Meditation Can Increase Gray Matter

Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers —that they were all extensively taught in the
people have many strategies for building biggerBuddhist Insight meditation practices. This meant
muscles and stronger bones. But what can one dothat the subjects spent about 40 minutes or so
to build a bigger brain?Now don't get surprise if ineach day in deep meditation. The result was that
school your children have a mediation period !!!the people in the group2 had a significant increase
Now scientists all over the world believe thatin the cortical tissue and grey matter.The
meditation can increase the depth of the corticalresearchers found significantly larger cerebral
tissue in the brain. Thus this type of change ormeasurements in meditators compared with
evolution of the brain can help the meditationcontrols, including larger volumes of the right
practiser to increase the emotional stability, focushippocampus and increased gray matter in the
and sensory response.right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and
the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no
The right orbito-frontal cortex, shown here, isregions where controls had significantly larger
 the area of the brain that appears to bevolumes or more gray matter than meditators.
enlarged due to meditation.Using an MRI the researchers were able to
The set of researchers from Harvard, Yale, themonitor the changes brought about through
Massachusetts Institute of Technology andregular meditation.
Massachusetts General Hospital studied 44 peopleSource:
and divided them into two groups. Out of which1.
the group1 were controlled with no meditation and2.
the group2 each one with significant commonality