Inside yoga 164 (25/4/2016)

These days meditation is generally accepted as being a practice which is good for us, because it helps us relax and it sharpens our awareness among other benefits. A study in California has now discovered that meditation reduces the age of our brain – it makes us younger!

In fact, the study revealed that regular meditation practice can take up to 7 years off the age of a brain, for example, it found that a 50-year-old was shown to have the brain of a 43-year-old.
Researcher Christian Gaser, of Jena University Hospital in Germany, said: “These findings seem to suggest that meditation is beneficial for brain preservation, with a slower rate of brain ageing throughout life.”
Dr Gaser, who collaborated with US and Australian scientists on the study, said it isn’t clear how meditation protects the brain but that it is possible that the “intense mental processes” trigger the growth of new cells and connection.
Previous research has suggested that those who practice meditation have less age-related degradation in their white matter, so the UCLA team, whose study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, sought to build on these findings.
“We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” says co-author Dr Florian Kurth, a post-doctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”
There are, of course, other factors which might influence the findings, such as a healthy lifestyle, but the research does indicate what many meditators have said for thousands of years, that this practice does helps us on every level.
To read more, see the links below for newspaper stories about this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/02/09/meditation-brain_n_6643898.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3553953/Is-meditation-key-youthful-mind-People-using-relaxation-technique-brains-7-YEARS-younger.html
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11627617
Any comments for this post, see reply panel below, or email me