Brentwood 11/20/2010 12:47:11 AM
News / Health & Wellness

The Meditation Connection

New research may have found a connection between brain strength and meditation, but what does this Eastern practice really do and how does it work?

Can meditation strengthen the brain the same way physical exercise can strengthen muscles? A long-time practitioner of Buddhist-style meditation and University of Wisconsin psychologist, Richard Davidson, insists it can do just that. Davidson has been practicing the art of meditation since a visit to India as a Harvard grad student in the 1970s.  

Contemplative Neuroscience

According to CNN.com, Davidson has become the leader of a relatively new field called contemplative neuroscience - the brain science of meditation. In this new field, Davidson and his colleagues have spent the last decade producing scientific evidence for the theory that meditation permanently changes the brain for the better. 

“We all know that if you engage in certain kinds of exercise on a regular basis you can strengthen certain muscle groups in predictable ways,” Davidson told CNN.com from his office at the University of Wisconsin, where his research team has hosted scores of Buddhist monks and other meditators for brain scans. 

“Strengthening neural systems is not fundamentally different,” he says. “It’s basically replacing certain habits of mind with other habits.” 

Through their research, Davidson and his colleagues have come to believe that making a habit of meditation can strengthen brain circuits responsible for maintaining concentration and generating empathy. One study found that expert meditators (i.e. monks with more than 10,000 hours of practice) appeared to have permanently changed their brains to be more empathetic. An earlier study found that committed meditators experienced sustained changes in baseline brain function, in other words they had changed the way their brains operated even outside of meditation. 

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