Meditation slows the aging of a Buddhist monk's brain
Tibetan Buddhist monk Yonghe Mingyur Rinpoche is a renowned practitioner and teacher of meditation; he began to meditate when he was only nine years old.
In a recently published long-term study, scientists found that the brain of a 41-year-old monk looks eight years younger: perhaps it was meditation that allowed him to slow down brain aging.
The study was conducted by experts at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Researchers studied the brain of Yonge Mingyur Rinpoche using MRI four times over a 14 year period; The first MRI scan was done when the monk was 27 years old.
At the same time, 105 adults (about the same age as a Buddhist monk) from Madison, Wisconsin, performed an MRI scan of the brain; they became a control group that allowed scientists to track brain aging in ordinary people.
Scientists then used the Brain Age Gap Estimation (BrainAGE) machine learning tool, which measures brain age based on gray matter.
