Scientific Council Member Michael Posner led a study that demonstrates that just one month of meditation training has positive effects on mental health. Researchers believe that this finding may lead to new treatments for brain and behavior disorders. As reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 11th, students who had integrative body-mind training reported improvements in mood, reduced levels of anger, depression, anxiety and fatigue. They also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Dr. Posner said: "This study gives us a much more detailed picture of what it is that is actually changing. We did confirm the exact locations of the white-matter changes that we had found previously. And now we show that both myelination and axon density are improving. The order of changes we found may be similar to changes found during brain development in early childhood, allowing a new way to reveal how such changes might influence emotional and cognitive development."