Let’s face it: the more we live, the more neurons we lose over the years. We have the sharpest mind when we are young, but we can maintain it at a decent level even when we get much older. One easy method of doing so is by practicing daily meditation, as a study made by a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard Medical School suggests.
Those who practice meditation regularly are already claiming huge benefits for it: getting rid of the so-called ‘brain fog’, increase in productivity, better memory, and so on. The simple fact of releasing all your thoughts or concentrating as much as possible on only one of them can boost up your brainpower.
The subject of the new study is a Tibetan monk
The researchers focused their attention on Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a 41-year-old Buddhist Tibetan monk who has practiced meditation daily for the most part of his life. The main question was if such a lifestyle could impact the brain of the guy, and the scientists involved scanned Rinpoche’s brain with an MRI machine four times during a 14 years period.
An AI system called the Brain Age Gap Estimation (BrainAge) framework analyzed the brain scans. The system estimated Rinpoche’s age to be 33 years old, instead of his real age of 41. The only logical explanation was that the result shows evidence of Rinpoche’s brain aging at a slower rate than it normally would. Furthermore, the researchers noted that they had found proof that Rinpoche’s brain had matured earlier.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a firm supporter of meditation, and he says about it that it’s the best way of training our ‘crazy monkey mind’. The idea behind this is that simply trying to think about fewer things as possible is extremely difficult – our minds are constantly popping out various thoughts, whether we want it or not. Therefore, meditation acts as a restart of the operating system for our minds.
The study of Rinpoche’s brain was published in the journal Neurocase.
