About 20 years ago Matthieu Ricard reported enthusiastically about scientific studies about the effect of meditation:

Was this video recorded to sell his book “Happiness”? . His 2003 book Plaidoyer pour the bonheur (published in English in 2006 as Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill) explores the meaning and fulfillment of happiness and was a major best-seller in France.

In 2018 the book „Altered Traits“ by Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman came out:

A key message of the book was that even a daily practice of 20 min meditation can change the brain in an objectively measurable way. But so what now? Also playing the violin changes the brain. Is there something special about the changes induced by meditation in the brain? And where has the enthusiasm gone of Mattieu Ricard? Is the meditation research project of Richard R. Davidson triggered by the Dalai Lama the 14 th a failure 20 years after it started? Are brain scanners not sup-tile enough the measure the changes we know from high level meditators in a way which is scientifically satisfying? 20 years after the PNAS paper:

Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15534199

Spiritual teachers at the highest level are still more helpful for us personally than brain scan studies about the effect of meditation of high- level meditators. Since these brain scan study results are as far as we know not published in journals at the highest level, but we find those in the popular scientific books such as „Altered Traits“.

And Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org

has experienced similar things in the past. For instance the enthusiasm when molecular biologist from Switzerland Charles Weissmann cloned interferon in 1980, or when Christof Koch explained in Nature in 1990 „how the brain works“. And now Richard R. Davidson explained that meditation changes the brain in PNAS in 2004. All of these topics where very popular. And they where especially interesting for book sellers. But where are the scientific revolutions these books made us believe will come?

Molecular biologists in Switzerland only rarely come back to Switzerland when they go abroad for a post-doc. Only view jobs for those can be found in Switzerland. And has Christof Koch no funds anymore for his computational neuroscience in 2024? Was the topic too complicated and unrealistic, to model the hole brain with computers to understand it? Koch publishes now about Panpsychism. Similar questions arise now about Richard R. Davidsons meditation research projects.

The world renowned neuroscientists comes to Landguet Ried in Berne Switzerand:

But as far as we know he is not invited to top universities in Switzerland such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, since there are hardly any meditation research projects happening there.