Medical meditation: MRI technology has been used to help trace what's going on inside of the brain of someone meditating. The findings show medical reasons why people feel better after meditaing.“Seinfeld” was a show about nothing, but a lot people really liked it and found it a worthwhile way to spend their time.

Could it be the same kind of situation for meditation? A new study thinks so.

Like “Seinfeld,” meditation is a lot of nothing – sitting still and concentrating. But the new research has focused in why it may be so effective for its practitioners. And actually, there’s a lot more going on in your head when you meditate than you would ever imagine.

Psychologists and therapists have known for a long time that talking about your feelings allows us to have more control over them. Through meditation, that process could be happening internally.

The researchers at UCLA hooked up test subjects to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and watched what was going on in their heads. The scans showed that putting negative emotions into words actually calmed down activity in the brain and helped people get rid of those bad thoughts.

Here’s how one step of the process worked. While hooked up to a fMRI, subjects were shown pictures of people making emotional expressions. With that, they were presented with a variety of words to describe the emotions being expressed in the pictures. For negative emotions, the fMRI recorded increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region of the brain. That’s an area where we deal with words and language. At the same time, activity in the amygdala, our brain’s area of emotional processing, calmed down.

When the process was repeated by asking participants to give personal names to the same faces expressing emotion, the results were different. The amygdala did not calm down.

Some of the participants in the study also completed a questionnaire to see how “mindful” they are. Mediation and mindfulness are practices that people can follow to connect deeper with their emotions without having a strong reaction to them.

Those whose questionnaires showed they were more “mindful” also had strong differences in their fMRI scans between the activity in their right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a stronger calming effect in their amygdala after labeling their emotions.

Tags : health, meditation, psychology, emotions

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