Meditation Protects Your Brain Say Scientists

From thousands of years we hear about Buddhist meditators and their tranquil state of mind free from neurotic suffering. They do this with the simple process of sitting down and closing their eyes called meditation.

Now scientists are studying meditation and meditators with phenomenal scanning technology.

A team of Emory University scientists described in early September that experienced Zen meditators were much better than control subjects at casting off external thoughts and returning to the breath. The study "Thinking about Not-Thinking:' Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing During Zen Meditation" printed by the online research journal PLoS ONE, detected that "meditation may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous thoughts."

This same group of scientist reported last year that those people who do meditation do not lose their gray matter with age as most people do.