Meditate to change your brain
January 25th 2011 22:39
CLAIRE O'CONNELL
If you do one thing this week. . . meditate to change your brain
Can meditation change your brain? A new study by Massachusetts General Hospital of people who meditated mindfully for about 30 minutes each day found that meditation correlates with observable changes in particular structures in the brain.
The study, due to appear later this week in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, asked 16 participants to meditate mindfully for a period each day over the course of eight weeks.
Magnetic resonance images of their brains taken before and after the eight-week stints showed meditation was linked with increases in grey-matter density in brain areas associated with learning and memory, and decreased density in areas linked with stress. A control group did not show the changes.
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practising meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our wellbeing and quality of life,” says study co-author Britta Hölzel.
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Comment by Jeff Watt
Now, as someone who uses a species of guided meditation (developed by myself) as one of a range of lighter (as well as some deeper - including true hypnosis) mental therapeutic techniques in the work I do, I find it most encouraging to learn that there is at least a modicum of solid evidence now that such techniques actually produce neurologically identifiable benefits.
As you once so rightly said - in one of your responses to a post of mine on yet another of your previous threads (the one which included video of Baroness Greenfield's lecture) -
'THE MIND IS VERY FAR REMOVED FROM THE BRAIN' (if I paraphrase you a little here; forgive me!). True, of course; although indubitably changes, processes and indeed even improvements in a person's mind and/or mental well being can be, and are, measurable in the brain. All that has for so long eluded us in doing this, of course, is the limitation of our technology. That is now changing. Glad to see that it is so!
The soul, too, which in my view is also intrinsically a part of the 'composite' which we recognise as a sentient human being can also produce such detectable changes in behaviour of both mind and brain. The three are a troika - as I argue in my forthcoming work (which I have discussed in brief on various previous threads of yours).
What do you (and others) think?
Jeff Watt, Mental and Spiritual Healer