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Meditation has long been practiced by followers of the Buddhist religion, but not until recently has it been recognized for its cognitive benefits.
Research supports that mindful meditation improves memory, correlated to development in areas throughout the brain.
While many students at LRHS have study methods that work for them, meditation could be a valuable tool in improving their memory retention.
Meditation is essentially an exercise for the mind, aimed towards making the brain more efficient.
In an article from the Insight Meditation Center, Gil Fronsdale explained the basics of mindful mediation: “In its Buddhist context, mindfulness meditation has three overarching purposes: knowing the mind; training the mind; and freeing the mind… Knowing, training and freeing the mind develop together.”
Frosndale continued, “The more we know about ourselves, the easier it is both to train ourselves and to know what needs to be released. The more our minds are trained, the easier it is to know ourselves and the more strength and wisdom we have to let go. And the more we let go, the fewer the obstructions to understanding ourselves and the easier it will be to train the mind.”
Herein lies the connection between meditation and memory. The ability to do skills and remember things more efficiently are improved by neuroplasticity—the process of training the brain by altering its synapses and pathways.
Mindful meditation is a method of neuroplasticity, as it involves knowing, training, and freeing the brain.
Neuroplasticity is defined on whatisneuroplasticity.org as “the potential that the brain has to reorganize by creating new neural pathways to adapt, as it needs… The more you focus and practice something, the better you become at the new skill you are learning.
“By doing this, new neural connections are created in the brain as synapses that don’t normally fire together do, which help us to sharpen our new skill [or improve our memory].”
Therefore, meditation results in the positive benefits that accompany all exercises in neuroplasticity.
Research from a 2011 study conducted by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) supports this conclusion.
Sara Lazar, PhD, a senior author in the study, explained, “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.
“[The research] demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
The MGH study concluded that meditation produced gray matter throughout the brain. During meditation, new neural pathways are constructed in the left hippocampus (the region responsible for memory, learning, and emotions) and the posterior cingulate cortex (which also dictates memory and emotions) among other regions.
In place of meditation, LRHS students have their own methods of retaining what they learn in class. Given, most of those students report that their memory retention is negatively impacted by stress.
Student Cameron Weber said, “When I study, I like to outline things I know are important to what we are learning, and then I just read [the notes] over and over again… <As students>, I feel like stress really does impact our ability to remember things because when you’re stressed, your brain is kind of all over the place, and that makes it hard to remember what you need to remember.”
“If I need to remember something really important that I think I’ll forget, I get a friend to quiz me on it, or I quiz them on it, which actually does help,” said Peyton Kiel. “When I get stressed, I forget basic things…”
Neuroplasticity is a process that can benefit everyone; meditation is not exclusively for Buddhists.
Consider practicing mindful meditation to improve your brain’s ability to retain information and reap the benefits of neuroplasticity.
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