How to Get a Buff Brain

If you want to look buff – muscular but trim, with good muscle tone – you can, with a lot of hard work. Most of this involves time at the gym, possibly with the assistance of a personal trainer. But a sound body deserves a sound mind, and there are plenty of offers from ‘experts’ of programs (many online) that claim to tone up your brain power. Maybe they should begin with enlarging the organ, as the muscle-builders do. It looks as if there is a way to increase the size of the brain, or at least part of it. A study described in the journal NeuroImage has examined such possible effects of long-term meditation.

UCLA scientists used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the size of certain brain structures. They examined 22 people who had practiced various forms of meditation for an average of 24 years and 22 non-meditating control subjects. There were significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cerebral cortex, the thalamus, and the inferior temporal gyrus; these are all regions known to be involved in regulating emotions. No brain regions were found where the non-meditators had larger volumes than the meditators.

The next step, say the researchers, is to try to see what particular microscopic correlations exist for meditation e.g. the number of neurons, the size of neurons, or the particular ‘wiring’ of the nerve cells. Of course, this might involve a brain biopsy – not the sort of exam where it’s easy to find volunteers. It would be interesting to see if other attempts at ‘brain exercises’ produce similar changes in brain size. I guess that the long-term practice is probably critical, though.