Meditation to help improve brain SlowLife

Meditation to help improve brain

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You might heard that meditation is really helpful on the body, but still, you are not sure how just staying calm improves brain and body condition. In this post, let me explain how it has a good effect on the brain with 4 benefits.

1. Improve Brain by Activation

There is some study about meditation making the brain more active. When the researcher compared with meditation expert group(Tibetan Monk) with the meditation newbie group, they found that part of attention and focus in the brain is more activated than the normal group. In here the expert group who they have done 19,000 hours of meditation. This expert group has done the ‘Focus attention meditation.’ That is paying attention to certain objects and trying to detect the mind that gets obstacles to focus and repeat to focus on some object. Researchers found that these sequential mental attentions to certain objects are deeply related to dissociable systems in the brain. When the expert meditation group, sustaining attention is activated and it helps to maintain these statuses. By doing these practices, it benefit to improve brain function (parietal areas and the thalamus) in the long term.

2. Helps reduce brain shrinkage due to aging

It is known that during the aging process, the size of the hippocampal complex naturally decreases, and meditation can have a positive effect on this aging phenomenon. A study comparing long-term meditators with a normal group found that these cells shrink in size with age. However, the long-term meditation group did not notice any significant size reduction.

Additionally, it has been discovered that brain cell growth and preservation are observed when meditation is repeated continuously in a normal brain. It is predicted that if you continue to practice meditation consistently, it will positively affect brain degeneration and cell loss due to aging. Not much research is being done on this, but as research on meditation practice continues to become more active, we will be able to find an answer for improve brain

3. Improve Brain Memory

There are some studies on the relationship between memory and meditation too. Practicing meditation training improves working memory capacity. Stress usually has a negative effect on brain memory and causes emotional disorders, and there has been research into the effects of meditation. First, we divided the groups into meditation training and examined working memory capacity according to the time of meditation training. The group with low meditation practice time showed a decrease in working memory capacity, and the group with long practice time showed an increase in working memory capacity. Appeared. If you practice consistently, your brain will be activated, and the total amount of memory you can remember will increase and improve brain functions. Above all, it has been found that when memory decline occurs due to stress, meditation can prevent the decline.

In addition, it is predicted that it will have a positive effect on memory decline due to neurodegeneration. In particular, while there is no specific treatment for neurodegenerative diseases, it has recently been revealed that consistent meditation improves cognitive ability and memory, and research on this is increasing.

4. Improve Brain Spatial Abilities

Lastly, meditation is also effective in enhancing spatial abilities. There is another study that showed that spatial cognitive ability improved with continued meditation training. This study was an experiment with 32 people, and was conducted by first measuring spatial ability before meditation and then randomly performing meditation training. In particular, the group that received meditation and mindfulness training showed better results in spatial ability and rotation training than the group that did not. Since this effect appears even with short-term training, it suggests that spatial cognitive ability can be improved through continued meditation.

In Short

To summarize, meditation and mindfulness are really beneficial to the brain by improving memory and spatial ability, reducing brain size, and activating the brain. However, Jung’s meditation and mindfulness are so abstract that it is necessary to distinguish what meditation is here. Some studies have defined meditation as complete concentration on an object. Some studies have compared meditation times to obtain results. Therefore, it is difficult to guarantee that you will get the same results as them.

However, the most important thing is the group who had positive results on their brain, they kept practicing and it presented positive results. Whichever meditation and mindfulness method you use, the most important thing is continuing this pattern as a habit.

Global Companies Encourage employee meditation for well-being

Reference from

Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation – 2009

Meditation and neurodegenerative diseases 2013

Examining the protective effects of mindfulness training on working memory capacity and affective experience

Improving spatial abilities through mindfulness: effects on the mental rotation task – 2011

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