Can meditation restructure our brains? Several recent studies have claimed that, with daily practice, meditation can boost grey matter volume and density in some brain areas in just eight short weeks. But a study published in Science Advances—one with the largest sample size yet—was not able to replicate these findings.
“There was frankly a lot of hype . . . saying that if you meditated for eight weeks you could change the volume of your prefrontal cortex. That is false,” study coauthor Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Scientist. He adds that beneficial functional and behavioral changes due to meditation are likely to occur much faster, however.
“From a methodological standpoint, [the study] really addressed some of the concerns that are common in a lot of imaging research,” says Matthew Jerram, a psychology researcher at Suffolk University in Boston who was not involved in the ...
