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∗2 Sharon Begley's recent book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine, 2007), provides one of the best and easiest-to-read overviews of neuroplasticity and the brain's potential to be changed through meditation. The research she documents underlies many of the neurological hypotheses that we will be introducing in this book. However, since the field has changed dramatically in the last two years, we will be focusing primarily on these new findings.

∗3 Actually, you have two thalami, two amygdalae, and two frontal and parietal lobes in your brain—one in each hemisphere—and each half can be involved in different neurological functions, but to keep things simple, we'll refer to them in singular tense.

2

DO YOU EVEN NEED GOD

WHEN YOU PRAY?

Meditation, Memory, and the Aging Brain

In the summer of 2006, I began a new line of research to see if meditation could have a positive effect on patients suffering from memory problems. As you know, the older we get, the more prone we are toward cognitive impairment, so we all have an investment in keeping our brain healthy, happy, and wise. Now, there are lots of things we can do to add extra years to our lives, but after we turn thirty, brain metabolism slowly begins to decline.1 We don't notice this until our later years, but like the engine of an aging car, things begin to break down. Gaskets can leak, the transmission fluid starts to dry out, and the spark plugs begin to misfire. Bit by bit we lose the optimal balance of neuro-plasticity, and this affects our memory, coordination, attention span, information processing, problem solving, and social decision-making skills.2 Unlike a car, we can't overhaul the brain or replace the electrical wiring with new parts. But we can give it a tune-up by “exercising” it in different ways.

Pharmaceutical companies are well aware of our national obsession for staying young, which is why they have invested billions of dollars in search of a chemical fountain of youth. But I was looking for evidence that meditation and prayer could be a better, cheaper, and safer way to go, so you can imagine my delight when I received a grant from the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation. The medical director, Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa, asked me to investigate how a specific form of meditation might affect the neural functioning of patients who suffered from memory loss.

This was very exciting for me. Our prior research showed how advanced meditators could consciously alter the normal functioning of different parts of the brain, but it did not answer the deeper question: Could meditation change our neural chemistry and circuitry in ways that enhanced our cognitive skills? And if it did, would such changes be temporary or permanent?

For years these questions have been an issue of considerable debate, and now we had an opportunity to find out. To make things more interesting, we'd be working with people who had little or no experience with meditation. We could actually watch what changes took place in the brain over time, and document them.

The practice we investigated is called Kirtan Kriya. The technique has its roots in the sixteenth-century spiritual traditions of northern India, and it became popular in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Specifically, this form of meditation integrates three elements: breathing, sound, and movement. The first element involves the conscious regulation of one's breath, and it is the foundation of many forms of Eastern meditation. Numerous well-documented studies have demonstrated how different forms of yoga and focused breathing can effectively reduce stress, blood pressure, anxiety, and a host of other health-related problems,4 while increasing alertness and cognitive functioning.5 In other recent studies, breathing meditations have been shown to have an effect on the regulation of immunity, aging, and cell death.6

The second element of Kirtan Kriya involves the repetition of the following sounds—sa, ta, na,