Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

by Daniel Goleman

We were intrigued by the possibility of some biological pathway where repeated practice led to a steady embodiment of highly positive traits like kindness, patience, presence, and ease under any circumstances. Meditation, we argued, was a tool to foster precisely such beneficial fixtures of being.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter has become known these days for the concept of “creative destruction,” where the new disrupts the old in a market.

A vision lets you see things in a new light, as he says, one “not to be found in the facts, methods, and results of the preexisting state of the science.”

mastering a musical instrument enlarged the relevant brain centers.

Most people lose sight of their finger as it moves to the far right or left of their nose. But one group does not: people who are deaf.

Signs are expansive gestures. When a deaf person is reading the signing of another, she typically looks at the face of the person who is signing—not directly at how the hands move as they sign. Some of those expansive gestures

move in the periphery of the visual field, and thus naturally exercise the brain’s ability to perceive within this outer rim of vision. Plasticity lets these circuits take on a visual task as the deaf person learns sign language: reading what’s going on at the very edge of vision.

The chunk of neural real estate that usually operates as the primary auditory cortex (known as Heschl’s gyrus) receives no sensory inputs in deaf people. The brains of deaf people, Neville discovered, had morphed so that what is ordinarily a part...

Such findings illustrate how radically the brain can rewire itself in response to repeated experiences.

The findings in musicians and in the deaf—and a slew of others—offered a proof we had been waiting for. Neuroplasticity provides an evidence-based framework and a language that makes sense in terms of current scientific thinking.16 It was the scientific platform we had long

needed, a way of thinking about how intentional training of the mind, like meditatio...

A mind free from disturbance has value in lessening human suffering, a goal shared by science and meditative paths alike.

For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can

control in life from what we cannot.

In the Greco-Roman tradition, qualities such as integrity, kindness, patience, and humility were considered keys to enduring well-being.

Carol Ryff, drawing on Aristotle among many other thinkers, posits a model of well-being with six arms: Self-acceptance, being positive about yourself, acknowledging both your best and not-so-good qualities, and feeling fine about being just as you are. This takes a nonjudgmental self-awareness. Personal growth, the sense you continue to change and develop toward your full potential—getting better as time goes on—adopting new ways of seeing or being and making the most of your talents. “Each of you is perfect the way you are,” Zen master Suzuki Roshi told his students, adding, “and you can use a little improvement”—neatly reconciling acceptance with growth.

Autonomy, independence in thought and deed, freedom from social pressure, and using your own standards to measure yourself. This, by the way, applies most strongly in individualistic cultures like Australia and the United States, as compared with cultures like Japan, where harmony with one’s group looms larger. Mastery, feeling competent to handle life’s complexities, seizing opportunities as they come your way, and creating situations that suit your needs and values. Satisfying relationships, with warmth, empathy, and trust, along with mutual concern for each other and a healthy give-and-take. Life purpose, goals and beliefs that give you a sense of meaning and direction. Some philosophers argue that true

happiness comes as a by-product of meaning and ...

many of the reported benefits in the early stages of practice can be chalked up to expectation, social bonding in the group, instructor enthusiasm, or other “demand characteristics.”

mindfulness has become the most common English translation of the Pali language’s word sati. Scholars, however, translate sati in many other ways—“awareness,” “attention,” “retention,” even “discernment.”

“The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience.”

We’ve also related these trait changes to the brain systems involved, wherever the data allow. The four main neural pathways meditation transforms are, first, those for reacting to disturbing events—stress and our recovery from it (which Dan tried not so successfully to document). As we will see, the second brain system, for compassion and empathy, turns out to be remarkably ready for an upgrade. The third, circuitry for attention, Richie’s early interest, also improves in several ways—no surprise, given that meditation at its core retrains our habits of focus. The fourth neural system, for our very sense of self, gets little press

in modern talk about meditation, though it has traditionally been a major target for alteration.

But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.

He saw that the body scan and other mindfulness practices could help these patients uncouple the cognitive and emotional parts of their experience of pain from the pure sensation, a perceptual shift that can itself be a significant relief.

In Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend their mental reactions and categorization of whatever arises in their minds or around them, and this mental stance gradually spills over into everyday life.

The more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we are under such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains seemed to disconnect the usual link between executive center circuits

where we evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain (This burns).

In short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain as though it was a more neutral sensation. In more technical language, their brains showed a “functional decoupling” of the higher and lower brain regions that register pain—while their sensory circu...

managing our emotion, the capacity to refrain from acting on whim or impulse. This simple skill, statistical analyses suggested, led to a range of improvements on self-reports, from less anxiety to an overall sense of well-being, including emotion regulation as gauged by reports of recovering more quickly from upsets and more freedom from impulses.

The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists

self-compassion. In her definition this includes being kind to yourself instead of self-critical; seeing your failures and mistakes as just part of the human condition rather than some personal

failing; and just noting your imperfections, not ruminating about them.

The opposite of self-compassion can be seen in the constant self-criticism common, for example, in depressed ways of thinking. Loving-kindness directed to yourself, on the ot...

just seven minutes of loving-kindness practice boosts a person’s good feelings and sense of social connection, if only temporarily.

Distress circuitry connecting to the insula, including the amygdala, responds with particular strength—a

The insula monitors the signals in our body and also activates autonomic responses like heart rate and breathing—as we empathize, our neural centers for pain and distress echo what we pick up from the other person.

This seems largely due to the brain’s caretaking circuitry, which we share with all other mammals. These are the networks that light up when we love our children, our friends—anyone who falls within our natural circle of caring. These circuits, among others, grow stronger even with short periods of compassion training.

Such intense resonance with others’ suffering has been found in another notable group: extraordinary altruists, people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger in dire need of a transplant. Brain scans discovered that these compassionate souls have a larger right-side amygdala compared to other people of their age and gender.

Our empathic resonance with the pain of others, she found, activates what amounts to a neural alarm that instantly tunes us to others’ suffering, potentially alerting us to the presence of danger. But compassion—feeling concern for the person suffering—seemed to involve a different set of brain circuits, those for feelings of warmth, love, and concern.

Compassion, she found, muted the empathic distress that can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout (as happens sometimes in the caring professions like nursing). Instead of simply feeling with the other person’s angst, compassion training led to that activation of completely different brain circuits, those for loving concern—and to positive feelings and resilience.

We wonder whether equanimity may have a very different effect on donations than does compassion—perhaps making someone less likely to, say, give money, even while resonating with the suffering.

when you focus on someone else’s suffering, you forget your own troubles.

women show higher levels of right amygdala reactivity than do men in response to all emotional images, happy or sad, including those of suffering.

women are more attuned to other people’s emotions than are men.

There are more factors at work in compassionate action than simply a brain signature, a fact that

researchers in this area continue to struggle with. Factors from feeling pressured for time, to whether you identify with the person in need, to whether you are in a crowd or alone—each of these factors can matter.

The Dalai Lama sees one strategy: recognize the “oneness” of humankind, even groups we dislike, and so realize that “all of them, like ourselves, do not want suffering; they want happiness.”

With this penultimate variety of compassion, he adds, we are impartial in our concern, extending it toward everyone, everywhere—even when those we feel it toward hold animosity toward us. What’s more, ideally this feeling does not come just sporadically, from time to time, but has become a compelling and stable force, a central organizing principle of our lives.

And whether or not we attain that lofty height of love, there are other benefits along the way, like how the brain’s circuitry for happiness energizes, along with compassion. As we’ve often heard the Dalai Lama say, “The first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it.”