Get Busy and Meditate!

Although many people practice meditation, there remains a lot of general skepticism – “does it actually do anything?” Recently the process called Insight Meditation, or ‘mindfulness’, has become more popular, as it’s the method used by Buddhists. It doesn’t use mantra or chanting, but focuses on cultivating awareness of present-moment internal and external stimuli without any mental elaboration.

A group of scientists compared MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans from 15 non-meditators with those from 20 people who had meditated for an average of 40 minutes daily for the last 9 years. The thickness of the cerebral cortex – the outer grey-matter brain layer – was, on average, greater in the meditating group. This was especially noted in the prefrontal cortex, where individual thickness correlated with the amount of meditation experience.

This study shows that there’s structural evidence for cortical ‘plasticity’ associated with meditation practice. Similar changes have been reported before: there’s an increased volume of gray matter in Broca's area of professional musicians, reflecting, at least in part, the number of years devoted to musical training; and there’s an increased volume of gray matter in the anterior hippocampus of experienced London taxi drivers (a brain region involved in spatial navigation), with volume correlated with length of taxi-driving experience.

If you want to know more about mindfulness using meditation, you can look at a fairly comprehensive website, or take an online course. However, I make no guarantee that you’ll need an extra hat size.