Monash researchers appear on ABC's Catalyst
Dr Neil Bailey with Catalyst presenter Dr Graham Phillips
Researchers from the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences (MICCN), the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre and Campus Community Division featured in an enlightening episode of ABC’s Catalyst program last week.
The program, which aired on Tuesday, June 7, explored whether meditation, which is more popular than ever, can actually make you smarter, happier and healthier.
In Meditation: Can it really change you?, Catalyst presenter, Dr Graham Phillips, undertakes eight weeks of intensive mindfulness meditation, taught by Dr Richard Chambers from the Monash Community Campus Division, and undergoes a raft of rigorous brain tests and scans at the University to find out whether meditation can in fact enhance the brain's performance and even change its physical structure.
At the Brain and Mental Health Lab (BMH), MICCN Research Fellow, Dr Neil Bailey, uses EEG to measure Dr Phillips’ brain’s electrical activity before and after undertaking the 8 week program of mindfulness meditation.
While at Monash Biomedical Imaging, he undergoes before and after MRI brain scans, which are later analysed by Dr Chao Suo, also from MICCN and BMH.
The results showed some significant improvements in his brain performance and some dramatic changes in his brain structure.
For example, he performed better in three of the five behavioral tasks, including memory function and exerted less brain activity in the process. He also reduced his reaction time to unexpected events by almost half a second.
Dr Chao Suo also noted that Dr Phillips’ brain scans revealed some significant changes to the grey matter density in several parts of his brain.
The most dramatic finding was a 22.8 per cent increase in a part of his hippocampus, known as the dentate gyrus, where new brain cells are produced in adults.
In other words, the scans revealed that after 8 weeks of intensive mindfulness meditation, Dr Phillips was growing new brain cells.
As Dr Bailey explained to him, “you reversed the ageing process a little bit in your brain.”
“Everything we do affects the brain. So any skill we learn, anything we practice, will change the way our brain is structured,” Dr Neil Bailey, formerly of the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre (MAPrc) told the Catalyst program.
“So over time, if you're repeating a practice - for example, mindfulness - it's going to strengthen certain connections in the brain and change the grey matter, for example, volumes of the brain.”
He added that “People who practice mindfulness show better mental health than 70 per cent of the population on average. People with depression and anxiety have even larger gains than that.”
You can watch the the full episode here, along with a transcript of the program.
If you would like to find out more about the beneficial effects of mindfulness practice, or would like to try a course in mindfulness, visit the Mindfulness section on the Health and Wellbeing website.