This is from New Scientist
magazine. It doesn't say what kind of meditation people were
doing, but the results reported (in studies by neutral
scientists) are pretty impressive.
Meditation builds up the
brain
15 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Alison Motluk
Bruce O'Hara, University of
Kentucky
Massachusetts General
Hospital
Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it
makes you perform better - and alters the structure of your brain,
researchers have found.
People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and
some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have
reported that the brain works differently during meditation -
brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise.
But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits
of sleep has remained largely unexplored.
So Bruce O'Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in
Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established
"psychomotor vigilance task", which has long been used to
quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity. The test involves
staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image
pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond,
but sleep-deprived people take much longer, and sometimes miss the
stimulus altogether.
Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either
sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects
trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve
performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what
astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only
intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite
none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.
"Every single subject showed improvement," says O'Hara.
The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep.
But, he admits: "Why it improves performance, we do not know."
The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several
hours each day in practice.
Brain builder
What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also
been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to
compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and
15 non-meditators.
They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of
the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such
as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.
"You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets
bigger," she says. The finding is in line with studies showing
that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have
thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence,
says Lazar, that yogis "aren't just sitting there doing
nothing".
The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons,
she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting
structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and
connections.
The new studies were presented at the Society for Neuroscience
annual meeting, in Washington DC, US.
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