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

by Daniel Goleman

meditation to manage their emotions as they listened to upsetting phrases like “people always judge me,” one of the common fears in the mental self-talk among those with social anxiety. The patients reported feeling less anxious than usual on hearing such emotional triggers—and at the same time, brai...

And in particular what really clicked was the loving-kindness practice, a workable way to have compassion for himself as well as other people. With loving-kindness, he felt “at home again,” a deep reminder of how he felt as a young boy playing with friends—a strong sense things were going to be okay.

“Practice helped me stay with those feelings and know, ‘This will pass.’ If I was getting angry, I could throw a little compassion and loving-kindness for myself and the other person.”

Last we heard, Steve had gone back to school in mental health counseling, gotten credentialed as a psychotherapist, and was completing a clinical doctorate. His dissertatio...

in any given year, between 11 and 20 percent

of veterans suffer from PTSD,

and over a veteran’s lifetime that number goes u...

among the symptoms of PTSD are emotional numbness, alienation, and a sense of “deadness” in relationships—all of which loving-kindness might help reverse by the cultivation of positive feelings toward others.

“I experienced a wave of self-hatred so shocking, so intense, that it changed the way I relate . . . to my own dharma path and the meaning of life itself.” So recalls Jay Michaelson of the moment on a long, silent vipassana retreat when he fell into what he calls a “dark night” of intensely difficult mental states.14 The Visuddhimagga pegs this crisis as most likely at the point a meditator experiences the transitory lightness of thoughts. Right on schedule, Michaelson hit his dark night after having cruised through a quietly ecstatic landmark on that path, the stage of “arising and passing,” where thoughts seem to disappear as soon as they begin, in rapid succession. Shortly afterward he plunged into his dark night, a thick mixture of morbid doubt, self-loathing, anger, guilt, and anxiety. At one point the toxic mix was so strong, his practice collapsed; he broke down in tears.

But then he slowly began observing his mind rather than being sucked into the thoughts and feelings that swirled through it. He began to see these feelings as passing mental states, like any others. The episode was over.

Dark nights are not unique to vipassana; most every meditative tradition warns about them. In Judaism, for example, Kabbalistic texts caution that contemplative methods are best reserved for middle age, lest an unformed ego fall apart.

Nearly one in five adults in the United States, nearly 44 million, were found by the National Institute of Mental Health to suffer from a mental illness in any given year.

The Wise Heart,

Thoughts Without a Thinker,

But years later he was diagnosed with that adrenal disorder, the cause of his long-standing high blood pressure. One of those adrenal symptoms: elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that triggers feelings of anxiety. Along with his years of meditation, a

drug that adjusts that adrenal problem seemed also to handle the cortisol—and the anxiety.

While their mastery at this inner expertise seems akin to world-class rankings in sports, in this “sport,” the better you get the less you care about your ranking—let alone social status, riches, or fame.

their motivation was compassion, not self-interest.

Most people who come into the lab get impatient, if not irritated, by such delays. But Mingyur was not in the least perturbed, which calmed the nervous lab technician—and all those looking on—with the feeling that anything that happened would be okay with him. That was the first inkling of Mingyur’s ease of being, a palpable sense of relaxed readiness for whatever life might bring. The lasting impression Mingyur conveyed was of endless patience and a gentle quality of kindness.

His current method, ongoing open presence (which expresses itself as kindness in everyday life), encourages letting go of any and all thoughts

fMRI, which renders what amounts to a 3-D video of brain activity. The fMRI gives science a lens that complements the EEG, which tracks the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG readings are more precise in time, the fMRI more accurate in neural locations.

On the other hand, fMRI, though spatially exacting, tracks the timing of changes over one or two seconds, far slower than EEG.

Mingyur’s brain’s circuitry

for empathy (which typically fires a bit during this mental exercise) rose to an activity level 700 to 800 percent greater than it had been during the rest period just before. Such an extreme increase befuddles science; the intensity with which those states were activated in Mingyur’s brain exceeds any we have seen in studies of “normal” people. The closest resemblance is in epileptic seizures, but those episodes last brief seconds, not a full minute. And besides, brains are seized by seizures, in contrast to Mingyur’s display of intentional control of his brain activity.

the site of the brain’s molecular machinery. Each of us has a decrease in the density of gray matter as we age,

Brains of people of a given age group into a normal distribution, a bell-shape curve; most people’s brain’s hover around their chronological age. But some people’s brains age more quickly than their chronological age would predict, putting them at risk for premature age-related brain disorders such as dementia. And other people’s brains age more slowly compared with their chronological age.

Comparing Mingyur’s brain to norms for his age, he falls in the 99th percentile—that

these adepts have shown remarkable mental dexterity, instantly and with striking ease mobilizing these states: generating feelings of compassion, the spacious equanimity of complete openness to whatever occurs, or laser-sharp, unbreakable focus.

