Ask Marieke

The dancing, meditating, scientist

[askmarieke]

Is it true that meditation can grow or shrink certain parts of the brain?

Everything shrinks and grows your brain! Yes, so meditation does so too. In meditation we practise certain mental habits, and this affects your brain. There have been studies that showed that a certain part of your brain called the hippocampus seems to grow when you practise meditation for only 8 weeks. But most likely your brain will revert back to its old ways if you stop meditating after those 8 weeks!

[askmarieke]

What’s the difference between meditating and just sitting in a room doing nothing?

Difficult question: can you ever just do nothing? Probably when you "do nothing" your mind is not completely blank, and instead you will be mind-wandering. You may be daydreaming about an upcoming vacation, you may be reliving a fight over breakfast or planning your grocery list. When you are meditating, you may also find yourself mind-wandering, but the goal would be to be actually aware that these are images playing through your head--you would realize that you are not your thoughts, but they are just playing through your head. Importantly, you would also have a fundamental attitude of friendliness towards these thoughts.Your brain will also look a bit different: Judson Brewer and Kathleen Garrison found in a study of meditators that when they were observing their thoughts effortlessly, that a part of their brain called the posterior cingulate cortex was less active compared to when they were very distracted and wrapped up in their thoughts. Work by Kalina Christoff further shows that when you are mind-wandering with awareness of your thoughts, your brain looks differently than when you are mind-wandering without awareness: the parts of the brain that generate thoughts to mind-wander about (mostly memories) are less constrained by the frontal parts of the brain.

[askmarieke]

Marieke van Vugt is a neuroscientist, but also likes to dance in her free time. She can answer questions about meditation, neuroscience, ballet, mind-wandering, and the intersection between all these things.