La meditazione agisce davvero sul cervello. Effetti duraturi anche dopo il termine del programma.

Meditare significa produrre effetti duraturi sul proprio cervello. Lo dice una ricerca del Massachusetts General Hospital e della Boston University pubblicata su Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Stando ai test effettuati su due diverse tipologie di meditazione, l’effetto prodotto andrebbe oltre la pratica stessa e si proietterebbe anche a distanza di tempo. I ricercatori hanno verificato l’efficacia della meditazione compassionevole e della meditazione da attenzione consapevole. Gli effetti sono stati registrati attraverso risonanza magnetica cerebrale. Stando ai risultati, la prima ha aumentato la reazione dell’amigdala nei confronti degli stimoli negativi, aumentando in tal modo la capacità di provare compassione per gli altri. Nel secondo caso, la pratica ha mostrato una riduzione dell’amigdala destra in risposta a stimoli negativi e positivi, suggerendo l’idea che la meditazione la meditazione possa aumentare l’equilibrio emotivo e allontanare lo stress. Meditare quindi rappresenta un vero toccasana per la salute psicofisica.

Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state

Gaëlle Desbordes1,2*, Lobsang T. Negi3, Thaddeus W. W. Pace4, B. Alan Wallace5, Charles L. Raison6 and Eric L. Schwartz2,7

• 1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

• 2Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

• 3Department of Religion, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

• 4Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA

• 5Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

• 6Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine and Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, College of Agriculture, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

• 7Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in emotional processing of both positive and negative-valence stimuli. Previous studies suggest that the amygdala response to emotional stimuli is lower when the subject is in a meditative state of mindful-attention, both in beginner meditators after an 8-week meditation intervention and in expert meditators. However, the longitudinal effects of meditation training on amygdala responses have not been reported when participants are in an ordinary, non-meditative state. In this study, we investigated how 8 weeks of training in meditation affects amygdala responses to emotional stimuli in subjects when in a non-meditative state. Healthy adults with no prior meditation experience took part in 8 weeks of either Mindful Attention Training (MAT), Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT; a program based on Tibetan Buddhist compassion meditation practices), or an active control intervention. Before and after the intervention, participants underwent an fMRI experiment during which they were presented images with positive, negative, and neutral emotional valences from the IAPS database while remaining in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Using a region-of-interest analysis, we found a longitudinal decrease in right amygdala activation in the Mindful Attention group in response to positive images, and in response to images of all valences overall. In the CBCT group, we found a trend increase in right amygdala response to negative images, which was significantly correlated with a decrease in depression score. No effects or trends were observed in the control group. This finding suggests that the effects of meditation training on emotional processing might transfer to non-meditative states. This is consistent with the hypothesis that meditation training may induce learning that is not stimulus- or task-specific, but process-specific, and thereby may result in enduring changes in mental function.

Citation: Desbordes G, Negi LT, Pace TWW, Wallace BA, Raison CL and Schwartz EL (2012) Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 6:292. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00292

Received: 01 February 2012; Accepted: 03 October 2012;
Published online: 01 November 2012. Amishi P. Jha, University of Miami, USA

http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00292/abstract

http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=1520,

http://www.italiasalute.it/2410/pag2/La-meditazione-agisce-davvero-sul-cervello.html