People who meditate
grow bigger brains
than those who don’t.
Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the
physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that
experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the
brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.
In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more
pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because
those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get
thinner as we age.
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Sara Lazar (center) talks to research assistant Michael Treadway and
technologist Shruthi Chakrapami about the results of experiments
showing
that meditation can increase brain size.
|
“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical
plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional
processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a
psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “These findings are consistent
with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas
in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of
jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in
response to repeated practice.”
The researchers compared brain scans of 20 experienced meditators
with those of 15 nonmeditators. Four of the former taught meditation or
yoga, but they were not monks living in seclusion. The rest worked in
careers such as law, health care, and journalism. All the participants
were white. During scanning, the meditators meditated; the others just
relaxed and thought about whatever they wanted.
Meditators did Buddhist “insight meditation,” which focuses on
whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn’t involve
“om,” other mantras, or chanting.
“The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to
your thoughts about the sensory experience,” Lazar explains. “For
example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than
thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the
physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your
breathing.” Successful meditators get used to not thinking or
elaborating things in their mind.
Study participants meditated an average of about 40 minutes a day.
Some had been doing it for only a year, others for decades. Depth of the
meditation was measured by the slowing of breathing rates. Those most
deeply involved in the meditation showed the greatest changes in brain
structure. “This strongly suggests,” Lazar concludes, “that the
differences in brain structure were caused by the meditation, rather
than that differences in brain thickness got them into meditation in the
first place.”
Lazar took up meditation about 10 years ago and now practices insight
meditation about three times a week. At first she was not sure it would
work.
But “I have definitely experienced
beneficial changes,” she says.
“It reduces stress [and] increases
my clarity of thought and
my
tolerance for staying focused
in difficult situations.”
Controlling random thoughts
Insight meditation can be practiced anytime, anywhere. “People who do
it quickly realize that much of what goes on in their heads involves
random thoughts that often have little substance,” Lazar comments. “The
goal is not so much to ‘empty’ your head, but to not get caught up in
random thoughts that pop into consciousness.”
She uses this example: Facing an important deadline, people tend to
worry about what will happen if they miss it, or if the end product will
be good enough to suit the boss. You can drive yourself crazy with
unproductive “what if” worry. “If, instead, you focus on the present
moment, on what needs to be done and what is happening right now, then
much of the feeling of stress goes away,” Lazar says. “Feelings become
less obstructive and more motivational.”
The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8
thousandths of an inch. “These increases are proportional to the time a
person has been meditating during their lives,” Lazar notes. “This
suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive
practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and
nonmeditators.”
As small as they are, you can bet those differences are going to lead
to lots more studies to find out just what is going on and how
meditation might better be used to improve health and well-being, and
even slow aging.
More basic questions
need to be answered.
What causes the
increased
thickness?
Does meditation produce
more connections
between brain cells,
or more blood vessels?
How does increased
brain thickness
influence
daily behavior?
Does it promote increased
communication between
intellectual and emotional
areas of the brain?
To get answers, larger studies are planned at Massachusetts General
Hospital, the Harvard-affiliated facility where Lazar is a research
scientist and where these first studies were done. That work included
only 20 meditators and their brains were scanned only once.
“The results were very encouraging,” Lazar remarks. “But further
research needs to be done using a larger number of people and testing
them multiple times. We also need to examine their brains both before
and after learning to meditate. Our group is currently planning to do
this. Eventually, such research should reveal more about the function of
the thickening; that is, how it affects emotions and knowing in terms
of both awareness and judgment.”
Slowing aging?
Since this type of meditation counteracts the natural thinning of the
thinking surface of the brain, could it play a role in slowing – even
reversing – aging? That could really be mind-boggling in the most
positive sense.
Lazar is cautious in her answer. “Our data suggest that one small bit
of brain appears to have a slower rate of cortical thinning, so
meditation may help slow some aspects of cognitive aging,” she agrees.
“But it’s important to remember that
monks and yogis suffer from
the
same ailments as the rest of us.
They get old and die, too.
However,
they do claim to enjoy
an increased capacity for
attention and memory.”
