Meditation based on compassion can bring miracles to the brain–this was the conclusion made by scientists researching the brains of Buddhist monks. Publications on this subject wouldn’t have become widely known if it hadn’t been for Matthieu Ricard, who became the favourite subject of the researchers and then a world media star.

“The happiest man in the world” was the way the media described Matthieu Ricard, a 75-year-old Frenchman and PhD holder in molecular genetics, who in the late 1970s became a monk and has since practised Tibetan Buddhism.

Day-to-day, Ricard lives in the Himalayas, but he travels around the world, gives lectures and writes books. He is involved in the work of the Mind and Life Institute, which was founded in 1980s and is supported, among others, by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The scientists associated with the Institute deal with a relatively new discipline: contemplative neuroscience. It is based on analysing the effects of meditation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures oxygenation in the active areas of the brain.

One of the most renowned people in the field of contemplative neuroscience is the psychologist and psychiatrist Richard J. Davidson (in private life a friend of the Dalai