What Meditation May do to Your Brain

Emma
posting #4
topic: health
title of article: In Sitting Still, a Bench Press for the Brain
author: John Hanc
publication: New York Times
date of publication: 5/9/12
length: 2 pages
   
        Recently at a UCLA lab, researchers have been studying the extent to which meditation may affect neuroplasticity. For many years people in the medical community have wondered about the possible affects meditation has on the brain and on health in general. During this study researchers studied a group of 28 men and 22 women who had been meditating regularly for an average time of 20 years. The researchers took brain scans of the subjects brains and compared them with scans from nonmeditators. The researchers found that the amount of cortical gyrification increased with the number of years that the person had been meditating. Cortical gyrification is a term used to describe the number of folds of the cerebral cortex. This is interesting because previous studies of the brain have lead to the conclusion that ones brain grows until they are around 20 years old at which time it reaches its peak in size and then it will start to shrink with age. Because of the increased cortical gyrification in meditators researchers are starting to wonder if meditation can truly help neuroplasticity. Other people in the medical field are not so sure. Dr. Josephine P. Briggs does not believe that there is enough evidence to conclude that the increased number of folds in the brains of these people necessarily means they have increased cognitive ability. She does acknowledge the fact that meditation is work for the brain and that exercises for the brain have been shown as a way to maintain cognitive health.  To conclude, though many studies on how meditation affects the brain nothing is conclusive or universally accepted yet. There have been links to meditation increasing cortical gyrification though the scientific community is still unsure about how cortical gyrification may or may not affect cognitive ability. Meditation seems to have some positive affects on the brain and is generally received as a positive mental exercise.