Buddhist Monk Is The World's Happiest Man

[camerata]

Buddhist monk is the world's happiest man

Tibetan monk and molecular geneticist Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The 66-year-old’s brain produces a level of gamma waves - those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory - never before reported in neuroscience.

Source.

[Several]

So they've tested everyone on earth then. Must've probed me while I was sleeping.

[weary]

It's a BS title.

But once we get past that, the fact remains that Matthieu Ricard is an undisputed meditation master. The graph demonstrating his superior control of mind states during metta meditation (metta ON, metta OFF ) is rather mind blowing to a puny beginner like myself.

There are some very interesting studies being conducted these days thanks to the Dalai Lama's efforts at dialogue with scientists, and possibly also because a fair number of Western scientists have become adept meditators.

[Xangsamhua]

He's also no mean intellect. "The Monk and the Philosopher" and "The Quantum and the Lotus" are must-reads for students of Buddhist philosophy.

[sabaijai]

By coincidence I am in the midst of reading The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, by neurophysiologist Owen Flanagan. The book contains several passages discussing the Mathieu Ricard study. Besides the problem of the n = 1 sample size, Flanagan points out it is scientifically fallacious to conclude Ricard is happier than the general population for several other reasons.

The discussion is quite advanced (or at least I have found it so), but if you go to the Amazon link for the book, click on the book cover for the "Look Inside" feature, and then search the book for "Ricard", you can read excerpts of the analysis -- in fact pretty much all of it. Flanagan, the author of an earlier book called The Colour of Happiness has a lot to say about the state of neurology research and measures of 'happiness'. In fact all that scientists have been able to do, so far, is make very rough correlations between certain areas of the brain that 'light up' under CAT, MRI, etc scans and positive affect reported by the subject. The discipline is still very far from defining or confirming 'happiness' through brain scans.

http://www.amazon.com/Bodhisattvas-Brain-Buddhism-Naturalized/dp/0262016044

Nonetheless it is a fascinating subject. I highly recommend the book if you can handle scientific discourse. Even in its infancy, brain research represents a whole new way of looking at Buddhist practice.

[Xangsamhua]

By coincidence I am in the midst of reading The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, by neurophysiologist Owen Flanagan. The book contains several passages discussing the Mathieu Ricard study. Besides the problem of the n = 1 sample size, Flanagan points out it is scientifically fallacious to conclude Ricard is happier than the general population for several other reasons.

The discussion is quite advanced (or at least I have found it so), but if you go to the Amazon link for the book, click on the book cover for the "Look Inside" feature, and then search the book for "Ricard", you can read excerpts of the analysis -- in fact pretty much all of it. Flanagan, the author of an earlier book called The Colour of Happiness has a lot to say about the state of neurology research and measures of 'happiness'. In fact all that scientists have been able to do, so far, is make very rough correlations between certain areas of the brain that 'light up' under CAT, MRI, etc scans and positive affect reported by the subject. The discipline is still very far from defining or confirming 'happiness' through brain scans.

http://www.amazon.co...d/dp/0262016044

Nonetheless it is a fascinating subject. I highly recommend the book if you can handle scientific discourse. Even in its infancy, brain research represents a whole new way of looking at Buddhist practice.

Yes, to call Matthieu Ricard the "happiest man in the world" is pretty gimmicky, and perhaps trivializes the Wisconsin studies. Still, as Owen Flanagan argues in The Bodhisattva's Brain, the capacity of neurophysiology to come up with such a conclusion is highly reductive and questionable unless one defines happiness in terms of the data emerging from the tests. Circularity. Flanagan baulks at that and so would most people, I think.

Happiness, like love, is not entirely measurable, or definable in purely quantitative terms (or even, perhaps, in qualitative ones). I would rather just observe Matthieu Ricard over a period of time in order to judge whether I thought he was very happy or not, and I think he and I would need to sit down first in one of his extensively exploratory dialogues to see if we can agree on what "happiness" is.

Not only Owen Flanagan, a fully booted and spurred neurophysiologist, is skeptical about the Wisconsin studies (Ricard began working with them in the early 2000s, and the results - and the "WHM" epithet - go back to 2006, so why we're hearing about them again now I don't know), but others question the broader neuroscience project altogether. The conservative English philosopher, Roger Scruton, has described it as "a new academic disease" that rejects the whole enterprise of a specifically ‘humane’ understanding of the human condition". Scruton's primary complaint seems to be that its findings do not really apply to the human condition except in very limited ways and that the neuroscience enterprise dismisses "our old ideas of responsibility".

