Meditation Helps Aging Brains

Zen meditation may slow down aging-related cognitive decline.

Researchers at Emory University made MRI scans of the brains of thirteen people who regularly meditated using Zen practices, and thirteen control subjects. The key finding: the meditators performed surprisingly well in tests of attention. The ability to pay attention normally declines with age, but the meditator's performance showed no correlation to age at all.

Meditators also showed none of the loss of grey matter volume that normally starts at about age twenty. Scientists have yet to determine the purpose of this process.

The putamen, a brain structure tied to attentional processing, seemed to benefit from meditation.

The Emory researchers -- Giuseppe Pagnoni and Milos Cekic -- concluded that "... the regular practice of meditation may have neuroprotective effects and reduce the cognitive decline associated with normal aging."

Potential problems with the study are the small number of subjects, and the inability to track the same subjects over time.

Previous research has linked meditation to physiological changes in the brain and health benefits such as stress reduction.