In 2011, Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it. Several studies have shown that meditation, through its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, it’s the goal for many people to dial it down. One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.” The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brain’s “Me Center" "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain." "We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," said study author Florian Kurth. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain - although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators. Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain Skeptics, of course, may ask what good are a few brain changes if the psychological effects aren’t simultaneously being illustrated? Luckily, there’s good evidence for those as well, with studies reporting that meditation helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ. The practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits – from changes in grey matter volume to reduced activity in the “me” centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is just now being confirmed with fMRI or EEG.
The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation.
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