Meditation has been found to produce structural changes in the brain that could help to offset the effects of aging. It appears - from an imaging study led by Massachusetts General Hospital - that meditation changes the areas of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing. Meditation practitioners say that meditating can have profound effects on the mind and benefit general mental health, but meditation has been difficult for researchers to study in the past due to the lack of tangible effects.
Now, however, researchers have used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify specific physical effects associated with meditation. Most interestingly, the effects were observed in ordinary people who meditated, rather than Buddhist monks, who have been the subjects of other studies in the past.
The new study looked at 20 people who practiced Buddhist Insight meditation - which focuses on "mindfulness," a specific, nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind. On average, they meditated for about six hours per week. For comparison, 15 people with no experience of meditation were enrolled as a control group.
After producing detailed images of the participants' brains using MRI, the researchers found that regions of the brain involved in the mental activities that characterize Insight meditation were thicker in the meditators than in the controls. This provides the first evidence that alterations in brain structure may be associated with meditation. "The area where we see these differences is involved in both the modulation of functions like heart rate and breathing and also the integration of emotion with thought and reward-based decision making - a central switchboard of the brain," said Sara Lazar, lead author of the study.
The study, in the journal NeuroReport, also found that, in an area associated with the integration of emotional and cognitive processes, differences in cortical thickness were more pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation could reduce the thinning of the cortex that typically occurs with aging.
While this is only a small study, it does suggest that meditation could help in staving off age related brain degeneration. "Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain. We also found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related atrophy of certain areas of the brain," concluded Lazar.
Source: Massachusetts General Hospital
