NARRATION

The ancient art of meditation has moved out of the temple and into our daily lives. It's practised by top class athletes, even taught in some of the most powerful corporations in the world.

Thubten Chokyi

You don't have to be Buddhist to meditate. You just have to be a person with a functioning mind.

NARRATION

New discoveries in science suggest it may indeed have benefits...

Dr Graham Phillips

8 per cent. That's enormous.

Dr Chao Suo

Yeah.

NARRATION

..boost memory and treat depression.

Ross Bunn

I decided I was well enough to come off the medication.

NARRATION

And meditation may even slow the ageing process.

Prof Elissa Epel

The studies are very promising. They actually do suggest there are benefits.

NARRATION

From brain scans to blood tests, from the psychological to the biological...

Dr Graham Phillips

It depends what your definition of pain is.

NARRATION

..I'm going to investigate the hard evidence to see if meditation lives up to the hype. And I'm going to put my own brain to the test and undertake eight weeks of mindfulness meditation. Will it make me less stressed? Will it improve my memory?

Dr Graham Phillips

I did better at that?

NARRATION

Will it change the structure of my brain?

NARRATION

Londoner Nick Brewer is a yoga and meditation teacher. But life hasn't always been so serene. For 10 years, Nick ran a drug empire, smuggling cocaine out of Colombia.

Nick Brewer

Essentially, I was quite a wealthy young man. I had a property asset, a holding company, a nightclub, restaurants and all the toys that go with it. You would have looked at me as being quite a successful entrepreneur unless you knew what I do for a living.

NARRATION

In 2004, he was arrested in South America and sentenced to prison there.

Nick Brewer

It was probably one of the worst places you could ever imagine in your entire life. It was poor, it was broken, it was corrupt. You're anxious about absolutely everything. You're anxious about staying alive, about where your next plate of food is gonna come from, if you've got any money, if you haven't got any money. You know, if you were gonna get raped, killed.

NARRATION

A year into his sentence, Nick was shown a book by his cell mate.

Nick Brewer

You know, I asked him what he had and he says, "I've got a book on yoga." So obviously at the time, I said, you know, "You must be some sort of weirdo."

NARRATION

Soon he was hooked and began practising yoga and meditation every day.

Nick Brewer

It was the sitting practice and the yoga practice that helped me to find some kind of serenity in there.

NARRATION

Nick transformed his life.

Nick Brewer

I have a very happy life, extremely humble. I have a lot of amazing clients that I teach. So the last five years has been completely transformational.

NARRATION

Like Nick, I guess, I'd never really contemplated whether meditation could do anything for me. But the more I hear about the research, the more keen I am to see whether it has any effect. So I'm going to try it myself for two months. Step one - learning how it's done.

NARRATION

I'm off to see Dr Richard Chambers who's a clinical psychologist but also an expert in mindfulness. He's going to teach me how to meditate, apparently.

Dr Richard Chambers

Mindfulness is a type of meditation where we focus our attention on the present moment - on the body, the breath, that kind of thing.

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Mindfulness meditation is the most well researched type of meditation.

Dr Richard Chambers

And just taking a few moments to check in and just notice the state that your body is in, checking in with the mind.

NARRATION

Some scientists say it can boost physical and mental health and improve cognitive abilities.

Dr Richard Chambers

And when the mind inevitably wanders, just noticing that and see if you can bring it back gently without any further thinking. Most of us focus our attention on daydreams and distraction and rumination and worry and a whole bunch of stuff. If we can train ourselves - and we can - we can actually build a mindful muscle to train ourselves to be focused and present. Just enjoy the moment more.

NARRATION

Key to building this so-called mindful muscle is strengthening the prefrontal cortex. If the brain were an orchestra, the prefrontal cortex is like the conductor.

Dr Richard Chambers

When we notice our attention has wandered and we bring it back to the present moment, we activate the pre-frontal cortex. It's forming new synapses, new connections, and getting thicker and stronger, kind of like a muscle.

Dr Graham Phillips

And will I feel at a sense of wellbeing or more relaxed or...?

