Korpo
24th November 2008, 10:15 AM
Read it here: Meditation May Protect Your Brain (http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/108204/meditation_may_protect_your_brain/?page=entire)
Some excerpts from the article:
meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus
Now isn't that a wonderfully scientific sounding paraphrase of "taming the monkey mind". ;)
The same researchers reported last year that longtime meditators don't lose gray matter in their brains with age the way most people do, suggesting that meditation may have a neuro-protective effect. A rash of other studies in recent years meanwhile have found, for example, that practitioners of insight meditation have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for attention and control) and that experienced Tibetan monks practicing compassion meditation generate unusually strong and coherent gamma waves in their brains.
Milos Cekic, a member of the Emory research team and himself a longtime meditator. He suspects the simple practice of focusing attention on the breath could help patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions characterized by excessive rumination.
There are some links to articles and related topics within the text. :) The article goes on to describe the test settings of the meditation studies done with brain scans and its results.
Amongst the results was this:
"We can't say causally that meditation prevents cell death, but we did see in our sample that the meditators did not see a gray matter loss with age," Cekic said.
Oliver
Some excerpts from the article:
meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus
Now isn't that a wonderfully scientific sounding paraphrase of "taming the monkey mind". ;)
The same researchers reported last year that longtime meditators don't lose gray matter in their brains with age the way most people do, suggesting that meditation may have a neuro-protective effect. A rash of other studies in recent years meanwhile have found, for example, that practitioners of insight meditation have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for attention and control) and that experienced Tibetan monks practicing compassion meditation generate unusually strong and coherent gamma waves in their brains.
Milos Cekic, a member of the Emory research team and himself a longtime meditator. He suspects the simple practice of focusing attention on the breath could help patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions characterized by excessive rumination.
There are some links to articles and related topics within the text. :) The article goes on to describe the test settings of the meditation studies done with brain scans and its results.
Amongst the results was this:
"We can't say causally that meditation prevents cell death, but we did see in our sample that the meditators did not see a gray matter loss with age," Cekic said.
Oliver