In regard to the human response to images, for example, he asks:

How do we explain the emergence of thoughts about something from processes that reside in the transformation of visually encoded data? Cognitive science doesn't tell us. And computer models of the brain won't tell us either. They might show how images get encoded in digitalised format and transmitted in that format by neural pathways to the centre where they're interpreted. But that centre does not in fact interpret - interpreting is a process that we do, in seeing what is there before us. When it comes to the subtle features of the human condition, to the byways of culpability and the secrets of happiness and grief, we need guidance and study if we are to interpret things correctly. That is what the humanities provide, and that is why, when scholars who purport to practise them, add the prefix 'neuro' to their studies, we should expect their researches to be nonsense.

http://www.spectator...33/brain-drain/

Matthieu Ricard, as a scientist and one who delights in exploration and analysis, has cooperated with the Wisconsin studies for over a decade and is happy to accept the sobriquet of "world's happiest man" for the publicity it directs to his work on meditation and the funds it brings in to the charitable work of Karuna-Shechen that he administers. However, I strongly suspect that he does not take the sobriquet very seriously, and that he would ascribe the happiness he enjoys to his long practice of the Buddhadharma and the meditation practice at its centre.

Edited October 31, 2012 by Xangsamhua

[sabaijai]

The four-year-old Wisconsin study also doesn't control for hereditary and non-Buddhist environmental factors. It may be Ricard's genetics that produce the colourful scans, or the diet he has been on for the last decades, or any number of other factors. To cherry-pick meditation from all the possible variables and make the correlation causal is not scientific.

I appreciate the way Flanagan has fashioned an integrated provisional hypothesis for the relationship between Buddhist practice and happiness as defined within Buddhism (with certain correlates with 'folk' happiness), that relies on all data available, not just on brain scans.

[Xangsamhua]

The four-year-old Wisconsin study also doesn't control for hereditary and non-Buddhist environmental factors. It may be Ricard's genetics that produce the colourful scans, or the diet he has been on for the last decades, or any number of other factors. To cherry-pick meditation from all the possible variables and make the correlation causal is not scientific.

Fair comment. It's a hypothetical correlation. But I think it's one that Matthieu Ricard identifies, at least hypothetically.

He speaks about the WHM thing (which he laughs off) in the video below and goes on to talk about the importance of meditation to attaining a realistic and unselfish view of life, which helps one to be happy.

[Several]

Being winner of the happiness competition isn't really the aim anyway. You'd surely be in the same boat as the angriest, greediest and most fearful. Equanimity is advised by Buddha. Also I reckon science has become enamoured of trying to weigh and measure everything conceiveable and is, in some cases, becoming ridiculous. Its fashionable to bandy scientific terms and combine old knowledge with new discoveries, but I would no more ask a scientist how to live this life than I would ask a mechanic where to drive my car. Science can do much to serve humanity provided it doesn't become too intoxicated by its own hyperbole.

[Xangsamhua]

Its fashionable to bandy scientific terms and combine old knowledge with new discoveries, but I would no more ask a scientist how to live this life than I would ask a mechanic where to drive my car.

[sabaijai]

I would no more ask a scientist how to live this life than I would ask a mechanic where to drive my car. Science can do much to serve humanity provided it doesn't become too intoxicated by its own hyperbole.

I agree. However it's a straw man argument to imply that scientists aim to instruct Buddhists how to practice. That's not the avowed intention of such studies.

When carried out using accepted empirical methodology, scientific inquiry can be intrinsically interesting. If such research can shed light on Buddhist practice in a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, way, it seems like a valid avenue of inquiry. How brain function correlates with affect is a wide field of study, and there is no reason for Buddhists to be exempt as consenting objects of study.

Will Buddhists learn much of real value from such studies? Probably not. The Tipitaka seems necessary and sufficient. But perhaps scientists and other empirically minded observers will get something of value out of it.

Nothing taken away from the remarkable, admirable Mathieu Ricard, by the way. He seems very happy

[Several]

I would no more ask a scientist how to live this life than I would ask a mechanic where to drive my car. Science can do much to serve humanity provided it doesn't become too intoxicated by its own hyperbole.

I agree. However it's a straw man argument to imply that scientists aim to instruct Buddhists how to practice. That's not the avowed intention of such studies.

When carried out using accepted empirical methodology, scientific inquiry can be intrinsically interesting. If such research can shed light on Buddhist practice in a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, way, it seems like a valid avenue of inquiry. How brain function correlates with affect is a wide field of study, and there is no reason for Buddhists to be exempt as consenting objects of study.

Will Buddhists learn much of real value from such studies? Probably not. The Tipitaka seems necessary and sufficient. But perhaps scientists and other empirically minded observers will get something of value out of it.

