Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard happiest man known to science
Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk, says meditation fundamentally rewires the brain towards joy, and research suggests he's right
As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Dr Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had tested.
The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people's happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.
"It's a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree, but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are," the Frenchman said.
Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.
Professor Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, wired up Ricard's skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation. The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produced a level of gamma waves - those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory - "never reported before in the neuroscience literature", he said.
The scans showed excessive activity in his brain's left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.
Research into the phenomenon, known as "neuroplasticity", is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of groundbreaking experiments along with other leading scientists.