Meditation halts age-related degeneration throughout entire brain

I think just turning off the TV and thinking about life would be considered meditation. Think! Your brain is a muscle and you have to use it to keep it strong. Repetition isn't thinking. You have to challenge yourself and ponder on the nature of things.

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Meditation halts age-related degeneration throughout entire brain

http://www.naturalnews.com/033005_meditation_brain_health.html



(NaturalNews) Getting older means you will not be as mentally sharp and, in fact, your brain will shrink. It's just the way life is and there's nothing you can do about it, right? Wrong. Now it appears we can take control of brain changes and even make our brains larger, not smaller, as we age and cause electrical connections to zip along at a faster rate to improve thinking and memory. The key is meditation.

Back in 2009, UCLA scientists made an amazing discovery -- they found that the brains of people who had meditated long-term were different than those of non-meditators. To be specific, the researchers found evidence that particular regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger. They also had more gray matter than the brains of people who didn't meditate.

This was startling-- and important -- because brains normally shrink with age, a process they may explain memory and other cognitive problems experienced by elders. More recently, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) concluded that an eight week mindful meditation practice produced measurable changes in participants' brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress (http://www.naturalnews.com/031228_m...).

Now comes even more proof that meditation does something profound, and beneficial, to the human brain. A follow-up study by the UCLA team just published in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage shows that people who meditate have stronger connections between brain regions. What's more, they have far less age-related brain atrophy.

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