Along these lines, Richie’s group found that meditators who had an average 7,500 lifetime hours, compared to people their own age, had decreased gray matter volume in a key region: the nucleus accumbens.13 This was the only brain region showing a difference in brain structure compared to age-matched controls. A smaller nucleus accumbens diminishes connectivity between these self-related regions and the other neural modules that ordinarily orchestrate to create our sense of self. This is a bit of a surprise: the nucleus accumbens plays a large role in the brain’s “reward” circuits, a source of
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