The seminal piece of neuroscientific research that opened people’s eyes to the link between meditation and happiness, was published in 2004 in PNAS[3]. It all began when the Dalai Lama invited Dr Richard Davidson, cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to interview monks about their mental and emotional lives back in 1992. Fast forward ten years, and Davidson was placing 128 electrodes on the head of Matthieu Ricard, the French biochemist turned Buddhist monk close to the Dalai Lama. When Ricard was asked to meditate on unconditional loving kindness (also known as compassion meditation, a particular strand of Buddhist meditation), the brain scans showed unusually high gamma waves, which only arise with intensely focussed thought at levels beyond the day-to-day experience of most people. (He was subsequently named the happiest man in the world).