Compassion is Good for the Brain

When Matthieu Ricard meditates, his mind is filled with infinite compassion. That’s his experience. When Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin used magnetic resonance imaging to look at Matthieu Ricard’s brain he saw a prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain associated with happiness and other positive emotions—lit up in a way never before seen by researchers. Ricard, a PhD geneticist and Buddhist monk who’s been meditating for decades, had off-the-charts gamma wave activity, which corresponds with focused thought. Davidson tested 30 other Buddhist monks and got similar results. Testing of 150 other subjects showed no such patterns, although it did show low-level changes among subjects who were newly trained in meditation techniques.