Meditation Builds Better Brains

Lately Geezer has been doing a lot of not thinking about anything, because not thinking about anything is essential to meditation, and meditation, we now learn, can do many wonderful things, from relieving pain to lifting depression to fighting flu. We know this from two recent stories, one in the Los Angeles Times and a somewhat more enlightening article in the Boston Globe, that report on revelations from a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The Globe piece tells us that brain scans done at Massachusetts General
Hospital found that, in the brains of people who meditated regularly, four regions of cortex — associated with higher functions like memory and decision making
— were thicker than in 15 subjects who didn’t meditate. Researchers also found signs that one area of the cortex
seemed to have aged less quickly than it did in nonmeditators. The West Coast paper reports that  that mediation appears to help lower blood pressure and may keep memory loss at bay. Read more.