October 2011 - Using Meditation To Keep Your Brain/Memory Youthful

Back to Newsletter

Have you noticed that as you get older, your memory may not be as good as it use to be? Naturally there are many reasons from stress, to medication, or even simple limiting beliefs about not being smart enough. Meditation, a similar state to hypnosis is yielding great results for improving memory. It turns out you can mediate your way to a younger brain. I hope you enjoy this important article by Dr. Al Sears, MD.

Researchers at UCLA decided to find out what happens to your brain when you meditate and found some very interesting things...

Meditate your way to a younger brain

This study took advantage of an innovative brain-imaging technique over at the UCLA Laboratory for Neural-Imaging.
The study recruited two groups of people, long-term meditators and a control group of people who don’t meditate. The resulting images were pretty surprising.

The people who meditated had stronger connections between brain regions.

These large-scale networks in the brain included the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, the anterior corpus callosum, limbic structures and the brain stem!

What’s more, their brains hadn’t shrunk as much as is typically associated with age.

"Our results suggest that long-term meditators have white-matter fibers that are either more numerous, more dense or more insulated throughout the brain. We also found that the normal age-related decline of white-matter tissue is considerably reduced in active meditation practitioners...” said Eileen Luders, the study’s lead author.

What better reason to meditate? It seems to help your brain grow and protect it from shrinking (usually a leading cause of memory loss)!

Of course, while this research gives us a small glimpse into the true benefits of meditation, more research needs to be done.

The researchers weren’t clear as to whether or not a specific brain “type” had more of a predisposition to be drawn to meditation in the first place (nature versus nurture)… accounting for the differences in brain size and connections.

Despite this, the researchers concluded that “Meditation appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain."

More Evidence

Fortunately, other studies seem to point in the same direction.

For example, one Harvard University study done a few years back found that people who meditated for six hours a week over nine years on average had a thicker right anterior insula and prefrontal cortex than those who didn’t. [2]

In publishing the study, researchers suggested that meditation has the potential to reverse the thinning of these structures that normally happens over time.

This is significant. The prefrontal cortex is the area of your brain used for higher thought processes and planning. That’s why meditation could be a helpful tool to help an old brain function like its younger counterparts.

One thing to note, the type of meditation used in most research is called “Mindulness” or “Insight” Meditation.

To learn more, feel free to click below for this free report:
 Repair Your Aging Brain in Just 15 Minutes a Day

Back to Newsletter