Meditation May Protect Your Brain

By Michael Haederle, Miller-McCune.com. Posted November 22, 2008.

This is the second set of findings to have come from the fMRI experiments, Cekic said. Although people lose neurons -- gray matter — and have more trouble concentrating as they age, the study published last year by the Emory team found this wasn't true of the Zen practitioners.

"What we saw in the meditators was pretty much a straight line," Cekic said. "There was no decrease with age in their gray-matter volume." There was also no decline in attention -- in fact, the effect of meditation on gray matter was most pronounced in the putamen, a brain structure linked to attention. "We can't say causally that meditation prevents cell death, but we did see in our sample that the meditators did not see a gray matter loss with age," Cekic said.

Meanwhile, Harvard University researcher Sara Lazar made headlines in 2005 when she reported that Western practitioners of insight meditation -- a non-judgmental awareness of present-moment experience that resembles zazen -- had significantly thicker tissue in their prefrontal cortex and insula than non-meditators.

Lazar, who practices insight meditation and yoga, performed fMRI scans on 20 experienced meditators and 15 controls with no meditation experience. Lazar said that because earlier research had mostly been conducted on monks, she wanted to see whether the once-a-day meditation sessions typical of most American meditators might affect brain structures.

Unlike earlier research, which had focused on brain waves or measured neural blood flow, Lazar's experiment yielded the first concrete evidence linking meditation practice to changed brain structure. "The nice thing about (studying) the structure is it's something solid," she said. "It's not performance on a task. It's your brain."

Lazar says it's too soon to tell whether meditation causes new gray matter to form or whether it protects against the normal decline of brain volume. The greatest contrasts were seen between the cortical tissue of meditators and control subjects who were in their 40s and 50s, she says, while the insula, which integrates sensory processing, was thicker in meditators of all ages.

Future research will require longitudinal studies -- following subjects through time -- to see whether or not meditation is causing the neural changes. "Maybe meditators are weird," Lazar said, suggesting that perhaps people with unusual brains are especially drawn to meditation.

Where does all this lead?

Andrew Newberg, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has written such popular books as Why We Believe What We Believe and who has conducted brain scans of meditating Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns engaged in contemplative prayer, believes the science shows meditation works.

"The overwhelming evidence is that meditation has benefits," he said. "If it makes your mind clearer and helps you focus your attention better, it should help people."

For more than a decade, Newberg has plumbed spiritual mysteries, using fMRI and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to measure blood flow in the brains of not only meditators but people in the throes of other religious experiences, including speaking in tongues, as well.

"The fascinating thing to me is that when people have these mystical experiences, they not only describe it as real, but they describe it as more real than our everyday experience," he said. It raises the question of just what is real.

"I recognize that studying some of the things I study may get me to an answer," he added. "A lot of this has been my own spiritual journey, which has become a lot more meditative and contemplative."

Miller-McCune magazine and Miller-McCune.com draw on academic research and other definitive sources to provide reasoned policy options and solutions for today's pressing issues.

See more stories tagged with: health, brain, wellness, meditation

Michael Haederle lives in New Mexico. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and many other publications.

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