Nothing taken away from the remarkable, admirable Mathieu Ricard, by the way. He seems very happy

Agreed. I like scientific information and it often sheds light on old ideas. Neuro plasticity, for example. I do not like that finding a single fault is an excuse to discard an entire work. You end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. As it was said earlier, doubt about the veracity of suttas on the Buddha conversing with divinities does not imply all 84000 chapters are suspect. Simply stating that a thing is myth, pseudo scientific or anecdotal also does not mean there is no truth in any of it. All data needs to be taken on a case by case basis. This includes so called empirical scientific study, as I have read (somewhere. I forget) that as many as two thirds of scientific reports produced in the last five years are plagiarised, falsified or just wrong. 66.6% failure is an unacceptable ratio for someone to be speaking in authoritative terms from. Science is good, but it needs to be better. I may sound antagonistic towards it but am in fact keeping an open mind.

The case by case process is from my favourite physicist Richard Feynmann. He said any experiments results only prove something about that particular experiment under those particular circumstances, and to have absolute certainty the experiment must be conducted under all possible circumstances (All experiments ever conducted have been done so within the gravitational/electromagnetic/radiation influence of Sol for example). Case by Histories he called it. Now that will only be possible with quantum computing which is still a fair way off.

So I like science. It'll be great when its finished.

And I'm happy that Matthew is happy. Sadhu.

[Several]

Ah, when I said about an earlier post that read doubts about one sutta shouldn't cast doubt on the whole tipitaka, well I just discovered that post is in a different thread. About Buddha hesitating before beginning to teach. I do tend to go off a bit sometimes. Sorry people. I had the Rant Intensity knob set to Zealot. I'll turn it down to Peeved.

[sabaijai]

I have enjoyed science only after being required to conduct post-grad research in applied linguistics, something I had to do to fulfil grant requirements.

Before that I was pretty anti-science, or maybe just science-phobic, but I now consider that experience one of the most useful components of my education. It gave me skills I have used almost every day since, eg, even reading the news.

If 66% of studies are shoddy, that means the rest must be pretty good, and that's not bad I think if more people learned how to scan scientific studies in an informed way, eg, understanding general methodology, along with a light knowledge of statistics (ie validity and reliability), there would a less bad science. Or it would at least be less tolerated.

The case by case process is from my favourite physicist Richard Feynmann. He said any experiments results only prove something about that particular experiment under those particular circumstances, and to have absolute certainty the experiment must be conducted under all possible circumstances (All experiments ever conducted have been done so within the gravitational/electromagnetic/radiation influence of Sol for example). Case by Histories he called it. Now that will only be possible with quantum computing which is still a fair way off.

Science isn't about 100 percent certainty. The utility of the scientific method is its predictive power, ie, the ability to predict outcomes of conditions with more certainty (but never 100%) than random guessing, superstition or intuition (although even intuition is a weaker form of empiricism, once you analyse it).

When a theory relating to topic X comes along that has more predictive power than an older theory on the same topic, it replaces it. There is no end to that dialectic, because the nature of creating hypotheses is that a better one always lies around the corner. The predictive power of science, generally speaking but not in every case, has strengthened over time.

Back to the original topic, I'm interested in attempts to understand Buddhism from a scientific perspective, but so far it all hasn't got very far. Flanagan's modest writings are best I've seen so far. If I didn't know a bit about research methodology, I would probably fall asleep reading it though

[Several]

Yeah, I'm just wary of scientists overreaching is all. It is a great leap forward to have brain scanning tech, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and so forth, to verify there are changes in brain activity rather than going just by feel. Meditation has a measurable effect. Not sure how science could improve on meditation techniques. Identifying ideal enviroment or adept personality types maybe. I get many emails promising deep meditative states and psychic powers through 'scientific' means. The fringe preying on the gullible. Media does not help much by giving these things titles like 'worlds happiest'. Though 'abnormally jovial meditator' isn't much better. I guess they're out to sell news, science needs research grants. Pretty obvious why Buddha advised we stay away from profit making. I'm sure the intentions of all involved in this research are good, I just feel there's something misguided about it.

Science, imho, is fine. I developed an interest out if sheer curiosity about almost everything. (If you think some science is dry reading, try cryptography. Uuugh.) I do have a problem with some scientists. But nothing compared to... a certain large monotheistic religious group who shall remain brain, sorry, nameless.

[sabaijai]

I agree, it's usually the media that is overreaching and hyping scientific movements. I like the way this columnist takes the piss on one of the latest theories to have trended.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-mcneill/after-much-soul-searching-it-is-now-official-we-are-eternal-16232533.html

[Several]

I agree, it's usually the media that is overreaching and hyping scientific movements. I like the way this columnist takes the piss on one of the latest theories to have trended.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-mcneill/after-much-soul-searching-it-is-now-official-we-are-eternal-16232533.html

Thats hilarious. Emeritus is latin for quite good. Brilliant. Thanks for that.