Ricard had, for instance, cooperated with the scientists Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson on
projects with expert meditators who were compared to novice meditators. In one of these studies,
it was found that when immersed in compassionate states while listening to distressed human
voices, expert meditators, but not novice meditators, showed enhanced activations in the insula
In a related paper, Antoine Lutz found that activation in the medial insula was associated with heart
rate responses and that this association was stronger for experts than for novices
When Tania Singer and her colleagues embarked on plasticity research, they took their first steps
in a cooperative project with the University of Maastricht together with Rainer Goebel and Bettina
Sorger, who were using an interesting technology: real-time fMRI. This rather novel technology
allows for the online visualization of brain activity while subjects, who are lying in the scanner,
engage in different mental activities.
To explore the neural signature of an expert compassion meditator during meditation, the
researchers asked Matthieu Ricard to immerse himself in different states of compassion: non-
referential compassion, compassion for the suffering of others and loving-kindness. To the surprise
of the researchers, all of these states elicited activation in rather similar networks. However, these
compassion-related networks did not resemble the empathy-for-pain network described above and
so frequently observed in meditation-naïve subjects when exposed to the suffering of others. This
was puzzling – here they had an expert practitioner in the scanner and all of the states he
produced were so different from their expectations. After the scanning session, the researchers
discussed with Matthieu Ricard what he was actually doing when engaging in these different
compassionate states. During this exchange, the researchers realized that Matthieu was speaking
of a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation rather than a negative
distressing state related to sharing pain.
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To test the intuition that empathy for the suffering of another may be very different to developing
benevolent or compassionate motivation towards others, Matthieu Ricard was scanned again, but
this time asked only to engage in emotionally sharing the suffering of others without going into any
form of compassion. And here it was: the researchers outside of the scanner witnessed the
appearance of the empathy-for-pain network similar to what Tania Singer and other colleagues
had observed many times before in non-practitioners.
