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

by Daniel Goleman

This inverted V-shaped pattern, with little reaction during anticipation of a painful event, followed by a surge of intensity at the actual moment, then swift recovery from it, can be highly adaptive. This lets us be fully responsive to a challenge as it happens, without letting our emotional reactions interfere before or afterwar...

long-term meditators (with an

average lifetime practice of about 10,000 hours) reported effortless awareness during meditation in association with decreased activity in the PCC, that part of the default network active during “selfing” mental operations.

When we take the self out of the picture, it seems, things go alon...

When long-term meditators reported “undistracted awareness,” “effortless doing,” “not efforting,” and “contentment,” activation in the PCC went down. On the other hand, when they reported “distracted awareness,” “efforti...

One metric for effortlessness here comes down to being able to keep your mind on a chosen point of focus and resist the natural tendency to wander off into some train of thought or be pulled away by a sound, while having no feeling of making an effort. This kind of ease seems to increase with practice.

When the team compared those with the most versus those with the least amount of practice, they found something truly striking: all of the increase in prefrontal activation was accounted for by those with the least amount of practice. For those with the most lifetime hours of practice, there was very little prefrontal activation.

Curiously, the activation tended to occur only at the very beginning of a practice period, while the mind was focusing on the object of concentration, that little light. Once the light was in

focus, the prefrontal activation dropped away. This sequence may represent the neural echoes ...

Another measure of concentration was to see how distracted the meditators are by emotional sounds—laughing, screaming, crying—which they heard in the background while focusing on the light. The more amygdala activation in response to those sounds, the more wavering in concentration. Among meditators with the greatest amount of lifetime practice hours—an average of 44,000 lifetime hours (the equivalent of twelve hours a day for ten years) the amygdala hardly responded to the emotional sounds. But for those with less practice, (though still a high number—19,000 hours) ...

This indicates an extraordinary selectivity of attention: a brain effortlessl...

extraneous sounds and the emotional reactivity they...

What’s more, this means traits continue to alter even at the highest level of practice. The dose-response relationship does not seem to e...

the yogis’ hearts beat more rapidly compared to novices’ when they heard sounds of people in distress.

The yogis’ heart rate was coupled with the activity of a key area in the insula, a brain region that acts as the portal through which information about the body is conveyed to the brain and vice versa.

compassion in the yogis sharpens their sense of other people’s emotions, especially if they are distraught, and heightens sensitivity to their own bodies—particularly the heart, a key source of empathic resonance with the suffering of others.

Another point. We expect that the lightening of self and lessening of attachment in the yogis would correlate with a shrinking of the nucleus

accumbens, as was found in long-term Western meditators. But Richie has collected no data on this from the yogis, despite the falling away of attachments being an explicit goal of their practice.

Science’s view of these yogis’ altered traits is akin to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The gamma finding, for instance, seems quite exciting, but it’s like feeling the elephant’s trunk without knowing about the rest of its body. And so, too, with their missing attentional blink, effortless meditative states, ultrarapid recovery from pain, and readiness to help someone in distress—these are but glimpses of a larger reality we do not fully comprehend.

What matters most, though, may be the realization that our ordinary state of waking consciousness—as William James observed more than a century ago—is but one option. Altered traits are another.

A word about the global significance of these yogis. Such people are very rare, what some Asian cultures call “living treasures.” Encounters with them are extremely nourishing and often inspiring, not because of some vaunted status or celebrity but because of the inner qualities they radiate. We hope nations and cultures that harbor such beings will see the need to protect them and their communities of expertise and practice, as well as preserve the...

IN A NUTSHELL The massive levels of gamma activity in the yogis and the synchrony of the gamma oscillations across wides...

the vastness and panoramic quality of awareness that they report. The yogis’ awareness in the present moment—without getting stuck in the anticipation of the future or ruminating on the past—seems reflected in the strong “inverted V” response to pain, where yogis show little anticipatory response and very rapid recovery. The yogis also show neural evidence of effortless concentration: it takes only a flicker of the neural circuitry to place their attention on a chosen object, and little to no effort to hold it there. Finally, when ...

In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.” That enigmatic riddle comes from Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet’s eminent twelfth-century poet, yogi, and sage.1

Matthieu Ricard unpacks Milarepa’s puzzle this way: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilizes, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.

The studies of beginners typically look at the impacts from under 100 total hours of practice—and as few as 7. The long-term group, mainly vipassana meditators, had a mean of 9,000 lifetime hours (the range ran from 1,000 to 10,000 hours and more).

