Brain: Meditation: Grow the Brain, Grow Your IQ

From Denny: Looks like science is beginning to catch up with what the truly spiritual people already know! Meditation makes us more intelligent! And now science has figured out the obvious.

Who did the study?

The study was published in the journal NeuroImage by the researchers from The University of California at Los Angeles.

Regular meditation has been found to enlarge the size of the brain. For those who have been meditating for a very long period of time brain scans revealed they had significantly larger amounts of the little grey cells.

Which area of the brain was larger?

Researchers using an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanned the brain's hippocampus because it is the area of the brain that is associated with our memory and learning ability. They found the area to be much larger in those who practiced regular meditation.

What was found in those who did not practice meditation?

Turns out the areas of their brains linked to emotion were much larger. The study inferred that with a larger emotionally area it is more difficult for a person to control their emotions.

What are the benefits of meditation to our brains?

It helps tremendously to maintain emotional control. Those who meditate are better focused and can control their emotions far better than those who do not meditate. Another benefit is reduced levels of stress which help boost the immune system. Some of this has been known from previous studies.

What has not been known until now about the link between the brain structure and meditation?

They studied 44 people, only half had practiced meditation for 5 - 46 years. They tended to meditate for between 10 - 90 minutes each day. Deep concentration was said to be part of their meditation routine.

The MRI scans verified "significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators." It is these changes in the brain structure that might explain why meditators "have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions," according to Eileen Luders, lead researcher, "The differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue as to why meditators have these exceptional abilities." The brain has been proven to change its structure over time as revealed in previous studies.

Summary

Researchers found in meditators increased brain size in the area of the right hippocampus and in the right frontal cortex, enlarging the brains' measurements.

For now researchers are speculating about this area of the brain so closely linked to our emotions. Eileen Luders wonders, "These might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators' brains the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way."

Written by Denny Lyon
Copyright 21 May 2009
All Rights Reserved

Brain: Brain Scanners Know Where You've Been

"The brain's center of memory and navigation, once considered too disorganized to decode, may soon be unlocked. Using a brain scanner, researchers were able to determine the location of people standing in a virtual room from the activity in their brains.

"We could read their spatial memories, so to speak," said study co-author Eleanor Maguire, a University College, London, cognitive neuroscientist. "There must be a structure to how this is coded in the neurons. Otherwise we couldn't have predicted this."

Maguire's team focused on the hippocampus, a region of the forebrain responsible for processing spatial relationships and short-term memories. As people move, hippocampal activation helps them know where they are. In Alzheimer's patients, disorientation and memory loss go hand in hand...

Maguire's study, published Thursday in Current Biology, challenges that notion. And though it's far too soon to pull memories directly from a brain, the findings suggest future avenues of research on Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

"How these millions of hippocampal neurons work is a fundamental question in neuroscience," said Maguire. "We still don't know how the hippocampal neural code is organized to support memory and activation."

The researchers used an fMRI machine to measure hippocampal blood flow in four subjects who navigated a room in virtual reality. They focused on groups of neurons identified by Maguire in an earlier study of London taxi drivers, whose hippocampi were hyperdeveloped by years of mental navigation through the city's mazelike streets.

After analyzing activation patterns and correlating them with a record of test subjects' movements, Maguire's team found that patterns could actually be used to predict location."

By Brandon Keim

From Denny: Pretty wild stuff! While they are still a long way from fully understanding the complete process of laying down memory or even how memory deteriorates, this small study is an intriguing first step.