Meditation Appears To Keep Brains Young

First the bad news: from the age 25 or so, our brains begin to wither, and with that withering comes some functional loss. And now the good news: researchers at UCLA, building on earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, have found that meditation appears preserve the brain’s gray matter. What’s so good about that? Gray matter is the part of the brain that contains neurons, special cells designed to transmit information to other nerve cells and muscles. You need them. You want them, because you can’t function without them. A UCLA news release reports that the researchers compared the gray matter of 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn’t. What did they find? The envelope please…. The researchers found that people in both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged, but those who meditated lost less gray matter than those who didn’t meditate. OMM