Last Updated on March 20, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Two major signals which are relevant for practicing meditation:
- alpha waves which correlates with inner peace
which can be reached for instance through the practice of Shamatha meditation
2. gamma waves in the left prefrontal cortex correlate with happiness or well-being
People with more gamma wave activity on the right prefrontal cortex are depressed, withdrawn, they don t describe a lot of positive emotions.
People with more gamma wave activity on the left prefrontal cortex show tendancy to altruism, curiosity, happiness or well-being
gamma waves in humans in general correlate with human conscious perception
The information about gamma waves is mainly from Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and son of the well-known French philosopher Jean-François Revel. Matthieu made his PhD. In cellular genetics
at the Institut Pasteur in Paris under the guidance of Nobel Prize winner Francois Jacob. The satements of Matthieu can be found in the following YouTube video:
Matthieu Ricard participated in a study with Richard Davidsons group, and is co-author of a PNAS paper about “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice”:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
for a detailed discussion check the scientific literature about this topic.