Meditation May Help Keep the Brain Young

It’s normal for our brains to get smaller as the years pass, but there are things you can do to slow that shrinkage. According to recent research, meditation may be one of those things. 

Scientists compared the brains of 50 adults ages 24 to 77 who, on average, had meditated for nearly 20 years and 50 similar people who did not meditate. The brains of those who meditated were aging at a slower rate compared with the non-meditators, according to the study, published in 2023 in Brain Sciences. 

The researchers focused on a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that’s involved in processing emotions, learning, language and working memory (your brain’s short-term “scratch pad,” where information is held until you use it). The OFC is especially susceptible to age-related shrinkage. As expected, the brain scans of study participants ages 50+ showed they had smaller OFCs, overall, than younger participants. But the older non-meditators had steeper declines in volume than those who regularly meditated. This indicates that a regular meditation practice might slow brain shrinkage.

Study co-author Eileen Luders, now an associate professor of psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, published an earlier study that also examined brain scans of meditators and non-meditators. She estimated that, by age 50, meditators had brains that were 7.5 years younger than those who didn’t meditate. 

Not only do the brains of meditators look younger, they may also function better. In a study of 146 adults ages 65 to 80 published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in 2021, those who completed eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training improved their scores on cognitive tests; people in the control group, who were assigned to do eight weeks of number and word puzzles, did not.

Sara Lazar, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, has been meditating since 1996. Her advice for those interested in getting started: “I strongly recommend finding a teacher, because beginners tend to have a lot of questions, and it’s easy to get discouraged or think you aren’t doing it correctly.” ​

Visit our Find Your Calm page for meditations to try.