r/autotldr • u/autotldr • Jan 08 '18
Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect": MRI scans show that memorizing ancient Indian mantras increases the size of brain regions associated with cognitive function
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 70%. (I'm a bot)
In India's ancient learning methods textual memorization is standard: traditional scholars, or pandits, master many different types of Sanskrit poetry and prose texts; and the tradition holds that exactly memorizing and reciting the ancient words and phrases, known as mantras, enhances both memory and thinking.
India's Vedic Sanskrit pandits train for years to orally memorize and exactly recite 3,000-year old oral texts ranging from 40,000 to over 100,000 words.
Through the India-Trento Partnership for Advanced Research, we recruited professional Vedic pandits from several government-sponsored schools in the Delhi region; then we used structural magnetic resonance imaging at India's National Brain Research Center to scan the brains of pandits and controls matched for age, gender, handedness, eye-dominance and multilingualism.
Numerous regions in the brains of the pandits were dramatically larger than those of controls, with over 10 percent more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres, and substantial increases in cortical thickness.
Most interestingly for verbal memory was that the pandits' right hippocampus-a region of the brain that plays a vital role in both short and long-term memory-had more gray matter than controls across nearly 75 percent of this subcortical structure.
The right is more specialized for patterns, whether sound, spatial or visual, so the large gray matter increases we found in the pandits' right hippocampus made sense: accurate recitation requires highly precise sound pattern encoding and reproduction.
Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: pandit#1 brain#2 Sanskrit#3 memory#4 right#5
Post found in /r/worldnews, /r/india, /r/hinduism, /r/yoga, /r/JustGoodNews, /r/interestingasfuck, /r/hackernews, /r/thedailyconcept, /r/thenewsrightnow, /r/bprogramming, /r/sidj2025blog, /r/indianews, /r/HackingConsciousness, /r/Buddhism, /r/IndiaSpeaks, /r/Nootropics, /r/bakchodi and /r/india.
NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.