Ashly Longstreth
April 2, 2022
The days of hearing meditation to be hippie-dippy, woo-woo, froufrou, and poppycock are long gone! Or so they should be. In the past two decades, modern science has opened our eyes to the active internal brain, and how it connects to our physical and emotional health, behavior, and the outside world. Mindful meditation is the practice of connecting to ones' internal body and the present moment, a practice that is available to anyone and can be as little as five minutes a day. Recent studies demonstrate intriguing results that support multiple benefits mindful meditation has on the brain, both short-term and long-term. Harvard Gazette expresses the importance of mindful meditation, and how the practice is like a fitness routine for your brain, “it keeps your brain healthy” (Mineo, 2019). Other beneficial results from mindful meditation include improved structural changes in the brain, brain cell functions, and cognitive functions (Lardone et al., 2018). All of which advocate the connection to mindfulness and wellbeing, suggesting the practice to be of therapeutic treatment and prevention towards ailments such as anxiety and depression.
Although meditation has been around for thousands of years, modern technology has only recently helped us understand how meditation affects the brain. Utilizing multiple facets to observe brain activity, we get to dive beyond the face value of meditation and see a complex root system in action. Imagine yourself sitting in a comfortable position and focusing on your breath for at least five minutes. It’s incredible to think that these simple instructions ignite awareness in your body, sending messages through the central nervous system (CNS), up to your brain where it gets processed, memories form and get recalled, and then the brain sends messages back out (Carter, 2009). During meditation the brain is undergoing major changes, and being the main command center of our body; it affects our cognition, emotion regulation, and behavior.
With evidence that meditation can influence our brain activity, we come to understand that over time, the structures and functions begin to change as a result. The structural changes continue to support the cognitive changes such as memory, which also helps the meditator to continue their growth and benefits of mind. One study took a look at brain activity during meditation and compared them with the brain activity observed during the resting state to find that there were significant differences in functional connectivity. They continue to study mindful meditation on a neural level, in which their results suggested the practice may shed light on the brain circuits that may be involved in antidepressant effects (Yang et al., 2016). As a result of these findings, mindfulness meditation may be therapeutic and useful in treating affective disorders like depression (Yang et al., 2016).
One study utilized Electroencephalogram based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to discover that there were significant improvements in metacognition from the continued practice of mindful meditation (Tan et al., 2014). Metacognition is a person’s awareness of their thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them, thus improving cognition and how we interact with stimuli. Not only does meditation improve how the brain processes information, but it improves how we respond to said information. Therefore, the practice of meditation improves the brain’s health on a structural and cellular level, which greatly influences how we respond to events in our daily lives. It’s an exciting time to be able to witness the recent breakthroughs and to see the scientific proof that mindful meditation improves mental health and wellbeing.
References
Carter, R. (2009). The brain book: an illustrated guide to its structure, function and disorders. Credo Reference (1st ed.). Dorling-Kindersley, Inc. https://search-credoreference-com.ezproxy1.apus.edu/content/entry/dkbrain/brain_functions/0.
Lardone, Liparoti, M., Sorrentino, P., Rucco, R., Jacini, F., Polverino, A., Minino, R., Pesoli, M., Baselice, F., Sorriso, A., Ferraioli, G., Sorrentino, G., & Mandolesi, L. (2018). Mindfulness Meditation Is Related to Long-Lasting Changes in Hippocampal Functional Topology during Resting State: A Magnetoencephalography Study. Neural Plasticity, 2018, 5340717–5340719. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5340717
Mineo, L. (2019, November 1). Less Stress, Clearer Thoughts with Mindfulness Meditation. Harvard Gazette. Retrieved March 2022, from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/04/less-stress-clearer-thoughts-with-mindfulness-meditation/
Tan, Dienes, Z., Jansari, A., & Goh, S.-Y. (2014). Effect of mindfulness meditation on the brain–computer interface performance. Consciousness and Cognition, 23, 12–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.10.010
Yang, Barrós-Loscertales, A., Pinazo, D., Ventura-Campos, N., Borchardt, V., Bustamante, J.-C., Rodríguez-Pujadas, A., Fuentes-Claramonte, P., Balaguer, R., Ávila, C., & Walter, M. (2016). State and Training Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Brain Networks Reflect Neuronal Mechanisms of Its Antidepressant Effect. Neural Plasticity, 2016, 9504642–14. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/9504642
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