Regular meditation effectively supports mental, emotional and physical health in numerous tangible ways. Several previous studies have supported the hypothesis that meditation training improves the emotional regulation of practitioners. Meditation training programs can have measurable effects on how the brain works by increasing gray matter and delaying brain aging.

In 2016, Dra. Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them on brain scanner.
She came to meditation through yoga and soon began to notice significant changes when handling difficult situations, in fact she felt and could see more clearly the point of view of others.

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How was this possible?

At first he thought it might be a placebo effect "My yoga teacher told me that I would feel that way and that's why I experience this"
As a neurologist she began to wonder why something as silly as a yoga posture or sitting and watching your breathing could produce such significant changes?
What we know is that by repeating a behavior, again and again, this can produce changes in the brain, is what is defined as Neuroplasticity, which means that your brain is plastic and that experiences can change as neurons communicate each.

First study

Then she did a study recruiting normal people from all over the world, who were not monks or teachers and who practiced meditation 30 minutes a day approximately, they scanned them and compared them with a group of demographically related people who did not meditate and discovered that there were areas with more gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex in the case of the meditators compared with the control group. Which makes sense because when you are conscious, you pay attention to your breathing, to the sounds, to the experience of the present moment and close the cognition, it is logical to think that your senses will improve.
One of the regions to be highlighted is in the front of the brain, this is the area that handles functional memory and executes decision making. The most interesting thing was when they made a graph of the data according to their ages.

It is well documented that as we age, a large part of our cerebral cortex is reduced, and this is part of the reason why, as we get older, it is harder to figure things out and remember them.
In this particular region, 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of cortex as those of 25, suggesting that the practice of meditation may actually delay or prevent the natural deterioration associated with age.
The critics, who were many, said that meditators are rare, that maybe they were like that before they began to meditate. There were many vegetarians, so, maybe it had something to do with their diet. Certainly, the first study did not cover that, so they decided to do a second study.

Second study

In this study they took people who had never meditated before and put them in an eight-week meditation program, where they meditated an average of 30 minutes every day. After eight weeks they rescanned them and found that several areas of the brain became larger and affected the area important for learning, memory and emotional regulation. It was interesting to see how people with depression and disorders had less gray matter in this region.

Another region they identified was the area that affects perspective, empathy and compassion. Once again people reported changes in these functions.
Then they looked at the amygdala, this is the emotional part of the brain. Here we find a significant decrease in gray matter. This change was related to the change of stress. The less stress these people suffered, the smaller their amygdala became, the opposite parallel.

Conclusions

"Meditation can literally change your brain"

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These studies show that you do not have to change the environment, but rather, you have to change the reaction of people to the environment. They show that people not only felt better for a placebo response, but that there was a great neurological reason to feel less stressed and better trained. Furthermore, they demonstrate substantially that the gray matter increases preventing brain aging.

"Brain plasticity in adults can improve social intelligence"

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"Our results provide impressive evidence that brain plasticity in adults, achieved through brief and daily training, can improve social intelligence," said Tania Singer, the study's co-founder and principal researchers at the ReSource Project. Given that empathy, compassion and the ability to see things from other perspectives are crucial for successful social interactions, conflict resolution or cooperation "we believe that these findings are very important for the education system and that they also have clinical applications"

"Meditation is a natural alternative to antidepressant drugs"

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Según el investigador Madhav Goyal, de la Universidad Johns Hopkins, los efectos de meditar sobre ansiedad y depresión son pequeños o moderados, pero tanto “como los que se pueden esperar de los antidepresivos, pero sin las toxicidades asociadas”. Goyal sugiere que los médicos deberían saber más sobre sus efectos para la salud mental.
According to researcher Madhav Goyal, of Universidad Johns Hopkins, the effects of meditating on anxiety and depression are small or moderate, but as much as "what can be expected from antidepressants, but without the associated toxicities." Goyal suggests that doctors should know more about their effects on mental health.

Related Links

• Scientists discover how meditation changes the brain
• How Meditation and yoga can change the shape of our Brain. Dra. Sara Lazar. TED

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