Forget Where You Put Your Car Keys? Meditation Can Help With That

So there's a study cited in the New York Times, saying that meditation helps the brain by improving memory. I'm all for that, especially in these days of information overload. We're inundated by news, tweets, Facebooks, text messages, and blog posts. It's enough to make some people turn off and tune out so they can get away from it all for awhile.

The study found that people who meditated for about a half hour a day (I know: Where do you find that kind of time?) had a higher amount of gray matter in their hippocampus. That's the part of the brain that, among other things, helps us remember things like the contents of the grocery list, the names of our immediate family members, and who's the leader of the country in which we're currently living. (Notice I didn't include the phone numbers of anybody we know: No one remembers those anymore because you can just press a button on your cell phone.)

But maybe, just maybe, if we meditate for just this short time during a day, we can remember things like that, so we're not doing silly things like tying string round one finger and then forgetting what the string represents. (Actually, I'm not sure that people do that sort of thing anymore, either. They probably just write an electronic note to themselves on their cell phone.)

Actually, the other problem with this meditation business is that you have to have a quiet place. You're probably not going to be productive at focusing on deep breathing and deep silence if your family, friends, or roommates have Jersey Shore or American Idol blaring next door. So that's a challenge as well — finding a place where you can zone out, removing the sounds of the outside world so you can focus inward. That's why you see some people seated on the lawn at 5:30 in the morning. The lawn mowers aren't going that early, and neither are most people.

I'm willing to try it, though. I'd love to be able to remember lots of things — as well as forget others. That's the last benefit of meditation: being able to focus on the things that are really important in your life.