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

by Daniel Goleman

make that relief an ongoing fact of life—a...

Traditional meditative paths contrast our everyday mental states—that stream of thoughts, many laden with angst, or to-do lists that never end—with a state of being free of these weights. And each path, in its particular terms, sees ...

This shift in how we experience ourselves—our pain and all that we attach to it—points to one of the main goals of

all spiritual practice: lightening the system that builds our feelings of I, me, and mine.

The Buddha, in telling of this very insight, likened the self to a chariot, a concept that arises when wheels, platform, yoke, and so on are put together—but which does not exist save as these parts in combination. To update the metaphor, there is no “car” in the tires, nor the dashboard or the steel shell of its body—but put all th...

In the same way, cognitive science tells us, our sense of self emerges as a property of the many neural subsystems that thread together, among other streams, our memories, our perceptions, our emotions, and our thoughts. Any of those alone would be insufficient for a full sense of our s...

Meditative traditions of all kinds share one goal: letting go of the ...

“stickiness” of our thoughts, emotions, and impulses—that guides us through our days and lives. Technically called “dereification,” this key insight has the meditator realize that thoughts, feelings, and impulses are passing, insubstantial mental events. With this insight we don’t have to believ...

As Dōgen, founder of the Soto school of Zen, instructed, “If a thought arises, take note of it and then dismiss it. When you forget all attachments steadfast...

Many other traditions see lightening the self as the path to inner freedom. We’ve often heard the Dalai Lama talk about “emptiness,” by which he means the sense in which our “self’—and all seeming objects in our world...

Some Christian theologians use the term kenosis for the emptying o...

wants and needs diminish while our openness to the needs of others grows into compassion. As a Sufi teacher put it, “When occupied with self, you are separated from God. The way t...

Such a step out of the self, technically speaking, suggests weakening activation of the default circuitry that binds together the mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent mental processes into the cohesive sense of “me” and “mine.”

The stuff of our lives becomes less “sticky” as we shift into a less attached relationship toward all that. At the higher reaches of practice, mind training lessens the activity of our “self.” “Me” and “mine” lose their self-hypnotic power; our concerns become less burdensome. Though the bill still must be paid, the lighter our “selfing,” the less we anguish about that bill and the freer we feel. We still find a way to pay it, but without the extra load of emotional baggage.

Our reading of the meager studies done so far suggests there may be three stages in how meditation leads to greater selflessness. Each of these stages uses a different neural strategy to quiet the brain’s default mode, and so free us a bit from the grip of the self.

if you are lost in some personal melodrama (a favorite theme of the default mode), you can voluntarily drop it—you can name it, or shift your attention to watching your breath or to bare awareness of the present moment. All of these are active interventions, efforts to quiet the monkey mind.

Such efforts heighten activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal area, a key circuit for managing the default mode.

Three days of practicing these mindfulness methods led to increased connections between this control circuitry and the default zone’s PCC, a

primary region for self-focused thought. Novices in meditation, this suggests, keep their mind from wandering by activating neural wiring that can quiet the default area.

But with more experienced meditators, the next phase of downscaling the self adds lessened activity in key sections of the default mode—a loosening of the mechanics of self—while the h...

During the meditation practice, all those tested were encouraged to distinguish between simply noting the identity of an experience (itching is occurring, say) and identifying with it (I itch)—and then to let go. This distinction seems a crucial step in loosening the self, by activating meta-awareness—a

awareness—a “minimal self” that can simply notice the itch rather than bring it into our story line, my itch.

As mentioned, when we are watching a movie and are lost in its story, but then notice that we are in a movie theater watching a film, we have stepped out of the movie’s world into a large frame that includes the movie but goes beyond. Having such meta-awareness allows us to monitor our thoughts, feeli...

Our sense of self gets woven in an ongoing personal narrative that threads together disparate parts of our life into a coherent story line. This narrator resides mainly in the default mode but brings together inputs from a broad range of brain a...

The seasoned meditators in the Brewer study had the same strong c...

control circuit and the default mode seen in beginners, but in addition had less activation within the default mode areas themselves. This was particularly true when they practiced loving-kindness meditation—a corroboration of the maxim that the more we...

Intriguingly, the long-term meditators seemed to have roughly the same lessened connectivity in the default mode circuitry while they just rested before the test as they displayed during mindfulness. That’s a likely trait effect and a good sign: these meditators intentionally train to be as mindful in their daily lives as during meditation sessions.

seemed to show less activity in parts of the default area while focusing on their breath during brain scans. The bigger this effect, the better they did on a test of sustained attention outside the scanner, suggesting a lasting drop in mind-wandering.

