent trial evidence has not confirmed IQ gains.

The 2022 meta-analysis found a small improvement in working memory (g = 0.23) and executive function (g = 0.15), with no significant effect on attention. Most trials had an unclear risk of bias.

A 2005 study found thicker cortex in experienced meditators, but it could not show cause. A 2022 randomized trial of 218 beginners found no structural brain changes after an eight-week course.

Possibly a little, if it lowers anxiety on test day. That would affect test performance rather than raise underlying ability.

The meditation IQ evidence is clear enough to summarize plainly: meditation does not reliably raise intelligence. Mindfulness courses produce small improvements on working memory and executive function tests, and the advantage shrinks to near zero against an active comparison activity. The most-cited brain-growth finding also failed a large randomized test. People may have good reasons to meditate, and a higher IQ is not one the research supports. To measure where your reasoning ability stands today, take the RIOT IQ test.

1. Whitfield, T., Barnhofer, T., Acabchuk, R., Cohen, A., Lee, M., Schlosser, M., Arenaza-Urquijo, E. M., Böttcher, A., Britton, W., Coll-Padros, N., Collette, F., Chételat, G., Dautricourt, S., Demnitz-King, H., Dumais, T., Klimecki, O., Meiberth, D., Moulinet, I., Müller, T., Parsons, E., Sager, L., Sannemann, L., Scharf, J., Schild, A.-K., Touron, E., Wirth, M., Walker, Z., Moitra, E., Lutz, A., Lazar, S. W., Vago, D., & Marchant, N. L. (2022). The effect of mindfulness-based programs on cognitive function in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuropsychology Review, 32(3), 677-702. [doi.org/10.1007/s11065-021-09519-y](. doi.org

2. Lao, S.-A., Kissane, D., & Meadows, G. (2016). Cognitive effects of MBSR/MBCT: A systematic review of neuropsychological outcomes. Consciousness and Cognition, 45, 109-123. [doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.08.017](. doi.org

3. So, K. T., & Orme-Johnson, D. W. (2001). Three randomized experiments on the longitudinal effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on cognition. Intelligence, 29(5), 419-440. [doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(01)00070-8](. doi.org

4. Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Wasserman, R. H., Gray, J. R., Greve, D. N., Treadway, M. T., McGarvey, M., Quinn, B. T., Dusek, J. A., Benson, H., Rauch, S. L., Moore, C. I., & Fischl, B. (2005). Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. NeuroReport, 16(17), 1893-1897. [doi.org/10.1097/01.wnr.0000186598.66243.19](. doi.org

5. Kral, T. R. A., Davis, K., Korponay, C., Hirshberg, M. J., Hoel, R., Tello, L. Y., Goldman, R. I., Rosenkranz, M. A., Lutz, A., & Davidson, R. J. (2022). Absence of structural brain changes from mindfulness-based stress reduction: Two combined randomized controlled trials. Science Advances, 8(20), eabk3316. [doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abk3316](. doi.org

6. Gard, T., Taquet, M., Dixit, R., Hölzel, B. K., de Montjoye, Y.-A., Brach, N., Salat, D. H., Dickerson, B. C., Gray, J. R., & Lazar, S. W. (2014). Fluid intelligence and brain functional organization in aging yoga and meditation practitioners. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 6, 76. [doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00076](. doi.org

Hero image: Black velvet zafu used in Antai-ji zen monastery, Japan, by Dontpanic, CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.