by David Hamilton Ph.D.

The scientific view of the brain was previously that it is hardwired. In other words, we are born with brain cells wired up in a particular way that is unchangeable except that our total brain cell count declines with age.

New discoveries in neuroscience have revamped that view. A common term now used is ‘plasticity’, where the brain moulds, changes, and grows depending upon what you are focusing upon.

So, say you were focusing on things that you were grateful for. Brand new connections would spring up between brain cells as you begin to grow an entirely new network connecting brain cells (neurons). This is called a neural network. Many neural networks are created by us….by what we choose to give our attention to.

Therefore your brain and body is not something that you are simply born with, whose health and functioning you can do nothing about. Instead, you are continually growing, changing, moulding, and shaping your brain and your body. You have far more of an effect on your mental and physical health than you’d think. In many ways, it comes down to what you choose to give your attention to.

And with practise you can develop great control over what you give your attention to. In a sense, you can build up your ‘attention muscle’ in the same way that an athlete might develop leg or arm muscles. Regular meditation is a great way to do this, and some recent neuroscience discoveries of meditators have confirmed this. Through repetitive meditation their brains grew significantly more neural connections than control groups who didn’t meditate. And in particular, much of this growth was found in the area of the brain that controls free will.

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David Hamilton is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief.  Get the DVD at:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Dr. David Hamilton

I love to meditate and have made it a daily practice. Being quite scientifically minded I love to monitor how it benefits me. Among other methods I often use the Heartmath FreezeFramer (see http://www.heartmath.com ) so that I can see how my meditations affect the rhythms of my heart.

Doing this helps me to stay in a meditative state for the duration of my meditations (usually 30 – 45 minutes). Any loss of concentration usually shows up quickly on the screen of my laptop as my rhythms lose their coherence. By periodically glancing at the screen, I am reminded to keep my focus.

Meditation has been shown to have many positive effects on the body. It is believed that around 80% of all health problems are either negatively affected by stress, or that stress had a hand in their creation. Meditation is a well-known antidote to stress and so has a positive effect on many health complaints.

Since the widespread use of MRI scanners, scientists have been able to explore the effects of meditation on the growth of the brain. In one recent study (published in the journal, ‘Neurobiology of Ageing’), scientists Giuseppe Pagoni and Milos Cekic, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, looked at the grey matter volume of the brain to measure the effects of Zen meditation.

Cerebral grey matter volume usually decreases with age, so the study compared the grey matter volume of 13 people performing Zen meditations against that of 13 control people who weren’t meditators.

What they found was that grey matter volume decreased as expected in the control group but not so with the meditators. In other words, meditation had a ‘neuroprotective’ effect: It slowed down the rate of ageing.

Many studies have shown similar anti ageing effects. It has been found also, for instance, that meditation can slow down the decline in levels of the hormone DHEA, which also usually declines with age.

David Hamilton is one of the experts in the documentary Beyond Belief: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com