Meditation Changes Brain Structure

Monday’s WaPo carried a story on how meditation changes brain structure.:

“Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

…
The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical sensors and asked to meditate for short periods. Thinking and other mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses.

Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that focus because it does not require concentrating on particular objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed state of being.”

I don’t have any more details, but it sounds very much like the practice of Centering Prayer . I expect that the results would be similar for experienced practitioners of centering prayer.

It is also interesting to note that changes in brain changes are not restricted to the young and that the changes are similar to those in athletes:

"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.”

I expect that music, martial arts, or any other mind/body discipline would produce similar results.

As an enneagram teacher and the husband of a school teacher, I reflect on the three centers of intelligence Head, Heart, and Body and how important it is that they work together. The school systems, at least in Virginia with its emphasis on Standards of Learning (SOL) are overemphasizing the head.