Aspergers. Mental Health. Behaviour Management. Autism. Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in eight weeks. Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter.
"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.
" Psychology. Thinking. Thinking & Learning. Thinking Styles. Cognitive Biases. Learn something every day. Brain Games & Brain Training. Habits of Mind. Mind Tools. Habits of Mind. Mind and Brain. Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in eight weeks. Cognitive Atlas. Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy -- Science of the Spirit. Faith can open your mind but it can also cause your brain to shrink at a different rate, research suggests. Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in the US claim to have discovered a correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults.
The study, published in the open-access science journal, Public Library of Science ONE, asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious group, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Changes in the volume of their hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, were tracked using MRI scans, over two to eight years. Protestants who did not identify themselves as born-again were found to have less atrophy in the hippocampus region than did born-again Protestants, Catholics or those with no religious affiliation.
Although the brain tends to shrink with age, atrophy in the hippocampus has been linked with depression and Alzheimer's disease. Imaginary Foundation. To read. Where is The Mind?: Science gets puzzled and almost admits a non-local mentalscape. This will be the last "home-produced" blog entry for a while [save the short "Everyday Spirituality" which will follow it as a sign-off] . West Virginia beckons tomorrow morning and off I will go to whatever that entails. As I said in one of the commentary responses the other day, I hope that reading two journal runs "cover-to-cover" will bring up a few thoughts worth sharing. This day's entry was inspired by two articles bumped into coincidentally which had scientists puzzling about a holographic universe and a non-local mind. Those scientists would cringe to see how I've taken their sign-posts-on-the-path, but that is their hang-up, not mine.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first of these articles [both from the New Scientist] was "Where in the World is the Mind?
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