A study conducted by researchers from Inserm and the University of Caen has shown that attention span, mood and emotional state improve through meditation.
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18 months of experiments, whose work has just been published in JAMA Neurology, a major American scientific journal. Researchers from Inserm and the University of Caen called on people over 65 who were in good health. They separated them into three groups: one had to meditate at least 20 minutes a day, another took English lessons and a last one did not change his habits. Result: people who meditated said that their attention span, mood and emotional state improved.
Meditation can allow the brain to age better, because it is a mental training that stimulates certain regions of the brain, involved in the regulation of stress and attention. By modifying certain automatisms, a regular practice can thus make it possible to reduce the anxiety, the negative emotions and the problems of sleep. So many phenomena which tend to increase with age and can accelerate cerebral aging. For Gaël Chételat, research director at Inserm who coordinated this study, “We can also think that by stimulating these particular regions of the brain, meditation creates a kind of cerebral reserve, which can make it possible to resist the attacks of neurodegenerative diseases for longer..
It has been found in the past that, in expert meditators, two areas of the brain involved in meditation – the frontal and insular cortex – are larger. In this latest study, these areas of the brain did not gain enough volume to be considered significant, but they did evolve in the right direction.
For this Inserm team, meditating for 18 months for seniors is perhaps not long enough for the effects to be really visible on imaging. But, as the results are encouraging, these researchers have already planned to continue their work, over longer periods of time and with more participants.