NEW335H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Transcendental Meditation, Precentral Gyrus, Calcarine Sulcus
Document Summary
*benefits from meditation is not restricted to change in the brain. *potential benefit of meditation may be to protect cognition/mood against pathology. *meditation can be a treatment for multiple disorders: * age-related cognitive dysfunction by cortical thinning, this can be prevented by meditation: spectrum, varied in individuals. Graphs showing gradual decrease in cortical thickness as age. No effect of age on middle prefrontal region. Higher r^2 indicates higher relationship (cortical thickness explaining age). Meditation does not have a huge effect on global gray matter but neuroplasticity hotspots (e. g. hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate and insula). *pagnoni cekic 2007: gm (gray matter), ctal (control), medt (meditator), rt (reaction time). *there are currently very few reports of meditation protecting against age-related cognitive dysfunction (more research is needed). While meditation generally increases gray matter volume, this is not always the case. Some studies report that gray matter volume may go down with meditation. Meditation is not growing your brain but reshaping it.
