(Editor’s Note: We are pleased to bring you this arti­cle by Jason Marsh, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Greater Good Mag­a­zine.)

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I con­sider myself some­thing of a prospec­tive meditator—meaning that a seri­ous med­i­ta­tion prac­tice is always some­thing I’m about to start… next week. So for years, I’ve been mak­ing a men­tal note of new stud­ies show­ing that med­i­ta­tion can lit­er­ally change our brain struc­ture in ways that might boost con­cen­tra­tion, mem­ory, and pos­i­tive emotions.

The results seem entic­ing enough to make any­one drop into the full lotus position—until you read the fine print: Much of this research involves peo­ple who have med­i­tated for thou­sands of hours over many years; some of it zeroes in on Olympic-level med­i­ta­tors who have clocked 10,000 hours or more. Pretty daunting.

Well, a new study offers some hope—and makes the ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion seem within reach even for a novice like me. The study, pub­lished in Jan­u­ary in the jour­nal Psy­chi­a­try Research: Neu­roimag­ing, sug­gests that med­i­tat­ing for just 30 min­utes a day for eight weeks can increase the den­sity of gray mat­ter in brain regions asso­ci­ated with mem­ory, stress, and empathy.

The researchers tracked 16 peo­ple who were par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) pro­gram, the train­ing pro­gram devel­oped more than 30 years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over eight weekly meet­ings, the pro­gram leads par­tic­i­pants through med­i­ta­tion exer­cises meant to build the skills of mindfulness—a moment-by-moment aware­ness of one’s thoughts, feel­ings, bod­ily sen­sa­tions, and sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment. Par­tic­i­pants are sup­posed to try these prac­tices on their own between classes.

For decades, peo­ple who’ve com­pleted the MBSR train­ing have reported feel­ing less stress and more pos­i­tive emo­tions; par­tic­i­pants suf­fer­ing from chronic ill­nesses say they expe­ri­ence less pain afterward.

But in this study, the researchers weren’t just ask­ing the par­tic­i­pants how they felt. They were exam­in­ing their brains, two weeks before and right after the eight-week pro­gram. Over the same period, they also scanned the brains of peo­ple who didn’t receive the MBSR training.

The MBSR par­tic­i­pants, none of whom were expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors, reported spend­ing just under half an hour per day on their med­i­ta­tion “home­work.” Yet when their brains were scanned at the end of the pro­gram, their gray mat­ter was sig­nif­i­cantly thicker in sev­eral regions than it was before.

Brain scans of the hip­pocam­pus, show­ing the regions the researchers deter­mined were affected by med­i­ta­tion. Image adapted from B. Hölzel, et al., Psy­chi­a­try Research: Neu­roimag­ing Vol. 191 (1), Jan­u­ary 30, 2011, pp. 36–43.

One of those regions was the hip­pocam­pus, which prior research has found to be involved in learn­ing, mem­ory, and the reg­u­la­tion of our emo­tions. The gray mat­ter of the hip­pocam­pus is often reduced in peo­ple who suf­fer from depres­sion and post-traumatic stress dis­or­der (PTSD).

The researchers also found denser gray mat­ter in the temporo-perietal junc­tion and the pos­te­rior cin­gu­lated cor­tex of the med­i­ta­tors’ brains—regions involved in empa­thy and tak­ing the per­spec­tive of some­one else—and in the cere­bel­lum, which has been linked to emo­tion regulation.

These brain changes may sug­gest that med­i­ta­tion improves people’s abil­ity to reg­u­late their emo­tions, con­trol their stress lev­els, and feel empa­thy for oth­ers, says Britta Hölzel, the study’s lead author and a research fel­low at Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal and the Uni­ver­sity of Geis­sen in Ger­many. How­ever, she stresses that these con­clu­sions are still very speculative.

The group that didn’t receive the MBSR train­ing didn’t show any of these pos­i­tive changes in brain structure.

Pre­vi­ous research has shown that the struc­ture of very expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors’ brains is dif­fer­ent from non-meditators in cer­tain regions, but it couldn’t prove that the med­i­ta­tors didn’t have excep­tional brains to begin with. This is the first study to doc­u­ment a dif­fer­ence in brain struc­ture from before some­one starts a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice to after they’ve got­ten underway—and after only eight weeks, at that.

While other research, notably a 2003 study led by Richard David­son of the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, has shown that people’s brain activ­ity changes after the eight-week MBSR course, there hadn’t been evi­dence that the effects of med­i­ta­tion can go so deep as to change the struc­ture of the brain.

The results of this new study offer fur­ther evi­dence for the “plas­tic­ity” of the brain, mean­ing it can change its shape over time. That sug­gests we’re not sim­ply stuck with the neural cards we’re dealt; we can fun­da­men­tally improve our cog­ni­tive and emo­tional capacities.

“I think what’s really pos­i­tive and promis­ing about this study is that it sug­gests our well-being is in our hands,” says Hölzel. “What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is that just pay­ing atten­tion in a dif­fer­ent way and being more aware can have such an impact that it even changes the struc­ture of our brain.”

It’s impor­tant to note that med­i­ta­tion isn’t the only research-tested way to pro­duce these changes in the brain. A study pub­lished last week, in The Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, found that the hip­pocam­pus of peo­ple in their 60s increased in vol­ume after they’d walked around a track three times per week for a year; in peers who did less aer­o­bic exer­cises, the hip­pocam­pus actu­ally got smaller.

The upshot of all this research seems to be: Small steps mat­ter. Many of us can bring about pos­i­tive effects on our brains and over­all well-being—without an Olympic effort.

It’s enough to turn a prospec­tive med­i­ta­tor like me into an actual one.

––  Jason Marsh is the edi­tor in chief of The Greater Good Mag­a­zine. The Greater Good, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quar­terly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Related arti­cle:

• Med­i­ta­tion: Dif­fer­ent Tech­niques, Dif­fer­ent Effects on the Brain

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