14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the Western world learned of the meditations performed by adepts of Eastern religions, experts have been fascinated by the influence that this religious practice has on the human brain. It would appear that, in addition to its relaxing purposes, meditation is also able to increase the size of certain brain regions, if practiced constantly. The find belongs to a group of researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), who analyzed the brains of several practitioners with a high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.
Most notably, significant increases were noted in brain areas known to control and regulate emotions, such as the hippocampus, as well as the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus, both of which are located in the orbito-frontal cortex. The experts hypothesize that meditation could act on the brain in very much the same way constant physical exercises act on the muscles, making them larger and stronger over time.
“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior. The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities,” UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging postdoctoral research fellow Eileen Luders says. She is also the lead author of a new scientific paper detailing the finds, published recently in the journal NeuroImage.
For the new study, the experts analyzed the brains of a number of meditators, as well as those belonging to people who did not practice meditation, who constituted the control group. They learned that those who did engage in this practice were more likely to be less stressed, and also to have bolstered their immune system, which allowed them to face diseases easier. They can also better control their emotions, and have the ability to focus on the tasks at hand better than non-meditators.
However, the team is still in the dark in regards to the connection that exists between meditating and the physical development of the brain. Thus far, the only explanations that exist concerning the human brain's ability to modify its structure are those involving environmental factors. The bottom line, the experts explain, is that people who meditate seem to have higher amounts of gray matter in certain regions of the brain than those who do not engage in this practice, ScienceDaily reports.