Photo by Nickolai Kashirin
March 11, 2015—This week, we’re focusing on meditation and recent studies that suggest it may be good for your health in all sorts of ways.
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There’s more good news for meditators. A publication out of UCLA suggests that meditation may slow down the aging process. Researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine and the Centre for Research on Ageing Health and Wellbeing in Australia compared the grey matter in the brains of meditators versus non-meditators, and found the brains of those who sit on the cushion deteriorated less.
The meditators practiced all kinds of meditation—Zen, Vipassana, and mindfulness meditation, among others. Some practiced meditation every day for an hour or more, while others only meditated for 10 minutes a day. The research scanned their brains with a magnetic resonance imaging device and then compared the 50 meditators with 50 people who served as a control group.
Grey matter is made up of neurons in the brain. As we age, its volume typically decreases. But the grey matter of meditators, when compared across ages that ranged from 24 to 77 years, showed more resilience.
The study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that meditation may protect against the typical degeneration that occurs in the brain. However, the authors warn that the results could be biased. The meditators could all possess common traits that protects against meditation. Hopefully, that’s not the case. It would be nice to know that a small part of aging is in our control — if only we choose to meditate.
-Judy Silber
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The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW and the Templeton Religion Trust. We’d love to hear your suggestions on what we should be covering. Leave us a comment or email us at [email protected].
