Last Updated on November 20, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
About 20 years ago, Matthieu Ricard spoke on TED about „The habits of happiness“
Ricard spoke of a scientific study about meditation which might be revolutionary. This study was published in PNAS in 2004:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
But 20 years later in the year 2024 we find podcats of Matthieu Ricard on his YouTube channel:
And Ricard does as far as we know not mention a scientific revolution in meditation research anymore.
And the situation is similar with Diego Hangartner.
https://www.diegohangartner.org
Diego was rowing at the level of the Swiss champions as a young man. But in 2024 Diego makes podcasts on „Meditationsszene Schweiz“. Diego says in this podcast, that he participated in scientific studies about meditation since the year 2004:
Diego Hangartner is now 62 years old and Matthieu Ricard 78.
Ricard spoke of a scientific study about meditation which might be revolutionary. But 20 years later Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org:
does not know of a revolution in the field of meditation research which was triggered by the PNAS paper from 2004.
Many new papers about meditation research appeared since 2004, for instance about the effect of meditation on the heart rate variability, etc. But as far as we know none of these are Nobel price topics.
A Nobel prize topic would be that happiness or even better mental health can be trained, and scientific data which proofs this and which are published for instance in Nature and Science. This would then really be revolutionary, for instance for the treatment of mental illnesses. But where are these Nature and Science papers about this topic?