Whenever I hear about the many benefits of meditation, my determination to find a place for it in my life is renewed once more. Unfortunately, the few and far between times I’ve attempted meditation have always ended in naptime, but I keep trying because the purported advantages, particularly increased relaxation, are just too good to pass up. And with myriad studies that explore the ways it emotionally and physically shapes our brains, it’s clear that meditation’s positive effects span well beyond relaxation. As we learn more about what meditation can do for us, penciling it into our schedules becomes not just a good idea, but a necessary one.
It can make you a nicer person.
In 2008, researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison assembled a group of thirty-two people—an equal mix of Tibetan monks who had been practicing meditation for several years and people who were inexperienced with meditation—and asked them to perform compassion meditation while their brains were scanned by MRI machines. The non-practitioners were given a two-week course on that type of meditation, which involves consistently focusing on a desire to rid all people of suffering and unhappiness. The scans revealed a great deal of activity in the parts of the brain associated with empathy and emotional responses toward others, and in the monks’ brains, the activity was even more markedly increased, which suggests that compassion can be learned and developed like any other skill.
It can make you smarter.
Okay, so maybe it doesn’t necessarily increase IQs, but meditation has been proven to result in sharpened mental acuity and performance on tests. A 2005 study at the University of Kentucky involved participants doing one of four activities for forty minutes—reading, sleeping, talking with others, or meditating—and then clicking a button whenever they saw an image come onto an LCD screen. Those who meditated did remarkably better than the others, even though none of them had experience with the practice.
A continuation of that same study compared the gamma waves of ten non-practitioners with the Dalai Lama’s eight most experienced and successful meditation devotees. The monks’ brains showed not only faster-moving and stronger gamma rays, but the progression itself was more intricate and formulaic. The inexperienced volunteers also showed more gamma ray activity, but even before the groups began meditating during the brain scans, the monks had higher levels of gamma ray production. So not only can meditation increase gamma ray activity—which directly affects our focus and perception—in the short term, the affects might be long-lasting and progressively more dramatic over time.
