Transcript

My co-author of the book Altered Traits is a neuroscientist, Richard Davidson. He has a lab at the University of Wisconsin. It’s a very large lab, he has dedicated scanners, he has about 100 people working there, and he was able to do some remarkable research where he flew Olympic level meditators—who live in Nepal or India typically, some in France—he flew them over to the lab and put them through a protocol in his brain scanners and did state-of-the-art tests and the

results were just astounding.

We found, for example, or he found that their brain waves are really different. Perhaps the most remarkable findings in the Olympic level meditators has to do with what’s called a gamma wave.All of us get gamma for a very short period when we solve a problem we’ve been grappling with, even if it’s something that’s vexed us for months. We get about half a second of gamma; it’s the strongest wave in the EEG spectrum.