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

by Daniel Goleman

As early as the 1830s, Thoreau and Emerson, along with their fellow American Transcendentalists, flirted with these Eastern inner arts. They were spurred by the first English-language translations of ancient spiritual texts from Asia—but had no instruction in the practices that supported those texts.

The West’s more serious engagement took hold mere decades ago, as teachers from the East arrived, and as a generation of Westerners traveled to study meditation in Asia, some returning as teachers. These forays paved the way for the current acceleration of the wide path, along with fresh possibilities for those few who choose to pursue the deep way.

In the 1970s, when we began publishing our research on meditation, there were just a handful of scientific articles on the topic. At last count there numbered 6,838 such articles, with a notable acceleration of late. For 2014 the annual number was 925, in 2015 the total was 1,098, and in 2016 there were 1,113 such publications in the English language scientific literature.5

the Garrison Institute, an hour up the Hudson River from New York City, one hundred scientists, graduate students, and postdocs had gathered for the first in what has become a yearly series of events, the Summer Research Institute (SRI), a gathering devoted to furthering the rigorous study of meditation.

The retreat was a high for Richie. He came away with a deep conviction that there were methods that could transform our minds to produce a profound well-being. We did not have to be controlled by the mind, with its random associations, sudden fears and angers, and all the rest—we could take back the helm.

At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub “monkey mind,” for its wildly frenetic randomness.

The Visuddhimagga lists seven more levels of jhana, with progress marked by successively subtle feelings of bliss and rapture, and stronger equanimity, along with an increasingly firm and effortless focus. In the last four levels, even bliss, a relatively gross sensation, falls away, leaving only unshakable focus and equanimity. The highest reach of this ever more refined awareness has such subtlety it is called the jhana of “neither perception nor nonperception.”

Jhana alone, the Buddha is said to have declared, was not the path to a liberated mind. Though strong concentration can be an enormous aid along the way, the Buddha’s path veers into a different kind of inner focus: the path of insight.

With mindfulness, the meditator simply notes without reactivity whatever comes into mind, such as thoughts or sensory impressions like sounds—and lets them go. The operative word here is go. If we think much of anything about what just arose, or let it trigger any reactivity at all, we have lost our mindful stance—unless that reaction or thought in turn becomes the object of mindfulness.

The Visuddhimagga describes the way in which carefully sustained mindfulness—“the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens” in our experience during successive moments—refines into a more nuanced insight practice that can lead us through a succession of stages toward that final epiphany, nirvana/nibbana.

This shift to insight meditation occurs in the relationship of our awareness to our thoughts. Ordinarily our thoughts compel us: our loathing or self-loathing generates one set of feelings and actions; our romantic fantasies quite another. But with strong mindfulness we can experience a deep sense in which self-loathing and romantic thoughts are the same: like all other thoughts, these are passing moments of mind.

We don’t have to be chased through the day by our thoughts—they are a continuous series of short features, previews, and outtakes in a theater of the mind.

Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather than getting swept away by the seductions of our thought...

Just as mud settling in a pond lets us see into the water, so the subsiding of our stream of thought lets us observe our mental machinery with greater clarity. Along the way, for instance, the meditator sees a bewilderingly rapid parade of moments of perception that race through the mind, ordinarily hidden from awareness somewhere behind a scrim.

In India they tell of a yogi who spent years and years alone in a cave, achieving rarefied states of samadhi. One day, satisfied that he had reached the end of his inner journey, the yogi came down from his mountain perch into a village. That day the bazaar was crowded. As he made his way through the crowd, the yogi was caught up in a rush to make way for a local lord riding through on an elephant. A young boy standing in front of the yogi stepped back suddenly in fright—stomping right on the yogi’s bare foot. The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strike the youngster. But suddenly seeing what he was about to do—and the anger that propelled his arm—the yogi turned around and went right back up to his cave for more practice.

The tale speaks to the difference between meditation highs and enduring change. Beyond transitory states like samadhi (or their equivalent, the absorptive jhanas), there can be lasting changes in our very being.

For example, as the text says, strong negative feelings like greed and selfishness, anger and ill will, fade away. In their place comes the predominance of positive qualities like equanimity, kindness, compassion, and joy.

