Dr Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, lecturer and science journalist who researches the brain and emotions. He recently revealed a recent study into Olympic-level meditators produced some incredible results. Dr Goleman detailed how medication can help trick the brain and produce gamma waves – which heighten our sense of smell, touch, taste and vision.
However, this feeling, which we experience for less than a second when we bite into an apple, can have lasting effects on meditators.
Dr Coleman revealed to BigThink: “What was stunning was Olympic-level meditators – this is people who have done up to 62,000 hours of meditation – have gamma present all the time.
“It’s not just during meditation but it is their everyday state of mind.
“We have no idea what that means, science has never seen it before.
“We also found when we asked them to focus on compassion, their level of gamma jumps 700 to 800 percent.
“We have to assume they are in a special state of consciousness, a state of being like liberation or enlightenment.
“We suspect there is really no vocabulary that can explain it, but the meditators say it is very spacious and you are prepared for anything.”
However, many neuroscientists are not convinced by the theory.
Arguments against it range from the possibility of mismeasurement in electroencephalogram (EEG) machines to relations to other neural function, such as minute eye movements.
Recent studies using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which does not suffer the potential drawbacks associated with EEG, have identified gamma activity associated with sensory processing, mainly in the visual cortex.
Dr Coleman is also the author of Emotional Intelligence, which was on the New York Time’s bestseller list for a year and a half after it came out in 1995.