There's no way a fidgety and skeptical news anchor would ever have started meditating weren't not for the science, the science is really compelling. It shows that meditation can boost your immune system, lower your blood pressure, help you deal with problems ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to psoriasis.

And the neuroscience is where it really gets sci fi. There was a study out of Harvard that shows that short daily doses of meditation can literally grow the gray matter in key areas of your brain having to do with self awareness and compassion, and shrink the gray matter in the area associated with stress.

There's also a study out of Yale that looked at what's called the default mode network of the brain. It's a connected series of brain regions that are active during most of our waking hours when we're doing that thing that human beings do all the time, which is obsessing about ourselves, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, doing anything, but being focused on what's happening right now. meditators not only turn off the default mode network of their brain while they're meditating, but even when they're not meditating. In other words, meditators are setting a new default mode. And what's that default mode, they're focused on what's happening right now. In sports, this is called being in the zone. It's nothing mystical. It's not magical.

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