Just two months of meditation can sharpen the brain

Meditation has been used for thousands of years for mental strength and relaxation. Now, a study has revealed that short-term daily meditation works in just 8 weeks, and changing the brain circuit can have immediate benefits.

Although the new survey was conducted by Binghamton University and State University of New York, man has been benefiting from the meditation exercises founded by Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, for hundreds of years.

Frequent meditators say that it reduces the noise of thoughts in the brain and gives peace of mind, but until now the scientific evidence was scarce. But now experiments have been done on ten volunteers and in a few weeks the brain circuitry of the students surveyed has changed and they have acknowledged the improvement.

George Weinstein, a computer science lecturer involved in the study, himself has been meditating on Buddhist monks for some time, and he has several certificates. He has done this research in collaboration with University Professor Ying Dai, who has been researching a number of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, from MRI and other brain scans.

Together, they launched a program of serious research on the effects of meditation on ten young students. In October 2017, they received some money and the study process began. Professor George first taught all participants to meditate and asked them to meditate 10 to 15 minutes a day five times a week.

Brain scans of all participants were performed at Cornell University's state-of-the-art center. All participants were asked to keep a record of their exercises and to write them down. At the same time, it was asked how much their thinking and mental freshness has improved.

The study included the best students from Binghamton University who followed the orders of the teachers and were interested in finishing the work. That's why they had no difficulty in practicing meditation, "said Professor George.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports. An important discovery is that meditation makes it easier to switch between different mental states. Two of these mental states are very important, one of which is the 'default mode' in which the brain is in a state of rest while awake and either cooks imaginary palao or is in a state of mental wandering. The second is the dorsal attention network in which the brain's focus is on one side only.

People who meditated for two consecutive months developed such flexibility in their brains that they could change both brain conditions very quickly and this ability is very useful for us. That is, meditation immediately leads the lost mind to attention and concentration. There are many benefits to this capability.