Meditation practice leaves traces in brain

According to a recent study, the subjective feeling of well-being experienced by many people with the practice of meditation is correlated with specific changes in the brain as researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca have shown that transcendental meditation is associated with the reduction of perceived stress and with specific cerebral changes.

The research, which appeared in Brain and Cognition, examined the effects of the technique known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), which consists in the silent repetition of a meaningless sound, a ‘mantra’.

Researchers enrolled 34 healthy young volunteers and divided them into two groups. The first one practised Transcendental Meditation 40 minutes per day in two sessions of 20 minutes each, one in the morning and the other in the evening; the second group did not change its daily routine.

At the beginning of the study, the researchers also measured through psychometric questionnaires the anxiety and stress level of all the participants, as well as their ability to manage stressful situations. Each individual was also subjected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging test (fMRI), in order to measure brain activity at rest and changes in the functional connectivity among different cerebral areas. The analysis of the data clearly showed that levels of anxiety and stress perceived by the subjects who followed the meditation program were significantly reduced in comparison with those of the volunteers who did not practice TM.

“Magnetic resonance imaging also shows that the reduction of anxiety levels is associated with specific changes in the connectivity between different cerebral areas, such as precuneus, left parietal lobe and insula, which all have an important role in the modulation of emotions and inner states. In the control group, instead, none of these changes was observed”, explained Giulia Avvenuti, who is the first author of the study.