Dr. Richard Davidson

One of them is during what some have called insight.

And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience of working on a problem and all of a sudden they just have an aha moment and things sort of gel, they congeal, they come together.

And there have been some clever experimental designs where investigators have created tasks

that increase the likelihood of aha moments.

They're sort of trivial in the experimental context, they're simple cognitive tasks where all of a sudden you just recognize the answer.

It might be something like a crossword puzzle and you're trying to get a word to fit and suddenly you get the word.

It comes in a moment and

It's kind of an instantaneous recognition and you typically would see a burst of gamma oscillations that is very short.

The average duration would be around 250 milliseconds, really short.

What we see in these long-term meditators is the prevalence of high amplitude gamma activity that goes on for seconds and minutes.

When we first saw that, by the way, and there's a lot of interesting history here, but we first reported this in 2004 with very long-term meditators where the average lifetime practice of this group was 34,000 hours.

Listeners can go to the arithmetic later, but 34,000 hours is a big number.

And in these...

practitioners, we saw these really high amplitude gamma oscillations that actually were visible to the naked eye, which is unusual for this kind of measurement.

And in the original paper which was published in PNAS in 2004, we actually had a figure of the raw EEG from one practitioner just to illustrate how

how prominent it is that you can see it with the naked eye.

And we've subsequently replicated that, it's been replicated by others.

We've also seen that this gamma activity is found during slow-wave sleep.

It's actually superimposed on delta oscillations.

This is a great question.