Can mindfulness meditation help older adults sleep better? This randomized trial says yes. In just six weeks, participants in a community-based meditation course saw clinically meaningful improvements in sleep quality, outperforming even a structured sleep hygiene program. They also experienced less fatigue and depression, with benefits comparable to medication but without the side effects.

Can meditation slow aging at the cellular level? This study compared long-term meditators with non-meditators and found that those with a regular practice had significantly longer telomeres (the protective caps on chromosomes) as well as higher activity of the genes that help maintain them. The more years of meditation, the stronger the effect. These results suggest that consistent meditation may influence how we age by reaching all the way down to our DNA.

The authors of this study used deep brain recordings to show that even novice meditators can rapidly increase gamma activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during loving-kindness meditation—regions tied to emotion and memory—revealing meditation's immediate impact on the emotional brain.

Can depersonalization be a sign of progress rather than pathology? This paper explores how long-term meditators experience self-detachment not as dysfunction, but as a calm and continuous mode of awareness—one shaped by meaning, not fear. A deep dive into how interpretation transforms experience.

A meta-analysis of 111 studies shows that mindfulness training improves attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility, with the strongest benefits for accuracy-based tasks and those experiencing mental health challenges.

Meditation is known to boost attention, but how it achieves this isn't fully clear. This study explored how intensive meditation affects attention control and inflammation, revealing that participants on a three-month retreat significantly improved their ability to stay focused amid distractions. Surprisingly, meditation did not reduce automatic reactions to distractors, and participants with higher inflammation had weaker attention control. These findings underscore improved controlled attention as a primary benefit of meditation and suggest inflammation independently impacts cognitive function.

Not all meditation experiences are positive. This pioneering study documents the range and frequency of meditation-related challenges, from mild discomfort to severe psychological distress. By interviewing practitioners and teachers across Buddhist traditions, the researchers identify 59 types of adverse effects, challenging the narrative that meditation is risk-free.

Meditation can increase telomerase activity, which is associated with decreased health risks and diseases. This study found that participants in a three-month intensive meditation retreat showed increased telomerase activity, along with improvements in purpose in life, perceived control, and decreased neuroticism. The changes in telomerase activity were correlated with changes in psychological measures, suggesting that meditation can influence telomere length through psychological factors.

Expert meditators experience less unpleasantness from pain than novices, despite similar intensity ratings. This difference is linked to enhanced activity in the brain's salience network during pain, suggesting that meditation can modify the emotional response to pain and facilitate quicker habituation to repeated pain stimuli.

This paper investigates the emotional impact of mind wandering, utilizing a phone app to collect real-time data from thousands of participants worldwide, revealing that mind-wandering occurs frequently across various activities and is associated with decreased happiness. The findings suggest that the content of one's thoughts has a more significant influence on happiness than the nature of the activity being performed, highlighting the cognitive and emotional costs of not living in the moment.

This study compares activity in the default mode network (DMN) between meditation and an active task, for both meditators and non-meditators. The paper finds evidence that suppression of DMN processing may represent a central neural process in long-term meditation, and suggest that meditation leads to relatively reduced DMN processing beyond that observed during active cognitive tasks.

This paper measures the propensity for people to mind wander in both laboratory settings and every day life. The authors find that the propensity to mind wander is a stable cognitive characteristic, representing an individual dif- ference that is reliable across time, activities, and contexts, consistent with the idea that mind wandering represents a failure of executive control.

This study takes a group of untrained meditators and puts them through an 8-week course in Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The study finds that the meditation group have brain activity implying a more positive emotional frame. Furthermore, the meditation group had a significantly stronger immune response to a flu vaccine than the non-meditators. The authors conclude that a short training program in mindfulness meditation has demonstrable effects on both brain and immune function.

This study compares the brain wave activity of a group of seasoned meditators to that of meditation novices, both at rest and during meditation. It finds that experienced meditators generate extremely high amounts of gamma brain waves, associated with enhanced perception, consciouness, attention and memory. These gamma waves are elevated both in- and out- side of meditation. More meditation experience is correlated with stronger gamma waves.

This study presents the first fMRI and EEG evidence of the neural effects of jhana meditation. The results show that jhana meditation quiets the brain, while simultaneously increasing activity in the brain's pleasure centers and areas associated with attention and self-control.