11 A Yogi’s Brain
In the
steep hills above the ridge-hugging Himalayan village of McLeod Ganj, you might
stumble on a small hut or remote cave housing a Tibetan yogi on a long-term,
solo retreat. In the spring of 1992, an intrepid team of scientists, Richie and
Cliff Saron among them, traveled to those huts and caves to assess the brain
activity of the yogi within each.
A
three-day journey had brought them to McLeod Ganj, the hill station in the
foothills of the Himalayas that is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan
Government-in-Exile. There the scientists set up shop in a guesthouse owned by a
brother of the Dalai Lama, who resides nearby. Several rooms were given over to
unpacking and assembling the equipment for deployment in backpacks for
transport up to the mountain hermitages.
In those
days such brain measurements required a mélange of EEG electrodes and
amplifiers, computer monitors, video recording equipment, batteries, and
generators. That equipment, much larger than today’s, weighed several hundred
pounds. Traveling with those instruments in their hard protective cases, the
researchers resembled a nerdy rock band. There were no roads to follow; yogis
on retreat choose the most remote place they can find. And so, with great
effort, and the help of several porters, the scientists lugged their measuring
instruments to the yogis.
The Dalai
Lama himself had identified these yogis as masters in lojong, a systematic mind
training method; in his view these were ideal subjects for
study. The
Dalai Lama had written a letter urging the yogis to cooperate, and even sent
along a personal emissary, a monk from his private office, to vouch for the
top-level request that they participate.
Arriving
at a yogi’s hermitage, the scientists presented the letter and through a
translator asked to monitor the yogi’s brain while he meditated.
The same
answer came from each yogi in turn: No.
To be
sure, they all were exceptionally friendly and warm. Some offered to teach the
scientists the very practices they wanted to measure. A few said they would
think about it. But none would go ahead then and there.
Some may
have heard about another yogi who once had been persuaded by a similar letter
from the Dalai Lama to leave his retreat and travel to a university in faraway
America to demonstrate his ability to raise his core body temperature at will.
That yogi had died soon after his return, and rumors on the mountainside held
that the experiment had played a role.
For most
of these yogis, science was quite foreign; none had much inkling of the role of
science in modern Western culture. Moreover, of the eight yogis the team met on
this expedition, only one had ever seen an actual computer before Richie and
the team arrived.
A few of
the yogis made the canny argument that they had no idea what, exactly, the
strange machines measured. If the measurements were irrelevant to what they
were doing, or if their brain failed to meet some scientific expectation, it
might look to some as though their methods were of no use. That, they said,
might discourage those on the same path.
Whatever
the reasons, the net result of this scientific expedition was a resounding
nothing.
Despite
the failure to get cooperation, let alone data, and though futile in the short
term, the exercise proved instructive, beginning a steep learning curve. For
starters, better to bring the meditators to the equipment, especially in a
well-fortified brain lab—if they would come.
For
another, research on such adepts confronts unique challenges beyond their
rarity, their intentional remoteness, and their unfamiliarity with or
disinterest in scientific endeavors. While their mastery at this inner
expertise seems akin to world-class rankings in sports, in this “sport,” the
better you get the less you care about your ranking—let alone social status,
riches, or fame.
That list
of indifferences includes any personal pride you might take in what scientific
measures show about your inner accomplishments. What
mattered
to them was how the results might influence others for better or worse.
Prospects
for scientific studies were dim.
A
SCIENTIST AND A MONK
Enter
Matthieu Ricard, whose degree in molecular genetics from France’s Pasteur
Institute had been under the tutelage of François Jacob, who later won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine.1 As a postdoc Matthieu abandoned his promising career
in biology to become a monk; over the decades since, he has lived in retreat
centers, monasteries, and hermitages.
Matthieu
was an old friend of ours; he had often participated (as had we) in dialogues
(organized by the Mind and Life Institute) between the Dalai Lama and various
groups of scientists, where Matthieu voiced the Buddhist viewpoint on whatever
topic was at hand.2 You might recall that during the “destructive emotions”
dialogue, the Dalai Lama exhorted Richie to test meditation rigorously and
extract what was of value for the benefit of the larger world.
