A new study conducted at IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, shows that the subjective feeling of well-being experienced by many people with the practice of meditation is correlated with specific changes in the brain. The research, which appeared in Brain and Cognition, examined the effects of the technique known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), which consists of silent repetition of a meaningless sound, a "mantra."
For the study, conducted at the Molecular Mind Laboratory (MoMiLab) of the IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, the researchers enrolled 34 healthy young volunteers and divided them in two groups. The first one practiced Transcendental Meditation 40 minutes per day in two sessions of 20 minutes each, one in the morning and the other in the evening; the second group did not change its daily routine.
At the beginning of the study, the researchers also measured through psychometric questionnaires the anxiety and stress level of all the participants, as well as their ability to manage stressful situations. Each individual was also subjected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging test (fMRI), in order to measure brain activity at rest and changes in the functional connectivity among different cerebral areas. After three months, at the end of the study, the same tests were repeated. (MORE)
Source: Medical Xpress
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