In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks — in particular, their meditative prowess — for scientific research.

Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee, an invitation to study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as Davidson recently conceded, ”very flaky.” But the Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself — he took leave from graduate school to travel through India and Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices — leapt at the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and embarked on an ambitious data-gathering expedition to northern India, lugging portable electrical generators, laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas. His goal was to measure a remarkable, if seemingly evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of the Buddhist mind at work. ”These are the Olympic athletes, the gold medalists, of meditation,” Davidson says.

Read more: Is Buddhism Good for Your Health? — The New York Times Magazine

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