The Dalai
Lama’s call to action touched Matthieu as strongly as it did Richie, stirring
in this monk’s mind (to his surprise) a long-unused expertise in the scientific
method. Matthieu himself was the first monk to come for study at Richie’s lab,
spending several days as experimental subject and as collaborator on methods to
refine the protocol used with a succession of other yogis. Matthieu Ricard was
a coauthor on the main journal article reporting initial findings with yogis.3
For much
of the time Matthieu had spent as a monk in Nepal and Bhutan, he was the
personal attendant to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the last century’s most
universally revered Tibetan meditation masters.4 Many, many lamas of note among
those living in exile from Tibet—including the Dalai Lama—had sought out Dilgo
Khyentse for private instruction.
This put
Matthieu at the heart of a large network within the Tibetan meditative world.
He knew whom to suggest as potential subjects of study —and, perhaps most
important, was trusted by those very meditation experts. Matthieu’s
participation made all the difference in recruiting those elusive adepts.
Matthieu
could reassure them that there was good reason to travel half the globe to the
university campus in Madison, Wisconsin—a place many Tibetan lamas and yogis
had never heard of, let alone seen. Further, they would have to put up with the
weird food and habits of a foreign culture.
To be
sure, some of those recruited had taught in the West and were familiar with its
cultural norms. But, beyond the journey to an exotic land, there were the
strange rituals of the scientists—in the yogis’ eyes an entirely alien
endeavor. For those more familiar with Himalayan hermitages than with the
modern world, nothing in their frame of reference made much sense of all this.
Matthieu’s
reassurance that their efforts would be worthwhile was the key to their
cooperation. For these yogis, “worthwhile” did not mean their participation
would have a personal benefit—increase their fame or feed their pride—but
rather that it would help other people. As Matthieu understood, their
motivation was compassion, not self-interest.
Matthieu
emphasized the motivation of the scientists, who dedicated themselves to this
because they believed if the scientific evidence supported the efficacy of
these practices, it would help promote the incorporation of the practices into
Western culture.
Matthieu’s
crucial reassurances have so far brought twenty-one of these most advanced
meditators to Richie’s lab for brain studies. That number includes seven
Westerners who have done at least one three-year retreat at the center in
Dordogne, France, where Matthieu has practiced, as well as fourteen Tibetan adepts
who traveled to Wisconsin from India or Nepal.
FIRST,
SECOND, AND THIRD PERSONS
Matthieu’s
training in molecular biology gave him an ease with the rigors and rules of
science’s methods. He dove into the planning sessions to help design the
methods that would be used to assay the first guinea pig— himself. As both
design collaborator and volunteer number one, he tried out the very scientific
protocol he had helped shape.
While
extremely unusual in the annals of science, there are precedents for researchers
to be the first guinea pig in their own experiments, particularly to be assured
of the safety of some new medical treatment.5 The rationale here, though, was
not fear of exposing others to an unknown risk, but rather, a unique
consideration when it comes to studying how we might train the mind and shape
the brain.
What’s
being studied is intensely private, one person’s inner experience —while the
tools used to measure it are machines that yield objective measures of
biological reality, but nothing of that inner one. Technically, the inner
assessment requires a “first-person” report, while the measurements are a
“third-person” report.
Closing
the gap between the first and third person was the idea of Francisco Varela,
the brilliant biologist and cofounder of the Mind and Life Institute. In his
academic writing Varela proposed a method for combining the first- and
third-person lenses with a “second person,” an expert on the topic being
studied.6 And, he argued, the person being studied should have a well-trained
mind, and so, yield better data than someone not so well trained.
Matthieu
was both topic expert and possessor of that well-trained mind. So, for example,
when Richie began to study the various types of meditation, he did not realize
that “visualization” required more than just generating a mental image.
Matthieu explained to Richie and his team that the meditator also cultivates a
particular emotional state that goes along with a given image—say, with an
image of the bodhisattva Tara the accompanying state melds compassion and
loving-kindness. Advice such as this led Richie’s group to change from being
guided by the top-down norms of brain science, to collaborating with Matthieu
in the details of designing the experimental protocol.7
Long
before Matthieu became a collaborator we had moved in this direction by
immersing ourselves in what we were studying—meditation— to generate hypotheses
for empiric testing. These days science knows this general approach as an
instance of the generation of “grounded theory”— that is, grounded in a direct
personal sense of what’s going on.
