Dalai Lama aide Matthieu Ricard the ‘world’s happiest man’

This week, scientists named a Buddhist monk, and aide to the Dalai Lama, the world's happiest man.

His secret? Meditation.

Neuroscientists wired up 66-year-old Frenchman Matthieu Ricard's skull with 256 sensors four years ago as part of their research on hundreds of practitioners of meditation.

When meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produced a level of gamma waves "never reported before in the neuroscience literature," neuroscientist Richard Davidson told the AFP.

Gamma waves are associated with learning, memory, attention, and consciousness.

The scans "also showed excessive activity in his brain's left prefrontal cortex" compared to his right side, likely indicating a greater capacity for happiness and decreased tendency toward negativity, scientists believe.

"It's a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are," Ricard told the AFP.

Ricard believes anyone can be happy — "if they only train their brain."

"We have been looking for 12 years at the effect of short and long-term mind-training through meditation on attention, on compassion, on emotional balance," Davidson said. "We've found remarkable results with long-term practitioners who did 50,000 rounds of meditation, but also with three weeks of 20 minutes a day, which of course is more applicable to our modern times."

The prominent monk, who received a PhD in cell genetics in Paris before moving to India and eventually writing the bestseller "The Monk and the Philosopher" and dedicating his life to the science of meditation, donated the proceeds from his books to 110 humanitarian projects, which provide schools for 21,000 children and health care for 100,000 patients a year.

"He was awarded the French National Order of Merit for his work in preserving Himalayan culture but it is his work on the science of happiness which perhaps defines him best," the AFP's Frankie Taggart wrote.