This is your brain on...meditation!

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

Some reasons to be cheerful from a study at Mass. General Hospital: after an 8-week program in meditation, subjects showed measurable and POSITIVE (my interpretation) changes in some pretty important ares of the brain.

Key points include:

• MR images taken before and after showed increased grey matter in the hippocampus, a center for learning and memory, as well as in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.
• MRIs also showed decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, the area associated with anxiety and stress. Correlated with this was a participant reporting reduction in feelings of stress.

The subjects practiced what is called mindfulness meditation – nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind – for an average of 27 minutes per day.

Previous studies have indicated that this sort of effect exists, but this appears to be the first one to document that the changes are due to meditation. You can read a nice summary at the MGH website.

So what's the takeaway for teachers from findings like this? As Scientific American summarized: "The brain is much more plastic than scientists thought even just a decade ago." And young or old, that is reason to be cheerful.

Photo credit: www.shutterstock.com