Along these lines, Richie’s group found that meditators who had an average 7,500 lifetime hours, compared to people their own age, had decreased gray matter volume in a key region: the nucleus accumbens.13 This was the only brain region showing a difference in brain structure compared to age-matched controls. A smaller nucleus accumbens diminishes connectivity between these self-related regions and the other neural modules that ordinarily orchestrate to create our sense of self. This is a bit of a surprise: the nucleus accumbens plays a large role in the brain’s “reward” circuits, a source of pleasurable feelings in life. But this is also a key area for “stickiness,” our

emotional attachments, and addictions—in short, what ensnares us. This decrease in gray-matter volume in the nucleus accumbens may reflect a diminished attachment in the meditators, particularly to the narrative self.

So, does this change leave meditators cold and indifferent? The Dalai Lama and other highly seasoned practitioners come to mind—like those who came to Richie’s lab, most of whom tend toward joyousness and warmth. Meditation texts describe long-term practitioners achieving an ongoing...

For instance, Hindu contemplative paths describe vairagya, a later stage of practice where attachments drop away—renunciation, in this sense, happens spontaneously rather than through force of will. And with this shif...

Could this indicate a neural circuit that brings a quiet enjoyment, even as our...

based attachments wane? We will see just such a possibility in chapter twelve, “Hidden Treasure,” from br...

Arthur Zajonc, the second president of the Mind and Life Institute, and a quantum physicist and philosopher to boot, once said that if we let go of grasping, “we become more open to our own experience, and to other people. That openness—a form of love—lets us more easily approach other people’s suffering.” “Great souls,” he added, “seem to embody the ability to engage suffering and handle it wi...

A THIEF IN AN EMPTY HOUSE

Ancient meditation manuals say letting go of these thoughts is, at first, like a snake uncoiling itself; it takes some effort. Later, though, whatever thoughts come to mind are like a thief entering an empty house: there’s nothing to do, so they just leave.

Effortful practice at the early stages of meditation activates prefrontal regulatory circuits. However, the later shift to effortless practice might go along with a different dynamic: lessened

connectivity among the various nodes of the default circuitry, and lessened activity in the PCC as effortful control is no longer needed—the mind at this stage is truly beginning to settle and the self-narrative is much less sticky.

When the meditators showed decreased activity in their PCC, they reported feelings like “undistracted awareness” and “effortless doing.”

In the scientific study of any skill that people practice, from dentistry to chess, when it comes to sorting out the duffers from the pros, lifetime hours of practice are gold.

As we master any activity, the brain conserves its fuel by putting that action on “automatic”; cuing up that activity shifts from top-of-the-brain circuits to the basal ganglia far below the neocortex. We’ve all accomplished the hard-at-first to no-sweat transition when we learned to walk—and as we’ve mastered every other habit since. What at first demands attention and exertion becomes automatic and effortless.

At the third and final stage of letting go of self-referencing, we conjecture, the control circuitry’s role drops away, as the main action shifts to looser connectivity in the default mode, the home of the self.

With a spontaneous shift to effortlessness comes a change in the relationship to the self: it’s not so “sticky” anymore. The same sorts of thoughts can arise in your mind, but they are lighter: not so compelling, ...

Stickiness seems to reflect the dynamics of the emotional circuitry of the brain, including the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated

on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.

The stickiness spectrum runs from being utterly stuck, unable to free ourselves from distressing emotions or addictive wants, to the Dalai Lama’s instant freedom from any given affect. One trait that emerges from living without getting stuck seems to be an ongoing positivity, even joy. When the Dalai Lama once was a...

IN A NUTSHELL The brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing that demands mental effort, just letting our ...

and feelings (often unpleasant) that focus on ourselves, constructing the narrative we experience as our “self.” The default mode circuits quiet during mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation. In early stages of meditation this quieting of the self-system entails brain circuits that inhibit the default zones; in later practice the connections and activity within those areas wane. This quieting of the self-circuitry begins as a state effect, seen during or immediately after meditation, but with long-term practitioners it becomes an enduring trait, along with lessened activity in the default mode itself. The resulti...

Stress, though often psychological, worsens inflammation, apparently part of an ancient biological response to warnings of danger that marshals the body’s resources for recovery. (Another signal of that response: how you just want to rest when you get the flu.) While the threats that trigger this response in prehistory were physical, like something that could eat us, these days the triggers are psychological—an angry spouse, a snarky tweet. Yet the body’s reactions are the same, including emotional upset.