Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Once the Dalai Lama urged the neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Davidson to test meditation rigorously and extract its value for the benefit of the world. For such a task, Davidson needed the help of advanced yogis in Tibet. Though kind and cordial, they flatly declined the invitation to get tested in a faraway land. However, one American monk they respected and trusted was Matthieu Ricard. He had abandoned his promising career in biology and become an advanced yogi in Tibet. At his recommendation they agreed to participate in the mapping of their brains. 

In 2002, the first Tibetan yogi tested in the lab was Mingyur Rinpoche. The number of his lifetime meditation practice hours were 62,000. His qualities of endless patience and gentle kindness truly impressed the researchers and were useful during the long and exhausting tests and the mappings of his mind.  

Mingyur had to lay down in absolute stillness. He was to alternate between one minute of meditation on compassion and thirty seconds of neutral resting period. EEG tracked his brain’s electrical activity and fMRI mapped the active regions in minute details. 

It takes time just to settle the mind considerably longer than a few minutes. But for Mingyur as soon as he began the meditation, there was a sudden huge burst of electrical activity on the computer monitors displaying the signals from his brain. Everyone assumed he had moved. But he had not moved an iota. Even when he went into the mental rest the giant spikes diminished but did not disappear. These were jaw-dropping results. In all, Davidson’s team tested twenty-two yogis. 

After his first brain scan in 2002, Mingyur was tested again in 2010 and 2016. Normally, each one of us has a decrease in the density of grey matter as we age. Most people’s brains hover around their chronological age. Mingyur’s chronological age was forty-one in 2016 but his brain scan fit most closely with thirty-three years old. This is because meditation slows the shrinkage of the key parts of the brain: at age fifty, longtime meditator’s brain is “younger” by 7.5 years compared to brains of non-meditators of the same age.