11 A Yogi’s Brain

 

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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