The World's Happiest Man?

The World's Happiest Man?
Friday July 17, 2009
At the New York Times, Daniel Goleman writes about Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama dubbed "the happiest man in the world." Mingyur Rinpoche is among a group of "Olympic-level meditators" whose brain waves have been studied by neuroscientists.
The neuroscientists compared champs like Mingyur Rinpoche, who have put in at least 10,000 lifetime hours of meditation, and people who were new to meditation, and looked in at the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The left prefrontal cortex in particular is associated with "happiness," or feelings of being “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.”
During meditation, the brains of practiced meditators showed on average a 100 percent increase in activity in the left prefrontal cortex. The newbies, on the other hand, showed about a 10 percent increase. As with most endeavors, practice matters, Goleman says.