Brainer Matters

My first thought this morning: ‘…it’s just another Manic Monday’. But if we can go to far off planets [or have I just been watching too much Star Trek?], surely we can get through Mondays with a little style. So, I dumped everything in my aggregator and won’t worry about what 247 other people have said over the weekend. Already, the beginning of something like peace is taking root in my hard little raisin of a heart.

Two stories about… the brain! [I knew you'd be excited.]

How Meditation May Change the Brain

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours daily, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

It has been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.

Read the entire article.

Meditative prayer should yield similar results, yes?

To Stave Off Alzheimer’s, Learn a Language?

Talk about the power of words—speaking at least two languages may slow dementia in the aging brain, new research shows.

Scientists already knew that bilingual young adults and children perform better on tasks dictated by the brain’s executive control system.

Located at the front of the brain, this system is “the basis for your ability to think in complex ways, control attention, and do everything we think of as uniquely human thought,” said Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Now studies are revealing that advantages of bilingualism persist into old age, even as the brain’s sharpness naturally declines, Bialystok said Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Read the article at National Geographic.

So, there you are. All we have to do to pump up the old gray matter is meditate in a foreign language. But first I have to learn another language… There’s always a catch!