Long-Term Meditation Tied To Less Brain Loss

This study says it's basically worthwhile to think about meditation," he said. Dr. Madhav Goyal told Reuters Health that the new study failed to convince him that he could prescribe meditation as an elixir to prevent brain loss. "There's still a lot of research that needs to be done," said Goyal, who practices meditation and studies it as a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The UCLA researchers found insignificant results when they performed the most conservative statistical analysis on their findings, he said. Goyal would have liked the study to compare skill levels between meditators and non-meditators. He also questioned what kind of meditation, and whether it was indeed meditation, the meditators were doing. "Meditation programs differ in how rigorously they teach the activity, a few hours over a few weeks versus 100 hours in a weeklong training," Goyal said. The new study "adds a little bit more evidence to the idea that the brain has plasticity, and by practicing certain mental activities, such as meditation, we can see structural changes in the brain as a result," he said. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/16N3VaJ Frontiers in Psychology, online January 21, 2015.
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news