Mindfulness Can Change the Brain

One Heart Song

Forbes magazine featured a great article, titled “7 Ways Meditation [Mindfulness] Can Actually Change the Brain”, by health care writer, Alice G. Walton. According to the author, research has shown some very exciting discoveries that support everything experienced mindfulness practitioners have been saying for centuries.

Not only does it produce measurable changes in the brain’s physiology, such as enhanced connectivity between the brain centers and increased gray matter, but it has effects that are noticeable in the practitioner’s personality. Reports from the studies showed mindfulness:

  • Helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression
  • Improves attention and concentration
  • Increases overall psychological well-being.

“One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., ‘monkey mind.’”