Skip to main content

neuroscience and meditation: take as good care of your brain as you do your body.


Its interesting that so many people I know are given to regular, if not daily, exercise routines, often putting in a couple of hours at the gym without a blink. If asked why, they invariably mention the numerous benefits of maintaining strength, flexibility and cardio performance for “it's the only body I've got.” Some explain that they love exercise in general, however many do it principally for the long term benefits, understanding the results are worth the time and effort it requires.

Yet so many admit they fail to practice meditation on a daily basis, even in the briefest of 5 - 10 minute intervals, explaining that “I have too much going on,” or “I can't sit still.” Some try to claim that their morning coffee and news reading, or their jogging is “meditative,” which would be like claiming “my television watching is how I exercise.” This is hardly a wise choice: increasing evidence via research shows that spending a life without training the mind is as detrimental to brain function as a life without exercise is to the body.

While activities that quiet the mind, such as hiking, swimming, painting, etc, are certainly soothing, they do not provide the same benefits as meditation, and the distinction is essential, as meditations based on focused attention (otherwise known as sustained concentration, wherein one steadily monitors the breath and body sensations without additional movement or thought) and open monitoring  (vipasanna meditation, which develops a non-reactive awareness that can attend to experience without identifying with the content) have clinically documented, significant long term neural benefits that soothing activities do not. Please note the citations below for a list of some of the hundreds of peer reviewed, clinical papers that document the importance role meditation plays in upgrading brain structure and performance.

Recent insights into the importance of meditation derive from the advent of new scanning technologies, notably fMRI. What they document is that our previous understanding of the brain, which was once considered to be somewhat set structure with hard-wired functions, was substantially incorrect. We know understand the brain to be continually flexible, with significant neuroplastic capabilities. It is, in other words, a uniquely malleable and self-editing organ, changing structure and function depending on the nature of our experience, how we focus attention, interpret the world and act. For example, a 1995 Harvard study documented that people who simply imagined playing the piano, without actually touching one, still rewired the somatosensory lobe in the same way that an actual piano players rewired their brains.

Lets review some of the significant developments over the last 15 years:

Long-term meditators increase the neural capacity of the hippocampus, cingulate, temporal gyrus, and insula, which are associated with the performance of memory, emotion-regulation, empathy, impulse control. In conjunction with exercise, meditation leads to reduction in vulnerability to alzheimer's disease.

Meditators, in as short a period of a few months, show continual and even activation in the cingulate, which focuses attention for sustained periods and, in conjunction with mirror neurons, allows for empathetic connection with others. Meditators invariably demonstrate superior ability to perform tasks that require uninterrupted attention.

There is also the benefit of increased levels of GABA, which lowers anxiety and improves one's disposition. In as little as two months, the left prefrontal region of the brain, associated with optimism, shows increased activity, even in the case of those who've previously suffered significant episodes of depression.

And of course there are the many health advantages to mediation which are well documented, such as the reduction of cortisol and stress, which in turn reduces high blood pressure, heart and digestive ailments, along with increasing the production of white blood cells. In short, meditation improves your brain function as significantly as exercise improves your health.

Given all the above, why would someone exercise without meditating? It's essentially choosing to take care of one's body without bothering to take care of one's brain. We do depend on both.

If you're looking to develop a short daily meditation routine, its easiest to avail oneself of all the free, online guided meditations available. There are numerous meditations found on tarabrach.com, dharmaseed.org, audiodharma.org, and of course dharmapunxnyc.podbean.com.

——————————————————————————————————————

peer reviewed, clinical papers on the importance of meditation to brain function:

Davidson RJ, Kabat-Zinn J, Schumacher J, Rosenkranz M, Muller D, Santorelli SF, Urbanowski F, Harrington A, Bonus K, Sheridan JF. Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosom Med. 2003;65(4):564-70.

Hölzel BK, Ott U, Gard T, Hempel H, Weygandt M, Morgen K, Vaitl D. Investigation of mindfulness meditation practitioners with voxel-based morphometry. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2008;3(1):55-61.

Lazar SW, Kerr CE, Wasserman RH, Gray JR, et al Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. Neuroreport. 2005;16(17):1893-7.

Vestergaard-Poulsen P, van Beek M, Skewes J, et al. Long-term meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in the brain stem. Neuroreport. 2009;20(2):170-4.

Brefczynski-Lewis JA, Lutz A, et al. Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(27):11483-8.

