Research: A Reality Check
Meditation was practised for two and a half thousand years before anyone attached an electrode to a practitioner. What the instruments have found over the past twenty years is genuinely interesting — and this page sets it out along with the reasons for holding it lightly.
Wisconsin, 2004
In 2004, Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison published a study of long-term Buddhist practitioners — monks with between 10,000 and 50,000 hours of practice behind them.
Asked to meditate on unconditional compassion, they produced high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase synchrony across lateral frontoparietal electrodes, at amplitudes that had not previously been reported in the neuroscience literature. The effect scaled with hours practised: more practice, more synchrony.
The detail that most impressed the researchers was not what happened during meditation. It was that the practitioners’ ratio of gamma to slow-wave activity was already higher than the controls’ before the meditation began. Whatever had changed had not switched on for the session. It showed at rest.
The Monk with the Sensors
The best known of those participants is Matthieu Ricard, and his biography is unusually relevant to a monastery arguing that study and contemplation belong together.
Ricard took a doctorate in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute under the Nobel laureate François Jacob, and then, in 1972, left science for the Himalayas. He has been the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989. In 2000 he co-founded Karuna-Shechen, which runs humanitarian projects across Nepal, India and Tibet, and he gives away what his books earn.
Wired with 256 sensors at Wisconsin, he produced gamma activity striking enough that the press began calling him the happiest man in the world.
Ricard calls the label absurd, and says it misrepresents both the research and his experience.
He is right, and it is worth being precise about why. A measurement is not a mood. One person is not a result. And a tradition whose central claim is that grasping at a solid self causes most of our trouble has little use for a title awarded to an individual — least of all a superlative one.
Sera Jey, 2024
In 2024 researchers brought portable EEG equipment to Sera Jey Monastic University in Bylakuppe — the institution whose curriculum this monastery follows — and recorded twenty-three monks across thirty-five sessions. Nine were beginners with under a year of practice, six had between one and ten years, and eight had more than ten years including extended retreats.
Concentrative meditation produced power changes of up to fifteen decibels in the most experienced monks, with a marked shift in the alpha peak that the researchers read as active inhibition — the mind holding distraction at bay.
Analytical meditation produced around two decibels. The researchers concluded that it engages processes less visible to this kind of analysis. Of the two practices, the one that most resembles ordinary thinking is the one the instruments find hardest to see.
The Wider Picture
Between those two studies sit a number of others. The largest recorded 73 Tibetan Buddhist monks against 30 meditation-naive controls, taking EEG and ECG together and drawing blood for proteomic analysis. Activity shifted to higher frequencies during meditation, and — the part that is hard to dismiss — the state-level changes correlated with lasting differences in heart rate and in levels of the protein neuropilin-1. Whatever is happening is not confined to the brain.
Other work has found that the difference persists into sleep: experienced meditators show higher parietal-occipital gamma during dreamless NREM sleep than non-meditators do. And studies of brain–heart interaction in Tibetan monks have found the neural response to the heartbeat itself modulated during practice.
Where the Findings Disagree
It would be convenient to report that this literature converges. It does not.
Against the studies showing gamma increasing during meditation, other work on long-term practitioners has found a consistent and significant decrease in relative gamma, and reduced beta and low-gamma power during deeper absorption. The explanation offered is that results depend on which practice is being done, how deep the state is, which region is measured, and which frequency band is examined.
Which means the popular summary — meditation raises gamma — is too crude to be true. Different practices do different things.
That is less satisfying than a clean story, and more credible. It also happens to match what the tradition says: concentrative and analytical meditation are not the same activity, and there is no particular reason to expect them to leave the same trace.
What These Studies Do Not Show
In 2018 a large group of contemplative researchers published a critical review of their own field, arguing that poor measurement, weak methodology and the hyping of unreplicated findings had outrun the evidence, and that the field needed to take the replication crisis seriously. It is the most useful thing to read alongside any of the results above.
- The samples are small. Twenty-three monks at Sera Jey; fewer in the Wisconsin work. These are not population studies.
- The participants are unusual. Tens of thousands of hours of practice tells you little about what someone sitting for twenty minutes a day should expect.
- Correlates are not causes. An EEG signature accompanies a practice; it does not explain it, and it does not establish that the practice produced the person.
- The results do not all agree. As above: whether gamma rises or falls depends on the practice, the depth, the region and the band.
- Meditation is not uniformly benign. Adverse effects exist, are under-reported, and are one of the specific criticisms that review makes of the field.
None of this makes the findings worthless. It makes them what they are: early results, in small numbers of unusual people, pointing somewhere interesting.
Why the Monastery Reports This Carefully
There is an obvious temptation for a monastery to use this research as advertising. We would rather not.
The monks here did not take up this practice because of an EEG result, and they would continue if every one of these studies were retracted tomorrow. The nine stages of calm abiding were mapped by people who had only their own attention to observe with, and the map has been useful for a thousand years without instruments to confirm it.
What the research offers is a shared language: a way for someone who finds the traditional vocabulary difficult to see that something here is being trained, and trained systematically, over decades. That is worth having.
It is not the reason for the practice.