Because gamma waves are associated with moments of insight, this result signifies that beginning LKM practitioners experience heightened awareness as a state change during meditation practice. How this enhanced concentration translates into mood changes and enhanced mindset is not yet clear, but study participants reported an increased feeling of well-being after a single ten-minute LKM session.
“We are giving the brain an emotional workout,” Panov explains. “The expert meditators didn’t show much alpha activity, so it leads us to suspect that there are really important differences between different levels of expertise.”
Brain Waves Synchronize in Long-Term Meditators
When neuroscientists analyze brain wave data collected via EEG, they assess many waveform characteristics, including amplitude, frequency, shape, and location. Each monk had also completed at least one three-year meditation retreat during which they meditated for eight hours per day.
The researchers found that gamma waves synchronized across distant regions of each monk’s brain, indicating that neurons on both sides of the brain were firing at the same time. Since this is rarely seen in non-meditators, the result indicates that, for highly experienced practitioners, meditation does indeed cause state changes to the neuronal landscape and connectivity of brain tissue.
“These practitioners often report that they are in a mode of open awareness,” Davidson explains, which means they are aware of more information in a given moment than other people. They analyzed brain scans of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, Mingyur Rinpoche, who had meditated for an impressive 62,000 hours.
