Meditation Supports Healthy Minds & Emotions!

A quiet mind cureth all. -- Robert Burton

Maintaining your brain is crucial. As recent research findings clearly prove.

Practitioners of meditation have long used this brain work to achieve different levels of cognition and emotion. Recently, scientists at the University of Wisconsinwere able to detect positive mental changes associated with meditation -- through electrical imaging.

The Dalai Lama – the most well-known meditation practitioner – greatly supported the study by offering eight of his Buddhist monks, with 10,000 to 50,000 hours of lifetime meditation (15-40 years of practice), to undergo tests and brain scanning.

These eight “professional” meditators’ results were compared to an untrained control group of ten volunteers. Even before either group began meditation, scientists noticed that the monks’ brain waves had considerable more activity than the control group – indicating that meditation may have lasting effects on the brain.

As both groups began to meditate on unconditional compassion, the intensity of the monks’ gamma wave activity was the highest that the researchers had ever seen.

Fast Factoid: Gamma waves are high-frequency electrical brain impulses, which knit together disparate brain circuits that are required for high-level brain functions, such as learning and conscious perception.

The monks with the most practice meditating also had an exceptional amount of activity within the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions!

Finally, the belief that connections among brain nerve cells are fixed early in life and do not change in adulthood, as it turns out, is passé! Today, scientists believe that the brain is actually quite plastic, enabling development to continue over a lifetime.

So, if you’ve been considering a meditation class (or any class that requires focused attention and learning), you will be doing a lot more than the activity itself. You’ll be developing valuable new brain circuits!

Article Source: Our Health Coop and Full Scientific Study