I first became interested in meditation and brain whilst attending the
'Neuroscience' conference in San Fransisco as few years ago in which the
Dalai Lama was the key note speaker and offered us, with a big grin, the
use of several of his monks for research purposes!
One of the things I note about the field now, is that there seems to be
very few studies in which direct comparisons can be made between schools
of meditation. So I got one of my students to try and piece together
different snippets of information from lots of different science papers
which he did very well (he was a good Neuroscience student). The
conclusions of this exercise seem to be that different types of
meditation produce different patterns of brain area activations and
deactivations. But we don't know what this really means because we don't
really know what these areas really do in the big scheme of things.
Other studies showed that long term meditators (and that means people
who've been doing it regularly and frequently of many, many years) seem
to retain the amount of grey matter they have in their brains and may
even increase it. Grey matter loss seems to be associated with dementia
etc, so inference it cold be beneficial but we don't know that for sure.
Tumours are an increase in tissue in a certain area after all (albeit
from weird cells!) and that most definitely is not beneficial.
When I get time I'll have a look at this research critically, because
you have to remember that neurones in the brain do not regenerate (as
far as we know) so this is saying something pretty spectacular!
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