WASHINGTON 鈥� Practicing yoga and meditation can do more than calm your mind 鈥� research shows it can change your brain.
Shortly after Dr. Sara Lazar started practicing yoga, she noticed a difference in her every day mental state.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not just while you鈥檙e practicing yoga and meditation, it really carries over throughout the rest of the day,鈥� says Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
鈥淚t has such a profound effect on how you see and interact with the world that something had shifted in my mind.鈥�
After talking to others who shared a similar experience, Lazar decided to further investigate her observation. In her , she found that the brains of meditators are different from non-meditators.
Lazar organized a group of people who had never practiced yoga or meditation and compared their initial MRI scans to MRIs after eight weekly classes of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
When comparing the pre and post scans, she noticed a change in the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory, as well as a change in the posterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in mind-wandering and is the region that鈥檚 destroyed by Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.
Additionally, Lazar found that the medulla, which is the 鈥渇ight or flight鈥� part of the brain, got smaller. This change correlated with a change in stress, Lazar says.
While the participants in Lazar鈥檚 study practiced MBSR once a week for an average of 30 minutes, she says it鈥檚 not known for how frequently and for how long people have to meditate to reap the brain benefits of MBSR. But every little bit helps.
鈥淒efinitely people have reported benefits from even practicing 10 or 15 minutes a day,鈥� she says.