Baron Short E, Kose S, Mu Q, Borckardt J, Newberg A, George MS, Kozel FA. Regional brain activation during meditation shows time and practice effects: An exploratory FMRI study. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2007 Oct 27[Epub].

Slagter HA, Lutz A, Greischar LL, et al Mental training affects distribution of limited brain resources. PLoS Biol. 2007;5(6):e138.

Moore A, Malinowski P. Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility.
Conscious Cogn. 2009;18(1):176-86.

Grossman, P.; Niemann, L.; Schmidt, S.; Walach, H. (2004). "Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefitsA meta-analysis"

Ospina MB, Bond K, Karkhaneh M, et al. (December 2008). "Clinical trials of meditation practices in health care: characteristics and quality". J Altern Complement Med 14 (10): 1199–213.

Luders E, Toga AW, Lepore N, Gaser C. The underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation: Larger hippocampal and frontal volumes of gray matter. NeuroImage. 2009;45:672–78.

Streeter CC, Jensen JE, Perlmutter RM, Cabral HJ, Tian H, Terhune DB, Ciraulo DA, Renshaw PF. Yoga asana sessions increase brain GABA levels: A pilot study. J Altern Complement Med. 2007;13(4):419-26.

Pagnoni G, Cekic M. Age effects on gray matter volume and attentional performance in Zen meditation. Neurobiol Aging. 2007;28(10):1623-7.

Comments

  1. Meditation used to be considered to be the realm of spiritualists, and a little "alternative" for the general population. There has been considerable research conducted to investigate the benefits of meditation, and the result is proof that meditation does impact the body and mind in several positive ways to help in the treatment of mental and physical conditions. Make daily meditation part of your life and enjoy the meditation benefits for yourself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. In this hyperconnected world, it is very easy to get distracted. Achieving isolation from all that background noise is very complicated. However, meditation can help you. There are studies that show that this practice improves attention by teaching us to concentrate and be aware of our thoughts. Meditation has a positive effect on the gray matter of our brain, which is the region dedicated to the control of emotions and responses. In this way, if you meditate often you will achieve greater concentration, better learning and more acute memory.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

fear

There are times in life when intrusive, fear based thoughts latch hold of us, filling the mind with swarming, buzzing thoughts, distracting us during interactions with others, muting the sensory richness of each moment—the sounds, body sens ations, aromas, feelings and on. Such dire visitors—generally based on past resentments or speculative fears—can easily bait and hook us, threatening us with annihilation, repeating constantly; given how constant the messages can be, releasing such thoughts can feel like ignoring ‘the world is going to end’ new flashes on CNN or city sirens announcing impending hurricanes. The mind can really play tricks that make it all to easy to abandon the present, which is, of course, the only place of true safety and utility. When we find the mind latching onto these narratives, images or moods, and we can’t reassure, reason with or let go, sometimes the only solution is to give up the battle and actually write down what our fears are trying to tell us. If

5 ways to resist obsessive thoughts (Vitakkasanthana)

The mind can be thought of as a committee Our thoughts are present by many "voices," some skillful and unskillful W there are some skillful voices in there, focusing on useful ideas, there are also the many voices in the "committee" that cause us suffering by advancing and encouraging useless, stress inducing ideas, plans, worries. Some examples of unskillful, stress producing obsessions —are dedictated to figuring out the worst possible outcomes (fear) of any situation —fixate on unknowable future events, i.e. what will we experience later in life? —try to figure out what other people are thinking about us —compare ourselves with others, especially in material concerns in general, the buddha broke these down the thoughts of craving, aversion and delusion. How unskillful internal voices persuade us some of these committee members try to get their way by —most work by repeating the same thought over and over —some split into thousands of variations that seem differe

Integrating the Head with the Heart

Integrating The Head With The Heart Summary of Insights Winter 2016 - Josh Korda ~ I’m an empowered Buddhist dharma teacher, which means I spend a lot of time addressing groups of students, in the course of annual retreats and two or three weekly classes around Manhattan and Brooklyn; however, the focal point of my life’s work involves providing one-on-one spiritual and psychological mentoring to individuals. What’s of central importance to my interpersonal work is emotion integration, by which I mean the practice of bringing one’s underlying, spontaneous, instinctive feeling states into ongoing conscious attention and decision making. Now, you may well wonder, why would anyone need help perceiving or assimilating emotions? Aren’t they readily apparent? However, I’ve found, over the course of working in depth with hundreds of individuals, that many of us live at estranged distances from our authentic feelings, depending on strategies of denial, numbing, and