A study from 2004 took Buddhist monks, and compared their brain signals to a group of volunteers, while they meditated. Matthieu Ricard, a buddhist monk who, at the time, had ~50000 hours of meditation behind him, showed the highest recorded sustained gamma frequency brain waves, which often link to attention, learning and happiness. His brain also showed extremely high activity in a region of the brain associated with general well-being. "*The high-amplitude gamma activity found in some of these practitioners are, to our knowledge, the highest reported in the literature in a nonpathological context*"[^1] Despite often being referred to as "the happiest person in the world", Matthieu calls the label absurd and untrue. However, it seems he still has the highest measures of happiness ever recorded. His lifestyle clearly does something, because all of the Buddhist monks in the experiment experienced greater measured happiness than any of the volunteers. [^1]: Lutz, Antoine, Lawrence L. Greischar, Nancy B. Rawlings, Matthieu Ricard, and Richard J. Davidson. 2004. “Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony during Mental Practice.” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America_ 101 (46): 16369–73. [https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0407401101](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0407401101). [[lutzLongtermMeditatorsSelfinduce2004|Annotations]]