Meditation and Successful Cognitive Aging

In May I attended a conference at Massachusetts General Hospital on midlife women's health. One to the topics was meditation and successful cognitive aging with a presentation by Sara W. Lazar, Ph. Dr. Lazar "is an associate researcher in the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School. The focus of her research is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of yoga and meditation, both in clinical settings and in healthy individuals."

She discussed components of cognitive function such as sustained attention, episodic memory, working memory and mental flexibility. She reviewed several studies looking at the effects of meditation on these functions through both testing and neuroimaging.

One such study looked at 120 healthy older adults ages 65-80 with normal cognitive functioning and no prior experience with meditation or yoga. They were randomized to mindfulness mediation or brain games (crossword puzzles, sudoku, etc) for an 8 week class but 40 minutes of guided meditation or games daily. They underwent cognitive testing at baseline, at the end of the 8 week program and at 12 and 24 months after the program had ended.

The group that practiced meditation showed an increased ability for sustained attention after the program which persisted and continued to increase through the 24 month follow up while the group that did brain games showed improvement at the 8 week mark but then declined throughout the additional 24 months of follow up.

Looking at memory specificity, the control group showed a significant decline from completion of the program to the 12 month testing while the meditation group showed no decline. A similar effect was found on mental flexibility with the mediation group showing improvement throughout the 24 month follow up and the control group showing progressive decline.

Her conclusions were that you can teach an old dog new tricks and you can benefit from starting meditation at mid life. At this point there isn't enough data to know how much meditation is needed to get such benefits but a good guideline would be similar to physical exercise with 20-40 minutes/day for 5 days/week. There is quite a bit of data looking at Headspace (an app with guided meditation for 10 minutes/day) and showing that it is beneficial. Most people agree that consistency is very important. An app like Headspace is beneficial for stress reduction. For trying to help manage anxiety or depression, it is recommended that you work with a teacher and not just use an app.

She answered questions on Netflix binging and social media. Neither of these are mindful activities and are antithetical to meditation. She also commented on exercise and how it can be a mindful activity but there needs to be an emphasis on the mindful component. Yoga in particular often provides a guided mindful component. More research is needed but interesting ideas!