New Delhi, Aug. 29 -- Seven days of silence left a trace in the genome. That is the finding at the centre of a study published by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the Chopra Foundation in Communications Biology, which documented measurable changes in gene expression among participants in a residential meditation retreat, the first controlled research to link intensive mindfulness practice to epigenetic shifts in healthy adults who had no prior meditation experience.

participants who attended a structured seven-day silent retreat at a facility in California, and a matched comparison group of experienced meditators who spent the same week at the same location without the formal retreat programme. Blood samples were...