Dr Richard Chambers

Why don't we wait and see what happens for you? I mean, I'm going to predict yes. But one of the best ways to learn mindfulness is through the doing.

NARRATION

For me, to take meditation seriously, I need some hard evidence that it's changing my brain for the better.

Dr Graham Phillips

That's the weapon.

Dr Neil Bailey

It's the weapon. We'll put one of these on you. It's an EEG cap.

NARRATION

So I've come to see neuroscientist Dr Neil Bailey. He's about to put me through a raft of rigorous tests to get a measure of my brain power at the beginning of the eight weeks meditation.

Dr Neil Bailey

Alright, Graham, it looks like we've got some brain activity.

Dr Graham Phillips

Fantastic. Contrary to popular opinion.

NARRATION

First up, an EEG to measure my brain's electrical activity.

Dr Neil Bailey

When we activate it, it will give you a gentle electrical shock.

SFX

Zap!

Dr Graham Phillips

That's annoying.

Dr Neil Bailey

Is it annoying but not painful at all?

Dr Graham Phillips

Oh, depends what your definition of pain is.

NARRATION

The tests will measure my memory, my reaction time and my ability to focus.

Dr Neil Bailey

You're to respond to the meaning of the emotion of the word and try and ignore the emotion on the face.

Dr Graham Phillips

OK, so an angry face could have the word 'happy' underneath.

Dr Neil Bailey

Exactly.

NARRATION

Electrical activity in the brain is produced as neurons communicate with each other. The synchronised signals are brainwaves. When you meditate, alpha and theta waves increase and activity in some parts of the brain decreases, allowing me to focus. The idea is after eight weeks, the brain activity changes I experience during meditation will have a lasting effect on my brain. According to Dr Bailey, I'll be better able to concentrate, make faster decisions and remember more information. Most extraordinary though, my brain may even become more energy efficient.

Dr Neil Bailey

You're performing better, but your brain is exerting less energy. You're getting a decrease in neural activity. You might be able to do just as well in your job but be exerting less mental energy. So when you get home, you're less tired.

NARRATION

Beyond enhancing my brain's performance, I also want to know if meditation can have an even more dramatic effect and actually change its physical structure.

Dr Graham Phillips

I must say, I hate being locked in confined spaces. Not looking forward to this.

NARRATION

So I've come for an MRI to have some before and after brain structure scans.

Technician

This next one is going to go for about six minutes. Try not to think of anything. Just let your mind go blank.

NARRATION

Recent research from Harvard University showed that just eight weeks of meditation can physically change the structure of the brain.

Dr Neil Bailey

Everything we do affects the brain. So any skill we learn, anything we practice, will change the way our brain is structured. So over time, if you're repeating a practice - for example, mindfulness - it's going to strengthen certain connections in the brain and change the grey matter, for example, volumes of the brain.

NARRATION

Grey matter is the darker tissue of the brain where most of the nerve cell bodies are. The Harvard research found that grey matter increased in key areas, such as the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction.

Dr Richard Chambers

And these are parts of the brain that help us to remember, to focus, to learn, to inhibit impulses and regulate our emotions. If we sat there daydreaming for 20 minutes, we'd be strengthening a different part or different parts of the brain and we get to choose what we want to strengthen. We've got a use it or lose it brain.

NARRATION

Now, it is early days for a lot of this research, but the possibility of meditation changing the structure of my brain certainly sounds exciting. I have to wait eight weeks to find out my results. I'd better start meditating.

Dr Graham Phillips

OK, the end of week one. It's now breathing meditation and that's more challenging. You're just focusing on that one thing, your breath, which I find very easy to get distracted from that.

NARRATION

But can meditation change the body as well as the brain? A handful of studies show it may be good for our health by reducing inflammation and stress hormones.

Prof Elissa Epel

So far, there's an interesting growing list of some of the different ways that meditation affects the body.

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The question US researcher Dr Elissa Epel wants to answer is, can it also slow down ageing?

Prof Elissa Epel

Been looking in particular at ageing markers. By now, the field has a pretty good collection of very interesting studies that do suggest that there are benefits to our rate of ageing.

