Science: inside the meditating brain (video)

Big Think, 9/13/18; Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

X-ray of Otzi's brain in skull, Iceman found in situ in Alps, frozen for five thousand years.

The 14th Dalai Lama with Rajneesh Kasturirangan, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, and American neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson at the Mind and Life Institute XXVI conference in 2013.

Superhumans: The remarkable brain waves of high-level meditators | Big Think

Meditation science: American Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson (richardjdavidson.com)

.

(Big Think) People [such as Buddhist monastics] who have meditated for thousands of hours exhibit a remarkable difference in their brainwaves.

Psychologist Dr. Daniel Goleman says we can actually see what happens in the heads of those who have achieved "enlightenment," and the results are unprecedented in science.

Author Daniel Goleman (danielgoleman.info)

ABOUT: Dr. Daniel Goleman (info) is an Amherst and Harvard-educated psychologist, lecturer, and science journalist. He has reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half. Dr. Goleman is also the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made -- changing everything for the better. His latest book is Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, which he co-authored with Dr. Richard Davidson, reveals the science of what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.

.

TRANSCRIPT

Edited for clarity by Wisdom Quarterly, 9/16/23

Dr. Richard Davidson, U of Wisconsin

DANIEL GOLEMAN: My co-author of the book Altered Traits is neuroscientist Richard Davidson, whose lab is at the University of Wisconsin.

It’s a very large lab with dedicated scanners. He has about 100 people working there, and he was able to do some remarkable research where he flew Olympic-level meditators, who live in Nepal or India [e.g., Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche] typically, some in France [e.g., Matthieu Ricard].

He flew them over to the lab and put them through a protocol in his brain scanners and did state-of-the-art tests. And the results were just astounding. We found, for example, or he found that their brain waves are really different.

Altered Traits (Dan Goleman, Dick Davidson)

Perhaps the most remarkable findings in the Olympic-level meditators has to do with what’s called a gamma [brain] wave.

All of us get gamma for a very short period when we solve a problem we’ve been grappling with, even if it’s something that’s vexed us for months. We get about a half-second of gamma; it’s the strongest wave on the EEG [electro encephalograph] spectrum.

We get it when we bite into an apple or imagine biting into an apple, and for a brief period, a split-second, inputs from taste, sound, smell, vision, all of that come together in that imagined bite into the apple. But that lasts very short period in an ordinary EEG.

What was stunning was that the Olympic-level meditators, these are people who have done up to 62,000 lifetime hours of meditation, their brainwave shows gamma very strong all the time as a lasting trait just no matter what they’re doing.

It’s not a state effect. It’s not during their meditation alone. But it’s just their everyday state of mind. We actually have no idea what that means experientially.

Science has never seen it before. We also find that in these Olympic-level meditators when we asked them, for example, to do a meditation on compassion, their level of gamma jumps 700 to 800 percent in a few seconds. This has also never been seen by science.

So we have to assume that the special state of consciousness that you see in the highest-level meditators is a lot like something described in the classical meditation literatures centuries ago, which is that there is a state of being which is not like our ordinary state.

Sometimes it’s called liberation, enlightenment, awake, whatever the word may be. We suspect there’s really no vocabulary that captures what that might be.

The people that we’ve talked to in this Olympic-level group say it’s very spacious, and you’re wide open, you’re prepared for whatever may come. We just don’t know.

But we do know it’s quite remarkable. More

• Watch the newest video from Big Think: bigth.ink/NewVideo
• Join Big Think+ for exclusive videos: bigthink.com/plus