Varela’s
approach goes a step further, necessary when what’s being studied lurks in the
mind and brain of one person yet resembles a strange land to the one doing the
research. Having experts like Matthieu in this private domain allows
methodological precision where there would otherwise be guesswork.
We admit
to our own mistakes here. Back in the 1980s, when Richie was a young professor
at the State University of New York at Purchase and Dan a journalist working in
New York City, we joined together for some research on a single, gifted
meditator. This student of U Ba Khin (Goenka’s teacher) had himself become a
teacher, and claimed he could enter at will a state of nibbana—the endpoint of
that Burmese meditative path. We wanted to find hard correlates of that vaunted
state.
Problem
was, the main tool we had was an assay of blood levels of cortisol, a hot topic
in research of the day. We used that as our main measure because we were
borrowing a lab from one of the main investigators of cortisol—not because
there was some strong hypothesis relating nibbana to cortisol. But taking
cortisol levels demanded that the meditator—ensconced in a hospital room on the
other side of a one-way mirror—be hooked up to an IV that let us draw his blood
every hour; we traded shifts with two other scientists so we could provide
around-the-clock coverage, a routine we followed for several days.
The
meditator signaled with a buzzer several times during those few days that he
had entered nibbana. But the cortisol levels budged not at all—they were
irrelevant. We also deployed a brain measure, but that, too, was not so apt,
and primitive by today’s standards. We’ve come a long way.
What might
be next as contemplative science continues to evolve? The Dalai Lama, a twinkle
in his eye, once told Dan that someday “the person being studied and the person
doing the research will be one and the same.”
Perhaps
partly with that aim in mind, the Dalai Lama has encouraged a group at Emory
University to introduce a Tibetan-language science curriculum into the studies
of monks in monasteries.8 A radical move: the first such change in six hundred
years!
THE JOY OF
LIVING
One cool
September morning in 2002, a Tibetan monk arrived at the Madison, Wisconsin,
airport. His journey had started seven thousand miles away, at a monastery atop
a hill on the fringe of Kathmandu, Nepal. The trip took eighteen hours in the
air over three days and crossed ten time zones.
Richie had
met the monk briefly at the 1995 Mind and Life meeting on destructive emotions
in Dharamsala, but had forgotten what he looked like. Still, it was easy to
pick him out from the crowd. He was the only shavenheaded man wearing
gold-and-crimson robes in the Dane County Regional Airport. His name was
Mingyur Rinpoche and he had traveled all this way to have his brain assayed
while he meditated.
After a
night’s rest, Richie brought Mingyur to the lab’s EEG room, where brain waves
are measured with what looks like a surrealist art piece: a shower cap
extruding spaghetti-like wires. This specially designed cap holds 256 thin
wires in place, each leading to a sensor pasted to a precise location on the
scalp. A tight connection between the sensor and the scalp makes all the
difference between recording usable data about the brain’s electrical activity
and having the electrode simply be an antenna for noise.
As Mingyur
was told when a lab technician began pasting sensors to his scalp, ensuring a
tight connection for each and placing them in their exact spot takes no more
than fifteen minutes. But when Mingyur, a shavenheaded monk, offered up his
bald scalp, it turned out such continually exposed skin is more thickened and
callused than one protected by hair. To make the crucial electrode-to-scalp
connection tight enough to yield viable readings through thicker skin ended up
taking much longer than usual.
Most
people who come into the lab get impatient, if not irritated, by such delays.
But Mingyur was not in the least perturbed, which calmed the nervous lab
technician—and all those looking on—with the feeling that anything that
happened would be okay with him. That was the first inkling of Mingyur’s ease
of being, a palpable sense of relaxed readiness for whatever life might bring.
The lasting impression Mingyur conveyed was of endless patience and a gentle
quality of kindness.
After
spending what seemed like an eternity ensuring that the sensors had good
contact with the scalp, the experiment was finally ready to begin. Mingyur was
the first yogi studied after that initial session with Matthieu. The team
huddled in the control room, eager to see if there was a “there” there.
A precise
analysis of something as squishy as, say, compassion demands an exacting
protocol, one that can detect that mental state’s specific pattern of brain
activity amid the cacophony of the electrical storm from everything else going
on. The protocol had Mingyur alternate between one minute of meditation on
compassion and thirty seconds of a neutral resting period. To ensure confidence
that any effect detected was reliable rather than a random finding, he would
have to do this four times in rapid succession.
