Working in Movement

Pay attention! We've heard it all our lives from family, teachers, bosses, and almost everyone else. And while there are any variety of good reasons for sharpening concentrative abilities, a new one has just shown up in some recently published research: it changes your brain. And this structural brain change just might delay some of the changes that come with the aging brain.

The research focused on people who mediate, and wasn't restricted to monks and the like that are usually examined in such research. Effects: When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head describes a small study at the Massachusetts General Hospital involving 20 people who regularly practice mindful awareness. It turns out that the meditators showed more gray matter in the frontal cortexes than those who don't mediate.

The difference was especially notable in older volunteers, suggesting that meditation may help reduce the cortical thinning that comes with age, the researchers said.

Is this "reduction of cortical thinning" a good thing? That doesn't seem so clear, but the interesting thing for me here is the idea that repeated concentration activity can contribute to reorganization in the nervous system - it changes the brain.

The study could not establish that the differences were attributable to meditation, but Dr. Lazar (the researcher) noted that other studies had found structural changes in jugglers' brain, presumably caused by the demands of their craft. She said the researchers believed other forms of meditation and even yoga might produce the same results.

I'd bet it's no so much the type of paying attention activity that matters. The act of engaging in some form of concentration on a regular basis is probably what matters.