By Brigid Schulte
It’s well-documented that our cortex shrinks as we get older — it’s harder to figure things out and remember things. But in one region of the prefrontal cortex, 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of gray matter as 25-year-olds.
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain. She explains:
Why did you start looking at meditation, mindfulness and the brain?
A friend and I were training for the Boston marathon. I had some running injuries, so I saw a physical therapist who told me to stop running and just stretch. So I started practicing yoga as a form of physical therapy. I started realizing that it was very powerful, that it had some real benefits, so I just got interested in how it worked.
The yoga teacher made all sorts of claims, that yoga would increase your compassion and open your heart. And I’d think, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m here to stretch.’ But I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view.
I thought, maybe it was just the placebo response. But then I did a literature search of the science, and saw evidence that meditation had been associated with decreased stress, decreased depression, anxiety, pain and insomnia, and an increased quality of life.
How did you do the research?
The first study looked at long-term meditators vs a control group. We found long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. Which makes sense — when you’re mindful, you’re paying attention to your breathing, to sounds, to the present moment experience. We also found they had more gray matter in the frontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and executive decision making.
We then took people who’d never meditated before, and put one group through an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program.
What did you find?
We found differences in brain volume after eight weeks in five different regions in the brains of the two groups. In the group that learned meditation, we found thickening in four regions:
- The posterior cingulate, which is involved in mind wandering and self relevance.
- The left hippocampus, which assists in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation.
- The temporo parietal junction (TPJ), which is associated with perspective taking, empathy and compassion.
- An area of the brain stem called the Pons, where a lot of regulatory neurotransmitters are produced.
The amygdala — the fight-or-flight part of the brain which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in general — got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program. The change in the amygdala was also correlated to a reduction in stress levels.
How long does someone have to meditate before changes appear?
Our data shows changes in the brain after just eight weeks. In our program, subjects took a weekly class, were given a recording and told to practice 40 minutes a day at home. In the study the average was about 27 minutes a day. There isn’t good data yet about how much someone needs to practice in order to benefit, though anecdotal comments suggest even 10 minutes a day could have some subjective benefit.
What would you encourage readers to do?
Mindfulness is just like exercise. It’s a form of mental exercise, really. And just as exercise increases health, helps us handle stress better and promotes longevity, meditation purports to confer some of those same benefits. But, just like exercise, it can’t cure everything — so the idea is that it’s useful as an adjunct therapy, not a standalone.
The most important thing, if you’re going to try it, is to find a good teacher. Because it’s simple, but it’s also complex. You have to understand what’s going on in your mind. A good teacher is priceless.