Mechanisms of white matter change induced by meditation training

Have your doctor analyze this and update your cognitive enhancement stroke protocol.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01220/full?utm_source=newsletter&

Michael I. Posner^1*, Yi-Yuan Tang² and Gary Lynch³

• ¹Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
• ²Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
• ³Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

Training can induce changes in specific brain networks and changes in brain state. In both cases it has been found that the efficiency of white matter as measured by diffusion tensor imaging is increased, often after only a few hours of training. In this paper we consider a plausible molecular mechanism for how state change produced by meditation might lead to white matter change. According to this hypothesis frontal theta induced by meditation produces a molecular cascade that increases myelin and improves connectivity.

In recent years there have been many reports of changes in white matter induced by training of human adults (see Zatorre et al., 2012 for a summary). Such changes usually involve training of specific networks involved in sensory discrimination, motor activity, or working memory. We call this form of training network training because it uses a specific task to induce changes in the underlying brain network. A different form of training involves training the brain state as occurs in the use of aerobic exercise or meditation, which we call state training (Tang and Posner, 2009; Tang et al., 2012b).

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