Name: 【TEDx】TEDxCambridge - Sara Lazar on how meditation can reshape our brains
Uploaded: 2013-07-29T03:14:34.000Z
Duration: 8 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So when I was in graduate school, I was a runner,

and a friend and I decided that we're going to run the Boston Marathon.

And so we started training and we overtrained,

and they told me that I had to stop running

As I was leaving the phzsical therapist office,

that promised not only to promote flexibility,

but also to promote strength and cardiorespiratory fitness.

So I thought, oh, well, this is a great way

that I can stretch, but also remain in shape,

and maybe I could even still run the Boston Marathon.

So I went to the yoga class and I really enjoyed it,

except when the teacher would make all sorts of claims,

you know, all sorts of medical claims, but also claims about, oh, yes,

You'll increase your compassion and open your heart and I was just like...

I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am here to stretch.

But what was interesting was that after a couple of weeks

I started noticing some of these changes,

I started noticing that I was calmer and I was better able

to handle difficult situations, and indeed, I was feeling more compassionate

and I was better able to see things from other people's point of view.

And, you know, I was like, hm, how could this be,

And, I thought, well maybe, you know, it's just a placebo response, right?

She told me I will feel this, so maybe that's why I was feeling it.

So I decided to do a literature search to see if there's any research on this.

And low and behold, there was quite a bit

showing both yoga and meditation are extremely effective for decreasing stress

they're also very good for reducing symptoms associated with numerous diseases

including depression, anxiety, pain, and insomnia.

And there's a couple of very good studies demonstrating it can actually

improve your ability to pay attention, and most interestingly, I thought

virtually every study has shown that people are just happier.

They report they're more satisfied with their life, and they have a higher quality of life.

And so I decided to switch and start doing this sort of research.

So as a nurse scientists, you know, how could this be happening?

How can something as silly as a yoga posture

How can that lead to all these sorts of different types of changes?

So, what we know is that whenever you engage in a behavior over and over again,

that this can lead to changes in your brain.

And this is what's referred to as neuroplasticity.

And what this just means is that your brain is plastic and that

the neurons can change how they talk to each other with experience.

And so, there's a couple of studies demonstrating

that you can actually detect this, using machines like the MRI machine.

They took people who had never ever juggled before,

and they scanned them, and then they taught them how to juggle,

and they said, "Keep practising for three months."

And they brought them back after three months, and they scanned them the second time,

and they found that they can actually detect with the MRI machine

changes in the amount of grey matter in the brain of these people

in areas that are important for detecting visual motion.

So, I thought, OK, three months, you know...

Can meditation change brain structure too?

Something as simple as, you know, as juggling.

we recruited a bunch of people from the Boston area,

and these were not monks or meditation teachers,

they're just average Joes who on average practice meditation

and we compared them to a group of people who were demographically matched,

That there were indeed several regions of the brain

that had more grey matter in the meditators compared to the controls.

One of the regions I'm going to point out to you

is here in the front of the brain, it's the area that's important

for working memory and executive decision making

was when we actually plotted the data versus their ages.

So here in the red square, that's the controls.

it's been well documented that as we get older,

not just there, but across most of our cortex,

And this is part of the reason why as we get older,

it's harder to figure things out and to remember things.

And what was interesting was that in this one region,

the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds,

suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent

the natural age-related decline in cortical structure.

So now, the critics, and there were  many critics,

said, well, you know, meditators, they're weird.

Maybe they were just like that before they started practising, right?

A lot of them were vegetarian, so maybe it had something to do with their diet,

or something else with their lifestyle, you know.

Couldn't possible be the meditation, it's something else, right?