Matthieu Ricard
Richard Davidson's Laboratory: How One Neuroscientist Built the World's Premier Contemplative Science Center
In 1992, Richard Davidson was already an established affective neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, known for his work on emotion and the brain. He had published in top journals.
The Neuroscience of Compassion Meditation: How Tonglen, Metta, and Karuna Rewire the Brain
In 2013, Helen Weng and colleagues at Richard Davidson's Center for Healthy Minds published a study that should have rewritten the textbooks on emotional development. The study took ordinary adults — university students and community members with no meditation experience — and gave them a simple...
The Default Mode Network: The Brain's Operating System UI and What Happens When You Minimize It
In 2001, Marcus Raichle and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis published a paper that would fundamentally reshape neuroscience's understanding of the brain — and, by extension, of consciousness, ego, and the self.
Matthieu Ricard: The Molecular Biologist Who Became the Happiest Man Alive
In 1972, a twenty-six-year-old French molecular biologist named Matthieu Ricard stood at a crossroads that most scientists never face. He had just completed his doctoral dissertation at the Institut Pasteur in Paris under the supervision of Nobel laureate Francois Jacob, one of the founding...
The Dose-Response Curve of Meditation: How Much Practice Produces What Changes
How much do I need to practice? How long until something changes?
Neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's Radical Proposal to Reunite Science and Experience
There is a paradox at the foundation of every neuroscience laboratory on Earth. Researchers use the most sophisticated imaging technology ever created — fMRI scanners generating 100,000 data points per second, EEG arrays with 256 electrodes sampling brain activity at millisecond resolution, MEG...
40 Hz Gamma Oscillations: The Neural Signature of Enlightenment
Close your eyes. Now open them.