Eight weeks to a better brain

Can eight weeks of meditation physically change your brain? A study from Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests the answer is yes.

The researchers scanned the brains of 16 people before and after they completed an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness, and compared them with scans from a control group of non-meditators over the same period. Participants averaged about 27 minutes of daily practice and reported significantly lower stress by the end.

The scans showed increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus — a region central to learning and memory — and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection. Strikingly, the participants who reported the largest drops in stress also showed decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, the brain region most involved in anxiety and the fight-or-flight response. None of these changes appeared in the control group, indicating they were not simply the passage of time.

One structure linked to self-awareness, the insula, did not change — the authors suggested that longer-term practice might be needed to move it. The study, led by Britta Hölzel with senior author Sara Lazar, was among the first to document that meditation produces structural brain changes over time rather than merely correlating with them, and was published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

The finding is notable partly because it gives a biological footing to something contemplative traditions have claimed for centuries: that training attention changes the mind in lasting ways. Meditation has long been one of the practices Ayurveda turns to for a strained mind — a modern reminder that the effects may reach all the way into the brain's architecture. (Read more about how stress lives in the body.)

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Based on the Massachusetts General Hospital research report, published via the Harvard Gazette.