NARRATION

Signs of ageing can be seen inside the body's cells, specifically in the tiny caps at the end of each chromosome known as the telomeres.

Prof Elissa Epel

Our telomeres protect our genes. Now, what happens as we age, our immune cells divide and the telomeres shorten. Those protective caps get shorter and shorter. So we want to keep those intact.

NARRATION

Basically, the shorter the telomeres, the faster the ageing. Several studies have compared the telomeres of meditators to non-meditators.

Prof Elissa Epel

It looks like telomere length, the measure of how our immune cells age, stabilises more and doesn't shorten in the meditation group.

NARRATION

Other studies have measured telomerase, the enzyme that protects those precious telomeres.

Prof Elissa Epel

Those studies have suggested that telomerase can go up and telomere length can be better maintained during those periods. And, you know, we wait for lots of replications before we say something is true or a fact, but the studies are very promising. Very suggestive.

NARRATION

We've seen how meditation can change you biologically, but how about psychologically? One of the most widely studied areas of meditation research is the effect on mental health. Ross Bunn has been coping with depression for years.

Ross Bunn

I wasn't really comfortable in my own skin. I was very sort of agitated. Quick to anger. I didn't really feel I knew who I was. I was not doing the things I loved and enjoyed. I wasn't seeing my friends or family anymore and, um, my relationship was, well, strained, really. It was very difficult.

NARRATION

Ross was given medication, but he didn't like the side effects.

Ross Bunn

It really didn't make me feel very well. I still didn't feel like myself. I still wasn't sleeping. I was still very agitated. I just felt pretty detached from everything and everyone.

NARRATION

Ross is one of a growing number of people using meditation to treat their depression.

Ross Bunn

I actually practice mindfulness whilst hiking. I find it's quite easy to focus on putting one foot in front of the other and then just noticing the world around me and how my body feels.

Dr Neil Bailey

People who practice mindfulness show better mental health than 70% of the population on average. People with depression and anxiety have even larger gains than that.

Dr Richard Chambers

The data shows that that reduces depressive symptoms, but the big finding is that it halves the rate of depressive relapse. For people who've had three or more depressive episodes, if they learn mindfulness as part of their treatment, they're half as likely to get depressed again down the track.

NARRATION

Indeed, for some, meditation could be an alternative to their medication.

Dr Richard Chambers

A paper that came out last year, a meta-analysis, has found that it's as effective as antidepressants for preventing relapse, which is a pretty significant finding.

Dr Graham Phillips

Did it make a difference to you?

Ross Bunn

Yes. Absolutely. It probably would have been about eight months or so, I decided I was well enough, able enough to come off the medication.

NARRATION

Dr Richard Chambers believes mindfulness meditation works because it breaks the cycle of depressive thoughts.

Dr Richard Chambers

Depressive thoughts that maybe go through people's minds that they don't normally notice, they're just running in the background like an app and reducing people's mood. So mindfulness helps them to notice that and then just to recognise it as a thought rather than taking it seriously, believing it, trying to push it away, which then gets the attention very much caught up in that kind of rumination. Just noticing it, let it go, bring the attention back to the present.

Ross Bunn

Doing the meditation really helps break that rumination cycle. And overall, that allows me to focus on all sorts of things. If I need to focus on work, my mind's not wandering away thinking about something else. So it's training my brain to focus. That's the main aim.

NARRATION

So, how exactly does meditation train the brain?

Prof Elissa Epel

One of the things that many types of medication do is exercise our attention muscle, and boy, that's an important muscle.

NARRATION

This so-called attention muscle may exert some control over one of the brain areas tied up with emotion - the amygdala.

Dr Neil Bailey

When the amygdala gets activated, that's when we feel fear and anxiety and that sort of thing, so its purpose is to give experience an emotional salience. In something like depression or anxiety, it becomes over-active and so it's constantly activated and providing that sensation of anxiety or fear or hypervigilance.

NARRATION

After meditation, other parts of the brain appear more in control of the amygdala.

