Say 'om':
Meditation may aid in brain function
By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY
November 13, 2005
WASHINGTON — The ancient practice of meditation may
change the brain in a way that helps boost
attention, according to studies out Sunday at the
annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Buddhist monks have been saying for years
that meditation helps increase attention and
concentration. The new findings now offer some support
for the notion.
Sara Lazar of Harvard Medical School
studied Westerners who meditated for about 20 minutes
every day but didn't necessarily believe in the tenets
of Buddhism. Lazar and colleagues used MRI (magnetic
resonance imaging) to look at brain parts involved in
memory and attention. She found that meditators had
increased thickness in those regions.
Those areas shrink as people get older,
but this study found that older meditators were able to
ward off some of that shrinkage. That finding is
preliminary but suggests that a regular meditation
practice might help people maintain their ability to
remember and focus on details, Lazar says.
Meditation involved sitting quietly and
focusing on breathing or an image.
Another study suggests meditation boosts
performance on tests that measure attention. Bruce
O'Hara at the University of Kentucky and colleagues
wanted to see how meditation might affect the ability to
attend to a boring task during the mid-afternoon, a time
when attention often flags.
He found that 10 people taught to
meditate for 40 minutes did better on a test of
attention compared with their own performance after
reading for 40 minutes.
Too little sleep can impair performance
on such tests, so the group repeated the experiment
after subjects had lost a night's sleep. Meditation
improved their performance even then, a finding that
suggests that meditation might give the sleepy brain an
edge.
"Vigilance is much more difficult when
you are sleepy," O'Hara says.
In a study of mostly Buddhist monks,
Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin found
meditation produced a jump in brain waves associated
with vigilance. His study also found meditation
activated brain regions involved in attention.
On Saturday, the exiled leader of Tibet,
the Dalai Lama, spoke to neuroscientists, urging them to
continue their crucial work on meditation. Such studies
may help identify practices that will help people rein
in negative emotions, he says. More than 500 scientists
signed a petition against the Dalai Lama's talk: Many
said they didn't want to mix religion with science.
