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Meditation Increases Your Brain Size
August 16th, 2010 by admin
In a small study of brain scans involving twenty people who had extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that people who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. The brain imaging of regular folks like you and I who meditate regularly – rather than monks who might do so as a living — revealed increased thickness in the cortical regions of the brain related to auditory, visual, sensory and internal perception such as awareness of one’s heart rate or breathing. The researchers found an increased thickness of the brain’s gray matter from around 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch with the amount of thickening being proportional to the amount of time a person had spent practicing meditation.
This is the first scientific evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of their brains. The brain scans revealed conclusively that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input even if the individuals were not long term meditators. So this can happen for ordinary people like you and I who simply start to meditate a few times a week.