Meditation Looking for a way to improve your memory, learning ability or to reduce stress? Half an hour each day of not doing much at all – but doing it mindfully – might be all you need.
New research from Massachusetts General Hospital, US, and Giessen University in Germany shows that meditation actually changes the brain's structure, boosting the parts that focus on memory and learning.
The researchers wanted to test the theory that meditation could actually alter the mind, something that practitioners have claimed for years but been unable to prove. So to do that they took magnetic resonance images of people’s brains, assessing any physical changes.
While previous studies had found structural differences between meditators and other non-meditating individuals, they could not prove that the meditation had caused this effect – it could have been that people who chose to meditate had different brain structures to begin with. So for this study 16 participants had MRI scans two weeks before and then after an eight-week training programme. Titled Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the programme involved weekly meetings where meditation was learned and then practised each day at home. They were also given audio recordings to help them at home. MRI scans were also taken of non-meditating individuals as a control group.
The meditating study participants did about 27 minutes each day of the exercises, and their MRI scans showed increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, the part of the brain used for learning and memory, as well as in the parts of the brain associated with self-awareness. The participants themselves reported feeling less stressed – and the MRI scans backed this up, with decreased grey-matter density in the parts of the brain associated with anxiety.
First published January 25, 2011