Dr Neil Bailey

What happens is, in theory at least and from what we can tell from the brain scans, when you've practised a lot of mindfulness, both the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, those regions exert more regulation on the amygdala and dampen the effect of that anxiety or fear coming up.

NARRATION

Meditation's list of benefits does seem remarkable and some are concerned media hype is falsely overselling them. After all, the research is still in its infancy.

Prof Miguel Farias

The few studies that have looked at it haven't found that mindfulness was any better than other forms of therapies, which in itself is not a bad outcome, but there simply isn't enough research.

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Professor Farias believes certain people should exercise particular caution.

Prof Miguel Farias

All kinds of meditation were originally designed to rattle your sense of self. If there is something which has traumatised you in your life and you've forgotten about it, by meditating you may become aware of it and this will exacerbate all the symptoms. It can actually increase stress. It can lead to greater levels of anxiety, panic attacks in some people.

Ross Bunn

There were times where it would dredge up past experiences that I really didn't want to go back to and it was really quite disturbing and confronting at the time too. I never expected for that to occur.

NARRATION

Professor Farias also believes there may be an inherent bias in the research.

Prof Miguel Farias

99% of the researchers have only been looking at the potential benefits, at the positive effects. They haven't really been asking people about adverse effects.

Dr Richard Chambers

If you've got a psychotic disorder, if you're really anxious or if you're getting it taught to you badly, maybe it's not going to be so good.

Dr Graham Phillips

Gee, when you're going through a stressful time, you've got a lot on your mind. It is really hard to get all that stuff out when you're meditating. I'm finding it really hard at the moment.

NARRATION

It's time for a catch up with Dr Richard Chambers.

Dr Richard Chambers

So, I might just check in. How's your practice being going?

Dr Graham Phillips

I'm a scientific type, you know. I'd like to do a lot more experiments before I draw any conclusions, but I'm feeling more relaxed than I have been for some time and I notice the stress, but it's not like I'm sucked into it. I can just sort of cruise through, which is very good.

NARRATION

Reducing stress is one of the most commonly reported effects of meditation.

Dr Richard Chambers

You know, the stress isn't actually in the situation. The stress is in our relationship with the situation.

NARRATION

But stress is a complicated thing.

Prof Elissa Epel

We can't avoid stress. Stress is an embedded part of life and in fact, engaging in new things and challenges is very good for us. But we need to make sure that we have enough reserve in our days or, at the least, in our weeks.

NARRATION

And that's where meditation might help.

Prof Elissa Epel

Meditation and mind/body activities are a wonderful way to build our kind of physiological and psychological resiliency.

NARRATION

To get a better idea of how meditation works on a bigger scale, I've come to Nan Tien Temple to meet meditation teacher Chokyi. She believes it has an important role to play in society.

Thubten Chokyi

When I first started meditating, I remember I was telling everyone this is the cheapest form of dealing with stress, anxiety that's available to you. It's totally free. Really. Because it's just you and your mind.

NARRATION

Chokyi is part of an international project teaching meditation to inmates in New South Wales correction centres.

Thubten Chokyi

People get into prison and in one way, you can say it's a bit like going into retreat, you know? Because you go into a closed environment, a lot of things are taken away from you and the one thing you do have on you is time on your hands.

Venerable Robina Courtin

So, what you're going to now is you focus all your awareness strongly on the sensation at your nostrils as you breathe in and out. You just feel that. Take one more breath and you'll feel it, OK?

SFX

BELL CHIMES

NARRATION

She believes it improves mental health and aids rehabilitation.

Thubten Chokyi

And it doesn't take very long to see the effects in a prison environment.

NARRATION

Former inmate Nick Brewer experienced these benefits firsthand.

Nick Brewer

There were deep shifts in my psychological patterns and thought patterns about the way I felt about myself and life and it started a whole rehabilitation process.

Venerable Robina Courtin

I think every one of us, whether we're in prison or out, we look at our lives by not knowing what's going on inside ourselves until the words vomit out the mouth or until the fist does the punch. You know, you kind of... you get into trouble in life.

