„Just as Mingyur began the meditation, there was a sudden huge burst of electrical activity on the computer monitors displaying the signals from his brain. Everyone assumed this meant he had moved; such movement artifacts are a common problem in research with EEG, which registers as wave pattern readings of electrical activity at the top of the brain. Any motion that tugs the sensors - a leg shifting, a tilt of the head - gets amplified in those readings into a huge spike that looks like a brain wave and has to be filtered out for a clean analysis.
Oddly, this burst seemed to last the entire period of the compassion meditation, and as far as anyone could see, Mingyur had not moved an iota. What's more, the giant spikes diminished but did not disappear as he went into the mental rest period, again with no visible shift in his body.
The four experimenters in the control room team watched, transfixed, while the next meditation period was announced. As John Dunne translated the next instruction to meditate into Tibetan, the team studied the monitors in silence, glancing back and forth from the brain wave monitor to the video trained on Mingyur.
lnstantly the same dramatic burst of electrical signal occurred. Again Mingyur was perfectly still, with no visible change in his body's position from resting to the meditation period. Yet the monitor still displayed that same brain wave spurge. As this pattern repeated each time he was instructed to generate compassion, the team looked at one another in astonished silence, nearly jumping off their seats in excitement.
The lab team knew at that moment they were witnessing something profound, something that had never before been observed in the laboratory. None could predict what this would lead to, but everyone sensed this was a critical inflection point in neuroscience history.
The news of that session has created a scientific stir. As of this writing, the journal article reporting these findings has been cited more than 1,100 times in the world's scientific literature. Science has paid attention.“
- The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. Penguin Life.
The diagram shows the EEG recordings of Mingyur Rinpoche (cover picture). At the age of 13, he became a respected master of contemplative meditation in the Tibetan community. Of his 42 years of life, he spent 10 years on meditation retreats, meditating at least 8 hours per day. The unusual huge bursts of his EEG are shown in the top diagram for his resting state and his meditative state. The lower picture shows the increase in the power of gamma oscillations for a control group and for long-term Buddhist practitioners during rest.
Lutz, A., Greischar, L. L., Rawlings, N. B., Ricard, M. & Davidson, R. J. Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 101, 16369 LP-16373 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0407401101