How meditation can reshape our brains

Here’s a great little TedTalk by Sara Lazar – a neuroscientist who heads up a research lab that carries out meditation and yoga research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Her talk gives a quick snippet as to how yoga can lead to changes through neuroplasticity (changes that occur in the brain that involve the growth and reorganisation of neural networks). Her research indicates that meditation practise can potentially prevent or slow the normal age-related declines in brain structure that over time affects our learning, memory and emotion regulation abilities. Additionally regions associated with stress have been seen to reduce in size suggesting that we’re able to change the way we respond to stress in our environment – on top of all that, she demonstrates that all this can happen in as short a period of 8 weeks!

You can access the talk here.