Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment students practice the Transcendental Meditation technique in front of TM teacher Siggi Lamothe, right, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004, in Fairfield, Iowa. Students at the school do TM, the practice of invoking a state of deep relaxation brought about by mentally repeating a word, or "mantra," for about 15 minutes several times a day. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Duke may have one of the best law schools in the country, but in recruiting new students, its promotional materials point out that Durham's bar scene has exploded in the past few years.

At Carnegie Mellon, the pitch is similar: "Pittsburgh rocks after dark," prospective students are told.

The story is the same at schools across the country. The "student experience," which often includes binge drinking and raucous parties for undergrads, is for many students as important as getting good grades and a degree.

The Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, might as well be on another planet. Its consciousness-based education involves daily transcendental meditation for its 1,200-something students, organic vegetarian meals, and four hours a week of required physical activity. Its ideal routine stresses rest as the basis of activity, including a "strongly" encouraged 10 p.m. curfew.

That early bedtime curtain call may be what prospective students thought they left behind in grade school. But the universitys routines, particularly regular transcendental meditation practice which involves sitting comfortably with eyes closed is not invasive, says Craig Pearson, Maharishis executive vice president.

Meditators report that once they begin to meditate, they naturally find themselves taking better care of themselves," he says. "But its not necessary to embrace any different lifestyle.

And, according to Pearson, students who meditate can expect to see a variety of benefits, from increased grade point averages to better focus, memory, energy, ego development and brain integration. Meditation, he adds, can also improve relationships and lower stress and anxiety levels. The benefits usually begin to be evident quickly, he says.

With its daily meditation, Maharishi is a good test case for the efficacy of meditation for students. But other schools, including Brown University and UCLA, have found benefits to meditative practices without making it a requirement.

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The rise of meditation on college campuses

Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment students practice the Transcendental Meditation technique in front of TM teacher Siggi Lamothe, right, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004, in Fairfield, Iowa. Students at the school do TM, the practice of invoking a state of deep relaxation brought about by mentally repeating a word, or "mantra," for about 15 minutes several times a day. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Duke may have one of the best law schools in the country, but in recruiting new students, its promotional materials point out that Durham's bar scene has exploded in the past few years.

At Carnegie Mellon, the pitch is similar: "Pittsburgh rocks after dark," prospective students are told.

The story is the same at schools across the country. The "student experience," which often includes binge drinking and raucous parties for undergrads, is for many students as important as getting good grades and a degree.

The Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, might as well be on another planet. Its consciousness-based education involves daily transcendental meditation for its 1,200-something students, organic vegetarian meals, and four hours a week of required physical activity. Its ideal routine stresses rest as the basis of activity, including a "strongly" encouraged 10 p.m. curfew.

That early bedtime curtain call may be what prospective students thought they left behind in grade school. But the universitys routines, particularly regular transcendental meditation practice which involves sitting comfortably with eyes closed is not invasive, says Craig Pearson, Maharishis executive vice president.

Meditators report that once they begin to meditate, they naturally find themselves taking better care of themselves," he says. "But its not necessary to embrace any different lifestyle.

And, according to Pearson, students who meditate can expect to see a variety of benefits, from increased grade point averages to better focus, memory, energy, ego development and brain integration. Meditation, he adds, can also improve relationships and lower stress and anxiety levels. The benefits usually begin to be evident quickly, he says.

With its daily meditation, Maharishi is a good test case for the efficacy of meditation for students. But other schools, including Brown University and UCLA, have found benefits to meditative practices without making it a requirement.

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Students can manage stress with meditation, but should regard it cautiously

The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is justnow being confirmed with fMRI or EEG. The practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits from changes ingrey matter volume to reduced activity in the me centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ. Skeptics, of course, may ask what good are a few brain changes if the psychological effects arent simultaneously being illustrated? Luckily, theres good evidence for those as well, with studies reporting that meditation helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being.

Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain

Last week, astudy from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants whod been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasnt as pronouncedas the non-meditators. We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating, said study author Florian Kurth. Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain. Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brains Me Center

One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried outat Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain networkresponsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts a.k.a., monkey mind. The DMN is on or active when were not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, its the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, though its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it.

Its Effects Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety

A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training. A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing, says Goyal. But thats not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways. Meditation isnt a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but its one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.

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7 Ways Meditation Can Actually Change The Brain

Thomas Barwick via Getty Images

Preserving the brain's most important tissue -- the neuron-rich gray matter -- could be accomplished through meditation, according to a new study at the University of California at Los Angeles.

As early as the mid-to-late 20s, the brain starts to show the effects of aging, as its volume and weight start to dwindle.

Previous research has suggested that those who practice meditation have less age-related degradation in their white matter, so the UCLA team, whose study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, sought to build on these findings.

"We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," says co-author Dr. Florian Kurth, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center. "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain."

