Meditation

Introduction
Meditation is an art form, involving the deep absorption in a moment. For many centuries the gnostic and agnostic man alike have found shelter from chaos in the embrace of a constant hum. In it, man finds not only comfort but heightened perception and a level of control over the mind and body. It is no wonder this practice has not only gained popularity, but is also gaining scientific interest. Though this entry might be unorthodox, it is a possible route to brain health. There are various meditative practices that have existed in the past, this article will primarily focus on those which have been tested in a scientific setting.

Benefits

"The health benefits of meditation—lowering blood pressure, improving immune function, decreasing stress—are well recognized, but can meditative practice actually change the brain? Growing evidence from neuroscience suggests that it can, providing increasing support for the idea that meditation alters both the function and structure of the brain.

Cortical thickening was correlated with experience: the longer a subject had been practicing meditation, the thicker the cortex was. Differences in the prefrontal cortex, an area that typically gets thinner as we age, were most pronounced in older subjects, leading Lazar to conjecture that meditation may circumvent this age-related effect. The study scanned subjects only once, but Lazar is in the process of following up with additional scans that will track brain changes at various times following the start of meditation practice."
(Dana Foundation: Meditation May Change the Brain)

"The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators.

Because these areas of the brain are closely linked to emotion, Luders said, 'these might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators' the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.'"
(Science Daily: Meditation May Increase Gray Matter)

"Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroen-
cephalographic [EEG] high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25– 42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4 –13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the postmeditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.


Little is known about the process of meditation and its impact on brain (1, 2). Previous studies show the general role of neural synchrony, in particular in the gamma-band frequencies (25–70Hz), in mental processes such as attention, working-memory, learning, or conscious perception (3–7). Such synchronizations of oscillatory neural discharges are thought to play a crucial role in the constitution of transient networks that integrate distributed neural processes into highly ordered cognitive and affective functions (8, 9) and could induce synaptic changes (10, 11). Neural synchrony thus appears as a promising mechanism for the study of brain processes underlining mental training."
Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice

Research
Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice

Dana Foundation: Meditation May Change the Brain

Science Daily: Meditation May Increase Gray Matter