If you’ve ever been on an elevator for nearly ten minutes you’ll appreciate the speed with which neuroscientist Dr. Sara Lazar gives one of the best “elevator speeches” on a complicated topic. She became interested in how yoga and meditation might effect the brain.
The following is an eight minute, high speed run down on some of her work. This is a TEDx event filmed in Cambridge, MA in 2011 where she explains the benefits of yoga and meditation in terms that are easy to understand and amazing to comprehend. In her research she has found that the size of some of the regions in our brain change with yoga and meditation and that the physical change is a thickening of our grey matter:
A link to the TEDx video: How Meditation Can Reshape Our Brains, Sara Lazar
Background to her work, the research team and their approach: https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/
Science continues to show the benefits of how by changing our thoughts we can literally change our minds. Neuroplasticity is a modern term that demystifies what may have been considered a fuzzy, fluffy “story” that yoga and meditation practitioners have been telling for centuries. A person can actually change the size, shape and condition of their brain by thinking thoughts – both good and bad.
Read more about the effects of meditation and yoga on trauma and neuroplasticity.