Thubten Chokyi

They learn more about themselves. They learn, what is it that triggers me? You know, what triggers me to anger? What triggers me to act out in selfish ways or ways that do harm to others?

NARRATION

Professor Farias studied the effect of meditation on prison inmates in South America. He believes it helps in some ways but it's no magic bullet.

Prof Miguel Farias

We did find they became less stressed. They had a lower probability of having psychological problems. On the other hand, we also found out that there weren't differences in terms of aggression or interpersonal behaviour, which was something we were looking for.

Nick Brewer

My old self is very alien to me now. I can relate to the old Nick, the character, but what I did, you know, is dead.

NARRATION

It's eight weeks later and my personal trial has come to an end.

Dr Graham Phillips

Who would have thought I'd ever take part in a group meditation session? There you go. Anyway, my eight weeks is up now. I'm off for my results.

Dr Graham Phillips

Ah, Neil!

NARRATION

I'm back to Monash to find out if all the dedication has paid off.

Dr Graham Phillips

I'm keen to see if I've made a difference to my brain.

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah. Let's see.

NARRATION

Three hours of cognitive tests and brain scans later...

Dr Graham Phillips

It wasn't bad this time! I've got to wait a week for the results, apparently, though.

NARRATION

And it's results time with Dr Bailey and MRI expert Dr Chao Suo.

Dr Neil Bailey

Overall, you did better in three of the five tasks. Better behavioural performance.

Dr Graham Phillips

Oh, that's fantastic!

Dr Neil Bailey

Not only that, you exerted less brain activity. So you spent less energy to do better. This one in particular was your memory task.

Dr Graham Phillips

I did better at that?

Dr Neil Bailey

You did better at that.

Dr Graham Phillips

I felt like I was guessing. That was a very hard task.

Dr Neil Bailey

It was very hard.

Dr Graham Phillips

That's annoying.

Dr Neil Bailey

It was actually one where we were distracting you with that tiny electrical shock.

Dr Graham Phillips

I remember it well.

Dr Neil Bailey

The same time as you were trying to remember stuff.

Dr Graham Phillips

It feels like I... it's easier for me to intervene if my brain is doing something I don't want it to do.

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah. That's cool. And that's actually a really interesting point for this next slide. Your reaction time to unexpected events. You cut your reaction time by 400ms.

Dr Graham Phillips

Really? That's almost half a second.

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah.

Dr Graham Phillips

That's huge!

Dr Neil Bailey

It's massive. If you're driving a car and a pedestrian steps out in front of you, 400ms is probably a life-saving amount of time.

Dr Graham Phillips

That's very good news! I feel like I passed!

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah.

NARRATION

I was better at the tasks, but had my brain physically changed?

Dr Graham Phillips

So, what do my brain scan results show?

Dr Chao Suo

Alright. Let's start with the structure changing. The three brain regions that has been reported before.

NARRATION

There were indeed changes in my grey matter density in several parts of my brain.

Dr Graham Phillips

They're big changes in the scheme of things!

Dr Chao Suo

Yes, yes. That's very interesting finding. Yeah.

NARRATION

The most dramatic change was in a part of my hippocampus known as the dentate gyrus, where new brain cells are produced in adults.

Dr Neil Bailey

22.8% increase.

Dr Graham Phillips

That's enormous!

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah, it's huge. It's really large. It means something's definitely going on. You've got what we call neurogenesis happening.

NARRATION

In other words, new brain cells were growing. And there's more. My hippocampus is also exerting more control over something called the default mode network, which is associated with anxiety. These changes are not usually seen in someone my age.

Dr Neil Bailey

Younger people show that pattern more than older people.

Dr Graham Phillips

It's as if my brain is getting a little bit younger.

Dr Neil Bailey

Yeah. You've reversed the ageing process a little bit in your brain.

Dr Graham Phillips

Who can complain about that?

NARRATION

Now, sure, my personal experience is not a proper scientific study, so we can't say for sure these brain changes were the direct result of meditation. But hey, I'm impressed and certainly feeling happy with my younger, heavier brain.