New Meditation Studies Prove Brain is Elastic

note: to track the benefits of the Inner Smile,they’d have to do MRI on the whole body. But that would require a big expansion of consciousness on the part of scientists…. M

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TRAINING CHANGES BRAIN STRUCTURE IN 8 WEEKS
KurzweilAINetwork
January 24, 2011

http://nhne-pulse.org/mindfulness-meditation-changes-brain-structure-in-8-we
eks/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindfulness-meditation-training-changes-brain-stru
cture-in-8-weeks

Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make
measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self,
empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General
Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to
document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of
peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that
meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist
throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric
Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study
demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these
reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because
they are spending time relaxing.”

Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences
between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals
with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex
in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those
investigations could not document that those differences were actually
produced by meditation.

For the current study, MR images were take of the brain structure of 16
study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the 8-week
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of
Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness
<http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/index.aspx> . In addition to weekly meetings
that included practice of mindfulness meditation — which focuses on
nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind —
participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and
were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of
MR brain images were also taken of a control group of non-meditators over a
similar time interval.

Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes
each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a
mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with
pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on
areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies,
found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be
important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with
self-awareness, compassion and introspection.

Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with
decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an
important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a
self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been
identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term
meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of
these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not
resulted merely from the passage of time.

“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing
meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can
increase our well-being and quality of life.” says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first
author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in
Germany. “Other studies in different patient populations have shown that
meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and
we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that
facilitate this change.”

Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates
mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations,
says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of
mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person
experience of stress can not only be reduced with an 8-week mindfulness
training program but that this experiential change corresponds with
structural changes in the amydala, a finding that opens doors to many
possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against
stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” Jha was
not one of the study investigators.