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A week of intensive meditation and other mind-body practices may produce measurable biological changes extending well beyond relaxation, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California San Diego.
The study found that participants who completed a seven-day residential retreat showed changes in brain activity, blood chemistry, immune signaling, metabolism and the body’s natural pain-control systems. Researchers also detected signs of increased neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to adapt, reorganise and form new connections.
The findings, published in Communications Biology, provide new evidence that intensive mental and behavioural practices may be associated with changes across multiple biological systems.
Researchers said the study is part of a multimillion-dollar initiative supported by the InnerScience Research Fund and is among the first to examine the biological effects of several mind-body practices delivered together during a short, intensive programme.
“We’ve known for years that practices like meditation can influence health, but what’s striking is that combining multiple mind-body practices into a single retreat produced changes across so many biological systems that we could measure directly in the brain and blood,” said senior study author Hemal H. Patel, a professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.
“This isn’t about just stress relief or relaxation; this is about fundamentally changing how the brain engages with reality and quantifying these changes biologically,” Patel said.
The study involved 20 healthy adults who took part in a seven-day residential programme led by neuroscience educator and author Joe Dispenza.
Participants attended daily lectures, completed approximately 33 hours of guided meditation and took part in group healing activities. Some of the activities incorporated an “open-label placebo” approach, in which participants are explicitly told that an intervention contains no active medical ingredient.
Researchers are increasingly studying open-label placebos because expectations, social interactions and the experience of receiving an intervention can sometimes produce measurable effects even when no active drug is involved.
Scientists assessed participants before and after the retreat to identify biological changes associated with the intensive programme.
Their analysis included functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which measures changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. This allowed researchers to examine changes in the activity of different brain regions and neural networks.
The researchers also analysed blood-based biological measures to assess changes in metabolism, immune signalling and other physiological processes.
One of the notable findings involved indications of increased neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity allows the brain to modify its structure and function in response to experiences, learning and environmental changes.
The researchers cautioned that the study was conducted in a small group of healthy participants and focused on a specific intensive programme. Therefore, the findings cannot establish that meditation alone caused all of the observed biological changes.
Larger studies will be needed to determine whether similar effects occur in broader populations and whether the changes persist after participants return to their normal routines.
Nevertheless, the findings add to growing scientific interest in how meditation and other mind-body practices may influence the brain and physiological systems simultaneously.