All the yogis had elevated gamma oscillations, not just during the meditation practice periods for open presence and compassion but also during the very first measurement, before any meditation was performed. This electrifying pattern was in the EEG frequency known as “high-amplitude” gamma, the strongest, most intense form.

There are four main types of EEG waves, classed by their frequency (technically, measured in hertz). Delta, the slowest wave, oscillates between one and four cycles per second, and occurs mainly during deep sleep; theta, the next slowest, can signify drowsiness; alpha occurs when we are doing little thinking and indicates relaxation; and beta, the fastest, accompanies thinking, alertness, or concentration.

Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during moments when differing brain regions fire

in harmony, like moments of insight when different elements of a mental p...

To get a sense of this “click,” try this: What single word can turn each of these into a compound word: sauce, pine, crab?* The instant your mind comes up with the answer, your brain signal momentarily produces that distinctive gamma flare. You also elicit a short-lived gamma wave when, for instance, you imagine biting into a ripe, juicy peach and your brain draws together memories stored in different regions of the occipital, temporal, somatosensory, insular, and olfactory cortices to suddenly mesh the sight, smells, taste, feel, and sound into a single experience. For that quick moment the gamma waves from each of these cortical region...

The contrast between the yogis and controls in the intensity of gamma was immense: on average the yogis had twenty-five times greater amplitude gamma oscillations during baseline compared with the control group.

We can only make conjectures about what state of consciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experience an ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives, not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have described it as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all their senses were wide open to the full, rich panorama of experience.

Or, as a fourteenth-century Tibetan text describes it, . . . a state of bare, transparent awareness; Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom; Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point; Spacious empty ...

The yogis’ pattern of gamma oscillation contrasts with how, ordinarily, these waves occur only briefly, and in an isolated neural location. The adepts had a sharply heightened level of

gamma waves oscillating in synchrony across their brain, independent of any particular mental act. Unheard of.

Intriguingly, yogis hearing sounds of people in distress while they were doing loving-kindness meditation showed less activity than others do in their postcingulate cortex (PCC), a key area for self-focused thought.6 In the yogis, hearing sounds of suffering seems to prime a focus on others.

They also show a stronger connection between the PCC and the prefrontal cortex, an overall pattern suggesting a “down-regulation” of

the “what will happen to me?” self-concern that can dampen co...

Develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages. . .

An eighteenth-century Tibetan text urges meditators to practice “on whatever harms come your way,” adding, “When sick, practice on that sickness. . . . When cold, practice on that coldness. By practicing in this way all situations will arise as meditation.”

Mingyur Rinpoche, likewise, encourages making all sensation, even pain, our “friend,” using it as a basis for meditation. Since the essence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchors attention can be used as support—and pain particularly can be very effective in focusing. Treating it as a friend “softens and warms” our relationship, as he puts it, as we gradually learn to accept the pain rather than try to get rid of it.

these volunteers learned to generate an “open presence,” an attentional stance of letting whatever life presents us come and go, without adding thoughts or emotional reactions. Our senses are fully open, and we just stay aware of what happens without getting carried away by any downs or ups.

The moment the plate heated a bit—the cue for pain about to come—the control groups activated regions throughout the brain’s pain matrix as though they were already feeling the intense burn. The reaction to the “as if” pain—technically, “anticipatory anxiety”—was so strong that when the actual burning sensation began, their pain matrix activation became just a bit stronger. And

in the ten-second recovery period, right after the heat subsided, that matrix stayed nearly as active—there was no immediate recovery.

This sequence of anticipation-reactivity-recovery gives us a window on emotion regulation. For instance, intense worry about something like an upcoming painful medical procedure can in itself cause us anticipatory suffering, just imagining how bad we will feel. And after the real event we can continue to be upset by what we have gone through. In this sense our pain response can start well before and last l...

The yogis, on the other hand, had a very different response in this sequence. They, like the controls, were also in a state of open presence—no doubt one some magnitudes greater than for the novices. For the yogis, their pain matrix showed little change in activity w...

ten seconds away. Their brains seemed to simply register that cue with no particular reaction. But during the actual moments of intense heat the yogis had a surprising heightened response, mainly in the sensory areas that receive the granular feel of a stimulus—the tingling, pressure, high heat, and other raw sensations on the skin of the wrist where the hot plate rested. The emotional regions of the pain matrix activated a bit, but not as much as the sensory circuitry. This suggests a lessening of the psychological component—like the worry we feel in anticipation of pain—along with intensification of the pain sensations themselves. Right after the heat stopped, all the regions of the pain matrix rapidly returned down to their levels...