Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Check out the big brain on Brad!

Sorry, couldn’t resist the quote in the title, which you may recognize from Pulp Fiction.

Have you noticed your baseball cap is fitting a bit too snug lately? This may explain it:

Meditation Found To Increase Brain Size

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

Click HERE for the full article.

6 Comments:

At September 13, 2006, Blogger Shonin said...

I'm not sure that this is such a radical revelation. I imagine that spending an hour a day playing Tetris would increase parts of the brain. And a bigger brain does not equate directly to intelligence either.

If meditation increased the size of other organs too, that really would be a big selling point.

 
At September 13, 2006, Blogger gniz said...

this is a ridiculously small sample size, thats all i can say

i dont doubt the benefits of meditation, but almost every meditation study i've seen looks at like 10-15 people and then extrapolates all kinds of wild stuff.

I think we'll need to wait for the much larger studies to really get an idea of what is what.

g

 
At September 13, 2006, Blogger Anatman said...

Justin, I think that may be a good marketing angle for Vajrayana Buddhism and tantric meditation.

 
At September 14, 2006, Blogger Shonin said...

maybe our heart is in our brain (metaphorically)

 
At September 14, 2006, Blogger PA said...

Maybe our brain is in our heart
(metaphorically)

 
At September 14, 2006, Blogger Shonin said...

(metaphorically)

 

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