Daniel Goleman, a superb interpreter of scientific findings, provides a look inside the mind of the Dalai Lama in a brief video, a quote from which here:

Question: What does meditation do for the brain?

Daniel Goleman: Well, the Mind & Life Institute catalyze these experiments where high, you have to say, Olympic level meditators came to brain imaging labs in the West and have their brains studied while they did different meditation practices. And what they’re finding is brain configurations that they’ve never seen before. These are different brains. For example, the left prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is the center of positive emotions or part of the key… key part of the circuitry for that. And when these monks meditate on compassion, it lights up, it activates to a level that just never seen in ordinary life. And they’re finding, you know, a range of specific… state specific effects like this.

I remember smirking while leafing through a Norman Vincent Peale book that I found in the attic as a teenager.  Now, I increasingly hear of scientific studies describing results that sound remarkably like what I leafed through in the attic.  Who’s smirking now?