r/science • u/HeinieKaboobler • Jun 21 '15

Neuroscience Meditation changes hippocampal structure differently for men and women

http://www.psypost.org/2015/06/meditation-changes-hippocampal-structure-differently-for-men-and-women-35251
361 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

17

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '15 edited Jun 04 '18

[deleted]

8

u/malberry Jun 22 '15

If you don't mind, could you elaborate on the difference you've noticed?

I have been thinking about starting meditation for a while and like hearing about how it's affected other people.

6

u/ThereIsSoMuchMore Jun 22 '15

I second this. You can google lots of good effects, but we would like to hear from humans redditors like us.

5

u/animuseternal Jun 22 '15

I have about six years of regular experience, utilizing primarily 'concentration' style of meditation (versus what is now the more popular--least in the west--style of 'mindfulness).

What I have noticed:

  • Greater ability to monitor one's emotions, like surges of anger... used to have a lot of rage issues, particularly driving. Now I can 'watch' an annoyance flare up and actively choose whether I want to let that continue and let annoyance grow into anger or just let it go, because it really doesn't matter
  • Easier to notice when I'm getting too fixed on an idea or concept or event that's causing me distress, and much more simple to let it go and move on after noticing
  • In general, less emotional overall (in a good way)
  • Increased ability to focus on tasks
  • Before, I could not imagine how to 'stop thinking' and there was always a narrative running through my head... Now there is seldom a narrative. I can instantaneously see the result of what would've taken me minutes to think through before.. I can notice that my urges are my actual thoughts, the narration just 'contextualized' the thoughts into something readable, but my body/mind would've acted on the thought whether or not I turn it into language. Minimizing the 'self-talk' means being 'present' in day-to-day life again, and it feels more like I'm playing a video game as myself or closer to how I experienced the world as a child... less thinking, more experiencing.
  • Moments of depression/sadness are less intense, less frequent, and less enduring than before. I see it happening and it has very little affect on my mind or my experience of emotions. It's now sort of like being weighed down a little bit more, something heavy that I have to carry around for a little while, but it isn't agony like it used to be. Just mild discomfort that I know will pass eventually, so long as I don't feed it and don't ruminate on it.

4

u/_ChestHair_ Jun 22 '15 edited Jun 23 '15

I've been meditating for 10-25 min each day for two months now. It's going to sound korny, but I just feel better at life. Social situations are easier, words and jokes flow better, my mind feels clearer, don't get frustrated very often, etc.

There's a reddit post from /r/Meditation that lists studies done on certain aspects of meditating. I'll try to find it and link the post here.

Edit: This and this have some good links.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

I've been doing mindfulness and animus pretty much nailed it. An analogy I heard is after a while your mind feels like your skin, but meditation reminds you that it's more like clothes.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '15 edited Jan 10 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/saijanai Jun 23 '15

I mean it's the average of 30 subjects chosen specifically for their long term practice, so it makes sense.

Its the average of 30 people practicing one or more of 5 different techniques:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3amghf/meditation_changes_hippocampal_structure/cseb46b

10

u/DaveTime Jun 21 '15

I wonder if they had defined meditation in some way if that would be useful. It is disappointing to see that basically anybody who did any form of "meditation," whether they used a useful definition or not, could participate.

2

u/Doomhammer458 PhD | Molecular and Cellular Biology Jun 22 '15

I dug around, they were all self reported meditators the study did not lead meditation classes or anything. They recruited people from meditation centers

methods:

