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

by Daniel Goleman

The Dalai Lama noted that he had met people who had everything they wanted, yet were miserable. The ultimate source of peace, he said, is in the mind—which, far more than our circumstances, determines our happiness.

Compassion and loving-kindness

kindness increase amygdala activation to suffering while focused attention on something neutral like the breath lessens amygdala activity.

“The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character and will,”

“an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”

most “advanced” monks did: their brains responded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first.

Ordinarily we notice something unusual just long enough to be sure it poses no threat, or simply to categorize it. Then habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar.

One downside

of this brain dynamic: we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, the same dish night after night, even, perhaps, our loved ones. Habitu...

The brain habituates using circuitry we share even with reptiles: the brain stem’s reticular activating system (RAS), one of the few attention-related circuits known at the time. In habituation, cortical circuits inhibit the RAS, keeping...

In the reverse, sensitization, as we encounter something new or surprising, cortical circuits activate the RAS, which then engages other brai...

It seemed the Zen brains could sustain attention when other brains would tune out. This resonated with our own experience at retreats on mindfulness, where we spent hours pushing our attention to notice every little detail of experience rather than tune out.

By zooming in on details of sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations that we otherwise would habituate to, our mindfulness transformed the familiar and habitual into the fresh and intriguing. This attention training, we saw, might well enrich our lives, giving us the choice to reverse habituation by focusing us on a deeply textured here and now, making “the old new again.”

Back in the 1970s science saw attention as mostly stimulus-driven, automatic, unconscious, and from the “bottom up”—a function of the brain stem, a primitive structure sitting just above the spinal cord, rather than from a “top-down” cortical area.

When anger or anxiety is triggered, the amygdala drives prefrontal circuitry; as such disturbing emotions reach their peak, an amygdala hijack paralyzes executive function. But when we

take active control of our attention—as when we meditate—we deploy this prefrontal circuitry, and the amygdala quiets.

every aspect of attention involves the prefrontal cortex in some way.

This neural zone, as we will see, holds the seeds of awakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined with emotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, and we also can be disturbed by worrisome thoughts—both signs of the prefrontal cortex at work.

While William James wrote about attention as though it were one single entity, science now tells us the concept refers not just to one ability but to many. Among them: Selective attention, the capacity to focus on one element and ignore others. Vigilance, maintaining a constant level of attention as time goes on.

Allocating attention so we notice small or rapid shifts in what we experience. Goal focus, or “cognitive control,” keeping a specific goal or task in mind despite distractions. Meta-awareness, being able to track the quality of one’s own awareness—for...

The neural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained—contrary to the standard wisdom where attention was assumed to be hardwired and so, beyond the reach of any training attempt.

the nonreactive open awareness—simply noticing and allowing whatever comes into the mind “just to be” rather than following a chain

of thoughts about it—becomes a cognitive skill that transfers over to registering a target like the letters and numbers on the blink test without getting caught up in it. That leaves their attention ready for the next target in the sequence—a more efficient way to witness the passing world.

Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”

The harm spills over into the rest of life. For one, the inability to filter out the noise (all those distractions) from the signal (what you meant to focus on) creates a confusion about what’s important, and so a drop in our ability to retain what matters. Heavy multitaskers, the Stanford group discovered, are more easily distracted in general. And when multitaskers do try to focus on that one thing they have to get done, their brains activate many more areas than just those relevant to the task at hand—a neural indicator of distraction.

A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory.

Usually what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost.

Such awareness of awareness itself lets us monitor our mind without being swept away by the thoughts and feelings we are noticing. “That which is aware of sadness is not sad,” observes philosopher Sam Harris. “That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as anyone else.”

We seem to impose a top-down gloss on our awareness, where the thin slice of the cognitive unconscious that comes to our attention creates the illusion of being the entirety of mind.19

We remain unaware of the much vaster mental machinery of bottom-up processes—at least in

the conventional awareness of our everyday life. Meta-awareness lets us see a larger swat...

Meta-awareness allows us to track our attention itself—noticing, for example, when our mind has wandered off from something we want to focus on. This ability to monitor the mind without getting swept away introduces a crucial choice point when we find our mind has wandered: we can bring our focus back to the task at hand. This simple mental skill undergirds a huge range of what makes us effective in the world...

There are two varieties of experience: the “mere awareness” of a thing, which our ordinary consciousness gives us, versus knowing you are aware of that thing—recognizing awareness itse...

As you become more aware of being aware, the DLPFC becomes more active.

The retreat boosted participants’ “alerting,” a vigilant state of readiness to respond to whatever you encounter.

while orienting may budge initially and then stall, alerting seems to improve with practice.

how much mental activity is going on in our mind “under the hood,” and about which we are oblivious. He understood that our experience is not based on the direct apperception of what is happening, but to a great extent upon our expectations and projections, the habitual thoughts and reactions that we have learned to make in response, and an impenetrable sea of neural processes. We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

This led Richie to a scientific insight: that consciousness operates as an integrator, gluing together a vast amount of elementary mental processes, most of which we are oblivious to. We know their eventual product—my pain—but typically have no awareness of the countless elements that combine into that perception.

The Hour of Stillness shows that every waking moment of our lives, we construct our experience around a narrative where we are the star—and that we can deconstruct that story we center on ourselves by applying the right kind of awareness.

during highly demanding cognitive tasks—like counting backward by 13s from the number 1,475—there were a set of brain regions that deactivated.

Raichle identified a swath of areas, mainly the mPFC (short for midline of the prefrontal cortex) and the PCC (postcingulate cortex), a node connecting to the limbic system. He dubbed this circuitry the brain’s “default mode network.”

When scientists asked people during these periods of “doing nothing” what was going on in their minds, not surprisingly, it was not nothing! They typically reported that their minds were wandering; most often, this mind-wandering was focused on the self—How am I doing in this experiment? I wonder what they are learning

about me; I need to reply to Joe’s phone message—all reflecting mental activity focused on “I” and “me.”

In short, our mind wanders mostly to something about ourselves—my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page—all the minutiae of our life story. By framing every event in how it impacts ourselves, the default mode makes each of us the center of the universe as we know it. Those reveries knit together our sense of “self” from the fragmentary memories, hopes, dreams, plans, and so on that center on I, me, and mine. Our default mode continually rescripts a movie where each of us stars, replaying particularly favorite or upsetting scenes over and over.

With nothing much else to capture our attention, our mind wanders, very often to what’s troubling us—a root cause of everyday angst. For this reason, when Harvard researchers asked thousands of people to report their mental focus and mood at random points through the day, their conclusion was that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” This self-system mulls over our life—especially the problems we face, the difficulties in our relationships, our worries and anxieties. Because the self ruminates on what’s bothering us, we feel relieved when we can turn it off. One of the great appeals of high-risk sports like rock climbing seems to be just that—the danger of the sport demands a full focus on where to put your hand or foot next.

When we become lost in thoughts during meditation, we’ve fallen into the default mode and its wandering mind.

A basic instruction in almost all forms of meditation urges us to notice when our mind has wandered and then return our focus to the chosen target, say, a mantra or our breathing. This moment has universal familiarity on contemplative paths. This simple mental move has a neural correlate: activating the connection between the dorsolateral PFC and the default mode—a

connection found to be stronger in long-term meditators than in beginners.3 The stronger this connection, the more likely regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the default areas, quieting the monkey mind—the incessant self-focused ch...

“So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.”

While most ways to relieve us from the burden of self are temporary, meditation paths aim to