At Transpersonal Dynamics, we are becoming more and more excited that science is beginning to catch up with spiritual tradition! Over 1000 peer-reviewed articles have been published in the scientific community reviewing the relationship between meditation and a decrease in the symptoms of disease or changes in the meditators mental state.  However, more recently, attention has shifted to attempting to understand how meditation works.

For example in November 2005, the Journal NeuroReport ran an article about a study that showed how 20 participants who were trained in Buddhist meditation showed increased grey matter in their brains. What is really exciting about this study, is that most of the participants only meditated 40 minutes a day! So you don’t need to shut yourself away in a cave like a hermit and study for years and meditate all day in order to gain benefits from meditation.

Studies at Harvard Medical School, Yale, and MIT, have used MRI scanning to find out what happened in meditators’ brains during meditation. They discovered that meditation generates activity in those sections of the brain that are responsible for the autonomic nervous system, the part of the brain that governance processes such as digestion and blood pressure. As the autonomic nervous system is also responsible for our response to stress this sheds some light on how meditation helps to relieve stress related conditions.

A group of researchers at UCLA also used MRI scans to look at the brains of meditators and in the Journal Neuroimage in May 2009 report that meditators showed a significant increase in the volume of the hippocampus, the orbito-frontal cortex and the thalamus, all regions of the brain that, amongst other things, regulate our emotions.

When science begins to explore new areas, they love to invent new terminology and there is now a new field of study called Neurotheology that seeks to quantify spiritual experiences and to understand what happens to the brain during and after periods of meditation, amongst other things. Research has shown that prolonged practice of meditation has even greater benefits.  People who have meditated for a long time appear to be able to produce gamma waves which are the brainwaves associated with the brain making and new circuits.