Can our brains age better through meditation?
Yes, according to a study published on October 10 in the American journal
JAMA Neurology.
By reducing negative emotions, anxiety and sleep problems, meditating regularly would preserve the attention and socio-emotional capacities of people over 60, according to researchers from Inserm, the University of Caen and from Geneva.
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Ahead of their research, the scientists point out that “meditation practices have recently emerged as a promising mental training exercise to promote brain health and reduce the risk of dementia”.
To go further, the teams observed for 18 months (between November 2016 and March 2018), the behavior, neurological activity and sleep of 137 French adults aged 65 and over, without cognitive impairment.
A third of them practiced meditation regularly, the second third learned a new language (English), and the third did not change anything in their daily life.
Results ?
"Meditation had a better impact than learning a non-native language, in attention regulation skills, socio-emotional skills and self-knowledge," they say.
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Improved cognition
These findings add to the evidence for the benefits of meditation on the brain, and overall wellbeing, that has been studied by science since the 2000s. “Previous studies have shown that mindfulness meditation improves cognition, by particular in the elderly in several areas, including attention and self-awareness or metacognition,” the researchers recall in the journal
JAMA
.
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Previous studies had effectively demonstrated the impact of the practice on two parts of the brain: the frontal and insular cortex.
Here, the researchers did not observe “significant changes in the volume of these brain parts, they inform.
Future, longer, secondary research may provide more detail,” they concluded.