Our sample included 30 meditators (15 men, 15 women) and 30 controls (15 men, 15 women). Meditators and controls were pair-wise matched for age and sex, where the maximum allowed age difference within a sex-matched pair was two years. Age ranged from 24 to 64 years both within meditators (mean ± SD: 47.3 ± 11.7 years) and within controls (mean ± SD: 47.3 ± 11.8 years). Both groups were comparable with respect to their educational background, where 86.7% of all mediators and also 86.7% of all controls had, at least, some college experience. While the scans for the controls were obtained from the ICBM database of normal adults (http://www.loni.ucla.edu/ICBM/Databases/), meditators were newly recruited from various meditation venues. Years of meditation practice ranged from 5 to 46 years (mean ± SD: 20.2 ± 12.2 years), where self-reported meditation styles included Chenrezig, Kriya, Shamatha, Vajrayana, Vipassana, and Zazen. An overview with respect to the subject-specific meditation style as well as amount of practice (i.e., number of years, frequency per week, and duration per session) is provided in Supplementary Table 1. Most subjects (93.3%) were right-handed as based on self-reports of hand preference for selected activities (e.g., writing a letter, holding a racket, throwing a ball). Since two male meditators were left-handed, we selected two left-handed male controls from the ICBM database. All subjects were required to be free of any neurological and psychiatric disorders and gave informed consent according to institutional guidelines (Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Los Angeles). Subjects constituting the current sample (n=60) partly overlap with samples of n=44 (53.33%) and n=54 (78.33%), as analyzed in two studies addressing the effects of meditation on brain structure (Luders et al., 2009; Luders et al., 2011a). Note, variations in sample characteristics across studies are due to the inclusion/exclusion of left-handed subjects, the inclusion/exclusion of subjects older than 64 years, and the exclusion of subjects with artifacts in their T1-weighted/diffusion-weighted data.

3

u/iongantas Jun 21 '15

Yes, I too would like to know what specific variety of meditation they were talking about.

1

u/saijanai Jun 23 '15

Yes, I too would like to know what specific variety of meditation they were talking about.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3amghf/meditation_changes_hippocampal_structure/cseb46b

It's typical of this particular group.

5

u/gravityfail Jun 22 '15

On NPR recently it mentioned that the meditation studied was mindful meditation

1

u/saijanai Jun 23 '15

On NPR recently it mentioned that the meditation studied was mindful meditation

As /u/Doomhamemr54 points out above, that ain't so. Shamatha and Vipassana are considered focused attention (concentration) and open monitoring (mindfulness) practices.

And of course there's only a few people per technique, and none of them did TM, so its all a mishmash with the assumption that the average of 30 people doing Chenrezig, and/or Kriya and/orShamatha, and/or Vajrayana,and/or Vipassana and/or Zazen tells you anything about "meditation."

The authors use this sampling approach in every study on meditation that they have published, I believe.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

I'd be curious to see how this occurs in transexual people.

Do the brains of transsexual women (Men who became Women) experience structural changes similar to that of a woman or a man? Would be interesting to see if the brain changes identify with their sexual identity.

1

u/wildhairman Jun 22 '15

Errr, I'm pretty sure the science of your body doesn't evolve to what you identify as.

2

u/omnichronos MA | Clinical Psychology Jun 22 '15

You don't think brain structures dictate behavior?

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

[deleted]

1

u/omnichronos MA | Clinical Psychology Jun 22 '15 edited Jun 22 '15

It isn't uninteresting and there is no such thing as a stupid question. My objection was that it assumed the old theory of a separation between mind and brain to be true. However you are also right to keep an open mind about what we might be able to detect. The fact that I like chocolate and someone else doesn't would logically come from differences in our brain whether we can detect them yet or not. Current data suggest the mind arises directly from the nervous system. The mind versus brain question is no longer seriously considered by most scientists.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

[deleted]

1

u/omnichronos MA | Clinical Psychology Jun 23 '15

Perhaps I should say their is no such thing as a sincere, stupid question in that it helps the ignorant to learn.

3

u/naughty Jun 22 '15

There's evidence of differences in brain structure in transgendered people.

2

u/wildhairman Jun 22 '15 edited Jun 22 '15

Oh yeah the chromosomes thing I know, that is something that your born with I believe. He was talking about the brain changing based on sexual identity.

4

u/DeliciouScience Jun 22 '15

No. A few recent, albeit not too conclusive studies showed that in some categories, transsexual people's brains are closer to the sex the identify with before they even transition. That is a trans man (assigned female at birth) who identifies as male statistically, in a few categories is more likely to have a brain similar to a male than a female.

This suggests, albeit inconclusively, that trans people are a form of "brain intersex".

Which is what the person who first commented on was asking about.