{"id":14036,"date":"2015-02-10T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/10\/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain\/"},"modified":"2015-02-10T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T12:00:00","slug":"eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/10\/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight Weeks to a Better Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2011\/01\/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>UNITED STATES, January 21, 2011 (Harvard): Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain&#8217;s gray matter.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,&#8221; says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. &#8220;This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is fascinating to see the brain&#8217;s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,&#8221; says Britta Hoelzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. &#8220;Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source UNITED STATES, January 21, 2011 (Harvard): Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}