From the start
Richie had grave doubts about whether this could work. Those on the lab team
who meditated, Richie among them, all knew it takes time just to settle the
mind, often considerably longer than a few minutes. It was inconceivable, they
thought, that even someone like Mingyur would be able to enter these states
instantaneously and not need some time to reach inner quiet.
Despite
their skepticism, in designing this protocol they had listened to Matthieu, who
knew both the culture of science and of the hermitage. He had assured them that
these mental gymnastics would be no problem for someone at Mingyur’s level of
expertise. But Mingyur was the first such adept to be formally tested this way
and Richie and his technicians were unsure, even nervous.
Richie was
fortunate that John Dunne, a Buddhist scholar at the University of
Wisconsin—who exhibits a rare combination of scientific interests, humanities
expertise, and fluency in Tibetan—volunteered to translate.9 John delivered
precisely timed instructions to Mingyur signaling him to start a compassion
meditation, and then after sixty seconds another cue for thirty seconds of his
mental resting state, and so on for three more cycles.
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.
Instantly
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
surge. 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.10 Science has paid attention.
A MISSED
BOAT
About the
time news of Mingyur Rinpoche’s remarkable data was reaching the scientific
world, he was invited to the lab of a famous cognitive scientist then at
Harvard University. There Mingyur was put through two protocols: in one he was
asked to generate an elaborate visual image; in the other he was assessed to
see if he had any knack for extrasensory perception. The cognitive scientist
had high hopes that he would document the achievements of an extraordinary
subject.
Mingyur’s translator, meanwhile, was fuming
because the protocol was not just hours long and onerous but painfully
irrelevant to Mingyur’s actual meditative expertise—from the translator’s
perspective, an act of disrespect within Tibetan norms for treating a teacher
like Mingyur (who nevertheless retained his usual good cheer throughout).
The net
result of Mingyur’s day in that lab: he flunked both tests, doing no better
than the college sophomores who were the usual subjects of study there.
Mingyur,
it turned out, had done no practice with visualization since the long-gone,
early years of his practice. As time went on, his meditations evolved. His
current method, ongoing open presence (which expresses itself as kindness in
everyday life), encourages letting go of any and all thoughts rather than
generating any specific visual images. Mingyur’s practice actually ran counter
to the purposeful generation of an image and the feelings that go along with
it—perhaps reversing any skill he might once have had in that. His circuitry
for visual memory had gotten no particular workout, despite his thousands of
hours spent in other kinds of mental training.
As for
“extrasensory perception,” Mingyur had never claimed to have such supernormal
powers. Indeed, the texts of his tradition made clear that any fascination with
such abilities was a detour, a dead end on the path.
That was
no secret. But nobody had asked him. Mingyur had run smack into a paradox of
today’s research on consciousness, the mind, and meditative training: those who
do the research on meditation are too often in the dark about what they are
actually studying.
Ordinarily
in the cognitive neurosciences, a “subject” (the term for someone who
volunteers for the study, in the objectifying, at-a-distance language of
science) goes through an experimental protocol designed by the researcher. The
researcher concocts that design without conferring with any of the subjects,
partly because subjects are meant to be naive about the purpose (to avoid a
potential biasing factor) but also because the scientists have their own points
of reference—their hypotheses, other studies done in the field which they hope
to inform, and the like. Scientists don’t consider their subjects particularly
well informed about any of this.
That
traditional scientific stance completely missed the chance to assess Mingyur’s
actual meditative talents, as did our earlier failure to take the measure of
nibbana. Both times that first- and third-person estrangement led to misjudging
where these meditators’ remarkable strengths lie and how to measure them, akin
to testing a legendary golfer like Jack Nicklaus on his prowess at shooting
basketball free throws.
NEURAL
PROWESS
Back to
Mingyur’s time in Richie’s lab. The next stunner came when Mingyur went through
another batch of tests, this time with fMRI, which renders what amounts to a
3-D video of brain activity. The fMRI gives science a lens that complements the
EEG, which tracks the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG readings are more
precise in time, the fMRI more accurate in neural locations.
An EEG
does not reveal what’s happening deeper in the brain, let alone show where in
the brain the changes occur—that spatial precision comes from the fMRI, which
maps the regions where brain activity occurs in minute detail. On the other
hand, fMRI, though spatially exacting, tracks the timing of changes over one or
two seconds, far slower than EEG.
