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TEDx Talks
Published: 2012-01-24
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8rRzTtP7Tc
th good morning so when I was in graduate school I was a runner and a friend and I decided we gonna run the Boston Marathon and so we start training and we were trained and I developed knee and back problems so it's difficult their best and at home and I have to stop running and instead I should just drop as I was leaving the therapist's office
the food for their post office %HESITATION I saw an ad for vigorous yoga class that promise not only to promote flexibility but also to promote strength and %HESITATION career respiratory fitness so that also well this is a great way that I can stretch but also remain in shape and maybe I could instill run the Boston Marathon so I went to the across and am I really
enjoyed it except for the when the teacher would make all sorts of claims he also to medical claims also all sorts of the year claims about %HESITATION yes it'll help you you increase your compassion and open your heart and just like in my eyes would roll and %HESITATION yeah I think area I'm here for him toward stretch but was it yeah what was interesting was that
after a couple weeks I start noticing some of these changes I start noticing that I was calmer and there's better able to handle difficult situations and that indeed I was feeling more compassionate and open hearted towards other people and is better able to see things from other people's point of view and %HESITATION you know as like him you know how to speed up the speed and
%HESITATION I thought well maybe you know it's just a placebo response Richard Thomas Nephila so maybe that's that's my feeling so I decided to do a literature search to see if there's any research on this and lo and behold there was quite a bit chewing gum both yoga and meditation are extremely effective for decreasing stress they're also very good producing symptoms associated numerous diseases including depression
anxiety pain insomnia they also %HESITATION there's a couple of very good studies demonstrating it can actually improve your ability to pay attention and most interesting I thought virtually every study has shown that people just happier there Porta they're more satisfied than life and have a higher quality of life and so %HESITATION this was interesting to me and so I decided to switch and start doing this
or research and %HESITATION southerners scientists you know how could this be happening what's you know how can you something as silly as a yoga posture or sitting and watching a breath how could that lead to all the sorts of different types of our home changes so what we know is that whenever you engage in a behavior over and over again this can lead to changes in
your brain as it's referred to as neuro plasticity and what this means is that %HESITATION your brain is plastic and that the neurons can change how they talk to each other with experience and so %HESITATION there's couple studies demonstrating that you can actually detect this using machines like the MRI machine the first study was of juggling the two people who had never ever juggle before and
they scanned them and then the time of the jungle and it said keep practicing for three months they run back after three months and this game a second time and they found that they could actually attacked with MRI machine changes in the monogram batter in the brain of these people in areas that are important for detecting visual motion so I thought okay three months you know
%HESITATION can I just thought you can meditation change brain structure to you know that something is snow the symbolism juggling would by meditation so the first thing we did we recruited %HESITATION a bunch of people from the Boston area these are not monks or meditation teachers they're just average Joes who on average practice meditation about thirty forty minutes a day I put them in the scanner
and compare them to a group of people who are demographically matched but who don't meditate and what we found is this that there were indeed several regions of the brain there had more gray matter in the meditators compared to controls %HESITATION one of a dozen ana point out to you is here in the front of the brain in the air that's important for working memory an
executive decision making it was interesting about it was when we actually part of the data versus their ages so here in the red squares that's the controls and this is something you see actually it's been well documented that as we get older not just there but across most of our core tax and actually shrinks as we get older this is part the reason why as we
get older it's %HESITATION harder to figure things out into %HESITATION to to %HESITATION you to remember things it was interesting was that in this one region the fifty year old meditators have a similar cortex as a twenty five year olds suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent %HESITATION the natural age related decline incredible structure so now the critics and there were many critics
said well you know meditators and they're weird maybe they're just like that before they start practicing right or love them and they're vegetarian so maybe that's why do their diet or something of the lifestyle you know could possibly limitation assuming a lot right and to be fair %HESITATION you know that that could be true here with this first UDDI could not address that so we did
a second study %HESITATION and the study we did is we took people who had never met him before and with women scanner and then we put them through an eight week meditation based stress reduction program where they were told to meditate everyday for thirty to forty minutes and I was given again at the end of the eight weeks and this is what we found so what
you see is that %HESITATION several areas became larger and this slide we consider hippocampus %HESITATION and in the graph the controls are in blue and the %HESITATION meditation subjects are in red and what we see is that %HESITATION the hippocampus and this is the area that's important for learning and memory it's also important for motion regulation and %HESITATION what's interesting is there's less brain matter in
this region and people who have depression and PTSD another reason we identified with the temple pradal junction which is here but your ear it's important for perspective taking and empathy and compassion and again these are both functions which people report changing when they start practicing meditation and yoga another region we identified was the amygdala in the middle is the fighter flight part your brain and here
we actually found a decrease in gray matter and what was interesting was that the changing gray matter was correlated the change in stress so the more stress reduction people reported the smaller them into became and this is really interesting %HESITATION because it's sort of the opposite and parallel of with some %HESITATION animal studies have shown the charity and our colleagues using rodents %HESITATION they took rodents
who are just happy normal rodents and having their cage and then measure their make up and then they put them through a ten day stress regimen at the end of ten days they measured their Manila and this exact same now as part of their right brain grew so we found a decrease since with stress they founded increase with was interesting is that then they left for
animals alone and three weeks later they went back and tested them again three weeks later that same parliament alert was still large and the animals even though they were in their original cages where they're happy were still acting stressed out so they you know were carrying the corner and they just weren't exploring the space where they had before come and so this is the exact opposite
of what we thought the humans because of the humans nothing has changed their environment they still have their stressful jobs all the difficult book one of us are still being difficult and the economy still sucked but yet you know they're Michelob got smaller and they were reporting less stress and so together this really show that the change the Mykola it's not responding to the changing environment
but rather it's representing the change in people's right my reaction relationship term fireman on and then the other thing that the study shows us is that %HESITATION it's also it wasn't just the people are saying oh I feel better are %HESITATION that it was a placebo response or that they're trying to please us there's actual neurobiological reason why they're saying they're felt less stressed and so
