Last Updated on March 7, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
Richard Davidson was in Asia when he was young, but he was pretty sure, that he would come back. And also the PNAS paper from 2004 was written on request of the Dalai Lama:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
And not as a vision and life journey of Richard Davidson. And we are now in the year 2024, where do we stand? Richard Davidson meditated with a group of people for 20 min a day, and wrote another best-selling book about it:
But so what, now. For something really revolutionary, should not have meditated for 13 years as a full-time training, as Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche did it:
And most probably also Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche meditated most of the 30 years of his life. So if we want to find out something new about how brains change trough meditation, let us learn from Shantideva, Milarepa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche.
Since can we not learn more from those than from scientists who mediated for 20 min. a day as a hobby practice, and then write best-selling books about it?
Books which are difficult to understand and review for Buddhist monks such as Mingyur Rinpoche, and seemed not to be unterstood by the Dalai Lama the 14 as well. The Dalai Lama the 14. , who is very interested in science and meditation. And for physologists like Peter Gamma, Director of the Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS), Altered Traits was still not interesting enough to buy, also in the year 2024. Really interesting are only findings which are reproduced by other scientists. And such findings can be found here:
https://infozentrum.ethz.ch/en/
and not in best-selling books such as Altered Traits