Meditation has many advantages, it is a known fact. A research done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard Medical School suggested that daily meditation can slow down brain aging.
This was done based on the meditation practices of a Buddhist monk who has been doing it religiously for long. The brain of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a 41-year-old Buddhist Tibetan monk was thus studied.
Over his lifetime, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has demonstrated an above-average ability to meditate, and graduated to teaching the practice to others many years ago. The researchers scanned his brain via an MRI machine four times over the past 14 years. Over the same period, the researchers also obtained MRI brain scans of a control group consisting of 105 other adults from the local area who were near in age to Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
This was analysed with the help of an AI system called the Brain Age Gap Estimation (BrainAge) framework. And the system found his age to be 33 while the others were found to be in “typical ageing band.”
The researchers concluded that his brain was aging at a slower rate than the control group. The researchers note that the BrainAge system did find some parts of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain that had aged in ways similar to the control group, suggesting that brain aging differences between individuals may be due to coordinated changes throughout a person’s gray matter. They also noted that they had found evidence showing that Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain had matured earlier than the brains of the others in the control group
