"Just Say Om"
Studies have shown that regular meditation improve memory and focus.
The brain, like the body, undergoes subtle changes during deep meditation. The first scientific studies, in the ’60s and ’70s, basically proved that meditators are really focused. In India a researcher named B.K. Anand found that yogis could meditate themselves into trances so deep that they didn’t react when hot test tubes were pressed against their arms.
A study by Sara Lazar, a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital shows that daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain’s cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, attention and memory.
Lazar’s results showed that the gray matter of 20 men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not. “We showed for the first time that you don’t have to do it all day for similar results,” says Lazar. What’s more, her research suggests that meditation may slow the natural thinning of that section of the cortex that occurs with age.
You don’t need to be a monk to experience for yourself the link between meditation and memory improvement. The basic type of meditation practiced in many Western countries was shown in the research to be very effective in causing the cortex to thicken.
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Tags: Focus, Meditation, Memory