Different Meditation Types Train Distinct Parts Of Your Brain

If you do crunches daily, you’ll get a nice six-pack abdomen; if you focus your training on cycling, you’ll get firmer thighs. Likewise, new studies from the Max Planck Institute in Germany show, you can get different outcomes from different kinds of meditation. It was already known that gaining a new ability, like learning a foreign language or giving up a bad habit, physically changes the brain. But now scientists set out to analyze how mindfulness meditation, perspective-taking meditation and compassion-based meditation affect the minds and bodies of people.

The MRI scans showed relevant changes in the respective areas of the brain, like the attention control region, the one responsible for processing emotions and in the area that helps bring emotions into conscious awareness.

“Tania Singer, a social neuroscientist and the lead researcher on the study, says that meditation courses should be better designed for specific outcomes, just as exercise programmes might target certain physical weaknesses. “It’s like asking a sport expert ‘what does sport do to your body’. The expert would say, do you mean swimming or horse-riding? You can imagine mental training being as complex,” she says.”