And the yogis studied in Richie’s lab, had all done at least one Tibetan-style three-year retreat, with lifetime hours up to Mingyur’s 62,000. Yogis, on average had three times more lifetime hours than did long-term meditators—9,000 hours versus 27,000.

A few long-term vipassana meditators had accumulated more than 20,000 lifetime hours and one or two up to 30,000, though none had done a three-year retreat, which became a de...

Let’s look at the impacts in those who have just begun a meditation practice. When it comes to stress recovery, the evidence for some benefits in the first few months of daily practice are more subjective than objective—and shaky. On the other hand the amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows lessened reactivity after thirty or so hours over eight weeks of MBSR practice. Compassion meditation shows stronger benefits from the get-go; as few as seven total hours over the course of two weeks leads to increased connectivity in circuits important for empathy

and positive feelings, strong enough to show up outside the meditation state per se. This is the first sign of a state morphing into a trait, though these effects likely will not last without daily practice. But the fact that they appear outside the formal meditation state itself may reflect our innate wiring for basic goodness. Beginners also find improvements in attention very early on, including less mind-wandering after just eight minutes of mindfulness practice—a short-lived benefit, to be sure.

But even as little as two weeks of practice is sufficient to produce less mind-wandering and better focus and working memory, enough for a significant boost in scores on ...

Indeed, some findings suggest decreases in activation in the self-relevant regions of the default mode with as l...

When it comes to physical health, there is more good news: small improvements in the molecular markers of cellular aging seem to emer...

IN THE LONG TERM

For example, in this range we see the emergence of neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity. In addition, functional connectivity in the brain in a circuit important for emotion regulation is strengthened, and cortisol, a key hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress, lessens.

Loving-kindness and compassion practice over the long term enhance neural resonance with another person’s suffering, along with concern and a greater likelihood of actually helping. Attention, too, strengthens in many aspects with long-term practice: selective attention sharpens, the attentional blink diminishes, sustained attention becomes easier, and an alert readiness to respond increases. And long-term practitioners show enhanced ability to down-regulate the mind-wandering and self-obsessed thoughts of the default mode, as well as weakening connectivity

within those circuits—signifying less self-preoccupation. These improvements often show up during meditative states, an...

Shifts in very basic biological processes, such as a slower breath rate, occur only after several thousand hours of practice. Some of these impacts seem more strongly enhanced by int...

While evidence remains inconclusive, neuroplasticity from long-term practice seems to create both structural and functional brain changes, such as greater working connection between the amygdala and the regulatory circuits in the prefrontal areas. And the neural circuits of the nucleus accumbens associated...

Intriguing signs suggest that long-term meditators to some degree undergo state-by-trait effects that enhance the potency of their practice. Some elements of the meditative state, like gamma waves, may continue during sleep. And a daylong retreat by seasoned meditators benefited their immune response at the genetic level—a finding that startled the medical establishment.

THE YOGIS At this world-class level (roughly 12,000 to 62,000 lifetime hours of practice, including many

years in deep retreat), truly remarkable effects emerge. Practice in part revolves around converting meditative states to traits—the Tibetan term for this translates as “getting familiar” with the meditative mind-set. Meditation states merge with daily activities, as altered ...

For most of us who meditate, concentration takes mental effort, but for the yogis with most lifetime hours, it becomes effortless. Once their attention locks onto a target stimulus, their neural circuits for effortful attention go quiet while their attention stays perfectly focused.

Finally, there is that tantalizing bit of data showing shrinking in the nucleus accumbens in long-term meditators, suggesting we might find further structural changes in the yogi’s brain that support a lessening of attachment, grasping, and self-focus.

when Richie’s lab asked one yogi to take swabs of saliva to assess his cortisol activity while he was on retreat, the levels were so low they were off the standard scale, and the lab had to adjust the assay range downward.

Some Buddhist traditions speak of this level of stabilization as recognition of an inner “basic goodness” that permeates the person’s mind and activities.

As one Tibetan lama said about his own teacher—a master revered by all the Tibetan contemplative lineages—“Someone like him has a two-tier consciousness,” where his meditative accomplishment...

more advanced meditators can show a brain pattern while merely resting that resembles that of a meditative state like mindfulness or lo...

Perhaps one day an ultralong study will give us the equivalent of a video on how altered traits

emerge. For now, as the Brewer group conjectured, meditation seems to transform the resting state—the brain’s default mode—to resemble the meditative state. Or, as we put it long ago, the after is the before for the next during.