Meditation Builds up the Brain

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established psychomotor vigilance task, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity.

Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions.

What astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

Every single subject showed improvement, says O’Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: Why it improves performance, we do not know. The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.

Brain builder
What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger, she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

NewScientist.com news service, By Alison Motluk

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Why Time Can Move in Slow Motion

Why does time seem to move in slow motion when we are in danger?  Scientists once assumed such time warps were caused by a release of adrenaline. But an entirely new explanation hais now being offered.  

To determine why a sense of danger makes people experience time in slow motion, scientists at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine tried scaring volunteers by dropping them from great heights. The scientists had volunteers dive backward with no ropes attached, into a special net that broke their fall. They reached 70 mph during the roughly three-second, 150-foot drop.

It’s the scariest thing I have ever done, said neuroscientist David Eagleman. The researcher felt it might be the perfect way to make people feel a danger-related time warp. He was right. The volunteers estimated their own fall lasted about a third longer than the dive actually took.

To determine if people in danger could actually see and perceive more like a video camera in slow motion, Eagleman developed  a perceptual chronometer they strapped onto volunteers’ wrists. This watch-like device flickered numbers on its screen. The scientists could adjust the speed at which numbers appeared until they were too fast to see.

If the brain sped up when in danger, the researchers theorized numbers on the perceptual chronometers would appear slow enough to read while volunteers fell. Instead, the scientists found that volunteers could not read the numbers at faster-than-normal speeds.

They concluded that such time warping seems to be a trick played by one’s memory. When a person is frightened, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that supplement  those normally laid down by the brain.

In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories, Eagleman explained. And, he theorizes, the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.

He feels this illusion is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you’re a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences;. But when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever, while adults think it zoomed by.

What do YOU think about his theory?

Proof We All Read Minds

Are we all natural mind readers? The evidence is YES. It all has to do with what are now being called mirror neurons. And you DO have them in YOUR brain.

Back in 1996 three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain that helps us plan our movements.

They found that the cluster of cells was active not only when the monkey performed an action, but also when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells  responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched as another monkey or human grab a peanut.

Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans, and revealed yet another surprise: In addition to mirroring actions, the cells also mirrored sensations and emotions. Because of mirror neurons we are practically in another person’s mind, says Marco Iacoboni, neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. The conclusion? We are all natural mind readers.

Since their discovery,  mirror neurons have been implicated in a broad range of behavioral phenomena. Apparently when we interact with someone, we do more than just observe the other person’s behavior. Some scientists believes we actually create brain-based internal representations of the other person’s actions, sensations and emotions within ourselves, as if WE are the one that is doing the moving, sensing and feeling.

These insights are typical of  the author’s remarkable personal empowerment ecourse. Want to learn to read minds? Come find out for yourself why thousands of intelligent people around the world use her proven techniques to experience higher states of consciousness and achievement. Click here.

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