In the study, the team compared 50 participants who had years of experience in meditation against 50 more who had none in order to understand the relationship between age and gray matter.

Participants ranged in age from 24 to 77 and each group consisted of 28 men and 22 women.

In the group that consisted of people who meditated, the average amount of experience was 20 years and the most experienced among them had been doing so for 46 years.

The research team captured the state of participants' brains using scans taken with high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology and found that gray matter declines with age, although less so for those who meditate.

While the findings are encouraging, the researchers caution that they were unable to establish a casual connection between practicing meditation and preserving gray matter.

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Meditation Can Literally Keep Your Brain Young: Study

LOS ANGELES (KABC) --

Making meditation easy and accessible is at the heart of what Diana Winston teaches her students. She started her practice 25 years ago.

"I feel a youthfulness, a happiness, from a meditating mind," Winston said.

Could meditation be behind her younger outlook?

Researchers with the UCLA Brain Mapping Center scanned the brains of people who have been meditating for years as well as those who haven't meditated at all.

After about the mid-20s, our brain tissue begins to wither. This may be one reason why we become more forgetful.

"Less brain matter in some regions is associated with less cognitive functioning," said Dr. Florian Kurth.

Kurth and his colleagues found that in the brains of people who meditated, the shrinkage of gray matter was less.

"What was kind of surprising about this was we found this effect throughout the whole brain, basically," Kurth said.

How meditation protects the brain is going to be the subject of further study, but Kurth theorizes it might be a two-pronged approach. First, meditation reduces stress and protects the brain. Second, it can help build up certain parts of the brain.

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Can meditation keep your brain youthful?

Older people who have sleep problems found more relief from a mindful meditation program than from a conventional sleep education program, researchers reported.

In another study, researchers found that meditation -- at least for people who did it for years -- may slow age-related loss of the brains gray matter.

In the sleep study, published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Internal Medicine, scientists used 49 people in Los Angeles 55 and older who had expressed moderate sleep complaints. They were split into two groups, one of which was taught to meditate and the other given behavioral sleep education. The meditators slept better and had better results in related issues such as depression, based on results of a standard measure of sleep quality. But the researchers said more work was needed to determine whether meditation is a long-term solution to sleep problems.

Sleep problems, the study noted, are common among older people, and those complaints often go untreated.

Previous research has shown that the movement-based meditation called Tai Chi can help with the quality of older peoples sleep. The form used in the current study is mindfulness meditation, which is characterized by paying attention to the moment, and not judging your thoughts or observations, said the senior researcher, Dr. Michael Irwin, a UCLA psychiatry professor and director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Semel Institute. UCLA and USC collaborated on the research.

The participants used a meditation program fromUCLAs Mindful Awareness Research Center, taught by a teacher with more than 20 years of experience. The program is available to the public. The second group spent as much time in their education program.

David Black, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Keck School of Medicine at USC and the director of the American Mindfulness Research Assn., plans to look at the effects of combining the two methods on sleep.

Mindfulness, the researchers wrote, is believed to function on brain processes that mediate the relationship between perception of things and ideas and appraisal of them.

In the second study, researchers from UCLA reported in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that meditation appears to help preserve the gray matter in the brain. They compared 50 people who had meditated for an average of 20 years with 50 who did not.

Meditation did not halt the loss of gray matter, they said.

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Meditating might help older people sleep, researchers say

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Estela Villanueva-Whitman, Special to the Register 11:02 p.m. CST March 7, 2015

Fred Nelson leads Meditation Around Town, a free monthly meditation session, on Feb. 19 at Iowa Methodist Medical Center.(Photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register)

Dennis Kelly discovered meditation more than 44 years ago; he later shared it at his workplace and now is involved with Meditation Around Town, bringing the experience to venues across central Iowa.

The program is in its second year, an offshoot of the popular Yoga in the Park, which Kelly developed six years ago.

If youve never really experienced meditation or youre open to giving it a try, its a safe environment. Theres no pressure and nobody asking you to join anything, he said.

Part of the experience is discovering what helps quiet the mind, Kelly said.

Kelly began meditating as a sophomore at the University of South Dakota after seeing a flier for Transcendental Meditation. Hes also a reiki master and practices yoga and EFT, or emotional freedom technique, also known as tapping. Before retiring, he brought yoga and meditation to his workplace, John Deere Financial in Johnston.

Ive always enjoyed energy work and self-development and the inner journey aspect of life, he said.

During a trip to Chicago, Kelly saw a flier for Yoga in the Park. He took a hotel towel with him and joined the group at Millennium Park, all the while thinking he could create something similar in Des Moines.

Kelly began talking to Des Moines parks officials and began the yoga program at Grays Lake. Although he no longer organizes that event, it is still going strong, drawing 200 to 300 people every Saturday in the warmer months.

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Meditation events help central Iowans