At the Shambhala Mountain Center, a 600-acre Buddhist retreat nestled at 8,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, UC Davis neuroscientist Clifford Saron and his team were busy gathering what amounted to more than 2,300 hours of data from physiological tests and interviews. Ambling outside, smiling blissfully despite the chilly late-year winds, were a few of the research subjects themselves—members of a group totaling 64, from the United States, Thailand, the Netherlands, and points in between.

On the Road to Shambhala: It may look like Tibet, but the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya (top left) is actually located high in the Colorado Rockies, at the Shambhala Mountain Center (above), where scientists are conducting extensive tests (top right) to better understand the effect of meditation on the brain.
Stupa, Meditation: Adeline Von Waning; Electrodes: Courtesy of Clifford Saron.

The scientists and their guinea pigs converged in this small valley just south of the Wyoming border, in a locale best known for the 108-foot-tall Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a sacred Buddhist monument that is the largest of its kind in North America. For 3 months—from September to December—and for as many as 12 hours a day, participants paid some extraordinary attention to attention. They learned to focus on the flow of their breath, donning rubber skullcaps wired with dozens of electrodes to test their cognitive and emotional skills, while samples of their blood and saliva were periodically taken.

A researcher at the Center for Mind and brain, Saron and his crew—including the study's contemplative director, B. Alan Wallace, a popular Buddhist author and former translator for the Dalai Lama—invested their time and more than $1 million in research funding. They examined whether meditation can lead to lasting changes in a subject's well-being—changes visible right down to a person's molecular makeup. Preliminary results show the intensive training did indeed improve performance, as compared with a control group, for both short-term and sustained attention, Saron says.

The study, called the Shamatha Project after a Tibetan school of meditation training, represents the most comprehensive research yet performed on the effect of meditation on the mind. The project turned a patch of semi-wilderness into ground zero for a new wave of Western enthusiasm with East Asian meditative practices, just as scientists at leading U.S. universities, including Berkeley, are beginning to focus on "positive" sentiments such as concentration, love, and compassion.

"Meditation has been demystified, to the point where it is now being studied very seriously by very serious scientists," says Berkeley psychology professor Robert Levenson, a Shamatha Project consultant. In recent years, Levenson has carried out his own research into meditation, including blasting a French Buddhist monk with noise to gauge his startle reflex. (The reflex was there, Levenson reports, but significantly muted by some meditation techniques.)

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