While his
brain was probed by the fMRI, Mingyur followed the cue to engage compassion.
Once again the minds of Richie and the others watching in the control room felt
as though they had stopped. The reason: Mingyur’s brain’s circuitry for empathy
(which typically fires a bit during this mental exercise) rose to an activity
level 700 to 800 percent greater than it had been during the rest period just
before.
Such an
extreme increase befuddles science; the intensity with which those states were
activated in Mingyur’s brain exceeds any we have seen in studies of “normal”
people. The closest resemblance is in epileptic seizures, but those episodes
last brief seconds, not a full minute. And besides, brains are seized by
seizures, in contrast to Mingyur’s display of intentional control of his brain
activity.
Mingyur
was a meditation prodigy, as the lab team learned while tallying his history of
lifetime hours of the practice: at that point, 62,000. Mingyur grew up in a
family of meditation experts; his brother Tsoknyi Rinpoche and half brothers
Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and Tsikey Chokling Rinpoche are considered contemplative
masters in their own right.
Their
father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, was widely respected among the Tibetan community
as one of the few great living masters in this inner art who had trained in old
Tibet, but then (spurred by China’s invasion) lived outside that country. While
Mingyur has as of this writing been on retreats for a total of ten of his
forty-two years, Tulku Urgyen reputedly had done more than twenty years of
retreat over his lifetime; Mingyur’s grandfather —Tulku Urgyen’s father—was
said to have put in more than thirty years on retreat.11
As a young
boy one of Mingyur’s favorite pastimes was pretending he was a yogi meditating
in a cave. He entered a three-year meditation retreat when he was just
thirteen, a decade or more earlier than most who undertake such a challenge. And
by the end of that retreat he proved so proficient that he was made meditation
master for the next three-year round, which began soon after the first ended.
THE
WANDERER RETURNS
In June
2016, Mingyur Rinpoche came back to Richie’s lab. It had been eight years since
Mingyur had last been studied there. We were fascinated to see what an MRI of
his brain might show.
Some years
before, he had announced he would be starting another threeyear retreat—his
third. But to everyone’s shock, instead of going into a remote hermitage with
an attendant along to cook and care for him as is traditional, he disappeared
one night from his monastery in Bodh Gaya, India, taking only his robes, a bit
of cash, and an ID card.
During his
odyssey Mingyur lived as a wandering mendicant, spending winters as a sadhu on
the plains of India and during the warmer months inhabiting Himalayan caves
where fabled Tibetan masters had stayed. Such a wandering retreat, not uncommon
in old Tibet, has become rare, especially among Tibetans like Mingyur whose
diaspora has brought them into the modern world.
During
those wandering years there was not a word from him, save once when he was
recognized by a Taiwanese nun at a retreat cave. He gave her a letter (telling
her to send it after he had moved on) that said not to worry, he was fine—and
exhorting his students to practice. A photo that surfaced when a monk, a
longtime friend, managed to join Mingyur shows a radiant face with a wispy
beard and long hair, his expression one of ebullient rapture.
Then,
suddenly, in November 2015, after almost four and a half years as a wanderer in
radio silence, Mingyur reappeared at his monastery in Bodh Gaya. On hearing
that news, Richie arranged to see him during a visit to India that December.
Months
later, Mingyur stopped in Madison while on an American teaching tour, and
stayed at Richie’s house. Within minutes of his arrival at the house Mingyur
agreed to go back into the scanner. Only a few months after returning from his
hardscrabble life he seemed right at home in this up-to-the-minute lab.
As Mingyur
entered the MRI suite, the lab technician gave him a friendly welcome, saying,
“I was the tech the last time you were in the scanner.” Mingyur beamed his
electric smile in return. While he waited for the machine to be readied,
Mingyur joked with another member of Richie’s team, an Indian scientist from
Hyderabad.
Given the
go-ahead, Mingyur left his sandals at the bottom of the twostep ladder that
boosted him to the MRI table and lay down so the tech could strap his head into
a cradle tight enough that it allows no more than 2 millimeters of movement—all
the better to obtain sharp images of his brain. His calves, thickened by years
of trekking the steep slopes of the Himalayas, protruded from his monk’s robes
and then disappeared as the table slipped into the maw of the MRI.
