Researchers took blood plasma from people who had just finished a week-long meditation retreat, dripped it onto neurons growing in a dish, and watched the cells extend longer branches than they did with the same people's pre-retreat plasma.
That experiment sits at the center of a UC San Diego study of 20 healthy adults, published in Communications Biology in November 2025. The paper has since traveled widely through science aggregators. What has traveled much less is what the journal did to it on July 25, 2026.
