Your brain has an age. You can change the slope. Another Live Discussion with Richie & Cort Tuesday 8pm ET
The next Dharma Lab LIVE AMA is Tuesday (tomorrow, 6/30) at 8pm ET. We will cover Neuroscience, the brain, practice.
Got a question? Send it now (by responding here) and we’ll prioritize it on air.
You can’t stop your brain from aging. You may be able to change the rate of change. (From Dharma Lab May AMA)
A listener with early Alzheimer’s asked Dr. Richard J. Davidson whether decades of meditation had done anything measurable.
You can compute a person’s “brain age” from an MRI. Across a thousand people, brain age tracks chronological age closely, but not exactly. Some brains run younger than their owner. Some run older.
“There’s no evidence that there’s anything we can do to stop the brain from aging. It happens to all of us. But there is the possibility of influencing the rate at which our brain ages.” — Dr. Richie Davidson
Over many years, the lab took repeated scans of one meditator, Mingyur Rinpoche, (who has logged 30k+ hours of meditation) and measured how fast his brain was aging. It is aging as is everyone’s. But compared to a thousand peers his age, his brain was aging more slowly than all of them.
Some practices lower inflammation in the body, and probably the brain, and inflammation drives a lot of age-related decline. His view is that practice started early and kept up may be protective.
You can’t stop your brain from aging. The open question is whether you can slow the rate. The early evidence suggests you might.
Also in last month’s session
A few of the threads:
Multitasking is a myth. It doesn’t really exist. You’re switching, fast, and switching has a measurable cost. (The average adult opens their phone about 152 times a day.)
A psychedelic gives you a state. Meditation gives you a trait. Why “altered states” and “altered traits” are not the same thing, and what that means for healing trauma.
Healing yourself isn’t selfish. Plus a story about a dying friend who couldn’t move, and gave more than most healthy people do.
Can meditation help a brain recover from a stroke? An answer about neuroplasticity, and a study about matching intensity to injury.
Is awareness a sixth sense? What the contemplative traditions and the neuroscience each say.
Check out Richie’s Latest Science Post if you Missed it:
The Moment We Realized Meditation Could Change the Brain by Dr. Richard J. Davidson
Welcome to our Seminal Research Series. Each installment takes one landmark study from the Center for Healthy Minds and puts it in context: where it came from, what it found, and how it helped shape the field of contemplative science.
Prefer video?
The full episodes and shorter clips are on our YouTube channel. A good place to start is our episode on boredom, and why we’ve nearly lost the ability to be bored at all.
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