The
technology had improved since his last visit; the monitors reveal a crisper
image of his brain’s folds and tucks. It would take months to compare these
data with those collected years before, and to track the changes in his brain
during that time against the normal alterations seen in the brains of men his
age.
Although
he was barraged with requests, following his return from this last retreat, to
have his brain scanned by many labs all over the world, Mingyur turned most all
of them down for fear of becoming a perpetual subject. He had consented to have
his brain rescanned by Richie and his team because he knew they had
longitudinal data from previous scans and could analyze ways his brain might be
showing atypical changes.
The first
scan Richie’s lab had of Mingyur’s brain was obtained in 2002; there was
another in 2010 and now the most recent, in 2016. These three scans provided
the lab team with an opportunity to examine age-related declines in gray matter
density, the site of the brain’s molecular machinery. Each of us has a decrease
in the density of gray matter as we age, and as we saw in chapter nine, “Mind,
Body, and Genome,” a given brain can be compared with a large database of the
brains of other people the same age.
With the
development of high-resolution MRI, scientists have now discovered that they
can use anatomical landmarks to estimate the age of a person’s brain. Brains of
people of a given age group into a normal distribution, a bell-shape curve;
most people’s brain’s hover around their chronological age. But some people’s
brains age more quickly than their chronological age would predict, putting
them at risk for premature agerelated brain disorders such as dementia. And
other people’s brains age more slowly compared with their chronological age.
As of this
writing the most recent set of scans of Mingyur’s brain are still being
processed, but Richie and his team see some clear patterns already, using
rigorous quantitative anatomical landmarks. Comparing Mingyur’s brain to norms
for his age, he falls in the 99th percentile—that is, if we had 100 people who
are the same chronological age as Mingyur (forty-one years at this scan), his
brain would be the youngest in a group of 100 age- and gender-matched peers.
After his latest retreat as a wanderer, when the lab compared Mingyur’s brain
changes to those of a control group over the same period of time, Mingyur’s
brain is clearly aging more slowly.
Although
his chronological age was forty-one at the time, his brain fit most closely the
norms for those whose chronological age was thirty-three.
This
rather remarkable fact highlights the further reaches of neuroplasticity, the
very basis of an altered trait: an enduring mode of being reflecting an
underlying change in the structure of the brain.
The total
hours of practice Mingyur put in during his years as a wanderer are difficult
to calculate. At his level of expertise, “meditation” becomes an ongoing
feature of awareness—a trait—not a discrete act. In a very real sense, he
practices continuously, day and night. In fact, in his lineage the distinction
made is not the conventional equation of meditation with time spent in a
session sitting on a cushion versus regular life, but rather, between being in
a meditative state or not, no matter what else you are doing.
From
Mingyur’s very first visit to the lab, he had rendered compelling data hinting
at the power of intentional, sustained mental exercise to redesign neural
circuitry. But the findings from Mingyur were only anecdotal, a single case
that might be explained many different ways. For instance, perhaps his remarkable
family has some mysterious genetic predisposition that both motivates them to
meditate and leads them to high levels of proficiency.
More
convincing are results from a larger group of seasoned meditation adepts like
Mingyur. His remarkable neural performance was part of a larger story, a
one-of-a-kind brain research program that has harvested data from these
world-class meditation experts. Richie’s lab continues to study and analyze the
mass of data points from these yogis, in an ever-growing set of findings
unparalleled in the history of contemplative traditions, let alone brain
science.
IN A
NUTSHELL
At first
Richie’s lab found it impossible to get the cooperation of the most highly
experienced yogis. But when Matthieu Ricard, a seasoned yogi himself with a PhD
in biology, assured his peers their participation might be of benefit to
people, a total of twenty-one yogis agreed. Matthieu, in an innovative
collaboration with Richie’s lab, helped design the experimental protocol. The
next yogi to come to the lab, Mingyur Rinpoche, was also the one with most
lifetime hours of practice—62,000 at the time. When he meditated on compassion
there was a huge surge in electrical activity in his brain as recorded by EEG;
fMRI images revealed that during this meditation his circuitry for empathy
jumped in activity by 700 to 800 percent compared to its level at rest. And
when he later went on retreat as a wanderer for four and a half years, the
aging of his brain slowed, so that at forty-one his brain resembled the norm
for thirty-three-year-olds./.
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