“With LSD we experienced what it took Tibetan monks 20 years to obtain, yet we got there in 20 minutes.”

Dead wrong. The trouble with drug-induced states is that after the chemical clears your body, you remain the same person as always. And, as Richie discovered, the same fading away happens with highs in meditation.

Our dissertation data were feebly—very feebly—supportive of the idea that the more you practice how to generate a meditative state, the more that practice shows lasting influences beyond the session itself.

These branching projections of the body’s cells allow them to reach out to and act on other cells; shrinking dendrites mean faulty memory.

McEwen’s results ripped through the brain and behavioral sciences like a small tsunami, opening minds to the possibility that a given experience could leave an imprint on the brain. McEwen was zeroing in on a holy grail for psychology: how stressful events produce lingering neural scars. That an experience of any kind could leave its mark on the brain had, until then, been unthinkable.

THE ALTERED TRAIT SPECTRUM Altered traits map along a spectrum starting at the negative end, with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a case in point. The amygdala acts as the neural radar for threat. Overwhelming trauma resets to a hair trigger the amygdala’s threshold for hijacking the rest of the brain to respond to what it perceives as an emergency.17 In people with PTSD, any cue that reminds them of the traumatic experience—and that for someone else would not be particularly noticeable—sets off a cascade of neural overreactions that create the flashbacks, sleeplessness, irritability, and hypervigilant anxiety of that disorder.

MINDFUL ATTENTION

A word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala circuitry triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.

Contrast the Zen sitters’ recovery from stress reactivity with burnout, the depleted, hopeless state that comes from years of constant, unremitting pressures, like from jobs that demand too much. Burnout has become rampant among health care professions such as nurses and doctors, as well as those who care at home for loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s. And, of course, anyone can feel burned-out who faces the rants of rude customers or continual implacable deadlines, as with the hectic pace of a business start-up.

This rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience. In short, equanimity emerges more strongly with extended practice. Among the benefits of long-term meditation, this tells us, are exactly what those Desert Fathers were after: a mind undisturbed.

The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice. Other mindfulness training shows a similar benefit, and there are hints in the research that these changes are traitlike: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state, with reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent.

What propelled those juicy grapes’ journey through that desert commune? The drivers were compassion and loving-kindness, the attitude of putting the needs of others ahead of our own. Technically, “loving-kindness” refers to wishing that other people be happy; its near cousin “compassion” entails the wish that people be relieved of suffering. Both outlooks (which we’ll just refer to as “compassion”) can be strengthened through mind training—and if successful, the result will be acting to help others, as demonstrated by the Desert Fathers and that bunch of grapes.

Holding the attitude of compassion means we merely espouse this virtue; embodying compassion means we act. The students pondering the Good Samaritan likely were appreciating his compassion—but were not more likely to act with compassion themselves. Several meditation methods aim to cultivate compassion. The scientific (and ethical) question is, Does this matter—does it move people toward compassionate action?

MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM SUFFERING

Sharon has become the leading advocate of a method she first learned from Goenka, called metta in Pali and loosely translated into English as “loving-kindness”—an unconditional benevolence and goodwill—a quality of love akin to the Greek agape.3

Yet in English the word compassion, the Dalai Lama pointed out, signifies the wish that others be well—but it does not include oneself. He explained that in his own language, Tibetan, as well as in the classical tongues Pali and Sanskrit, the word compassion implies feeling this for oneself as well as others. English, he added, needs a new word, self-compassion.

That very term came into the world of psychology more than a decade later when Kristin Neff, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published her research on a measure of 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...

EMPATHY MEANS FEELING WITH Brain research tells us of three kinds of empathy.6 Cognitive empathy lets us understand how the other person thinks; we see their perspective. In emotional empathy we feel what the other is feeling. And the third, empathic concern or caring, lies at the heart of compassion.

This includes a variety of loving-kindness meditation, aspiring to help others be happy and free from suffering, and the determination to act accordingly.

highly accomplished Tibetan meditation master studied in Richie’s lab once said that one hour spent practicing loving-kindness toward a difficult person is equivalent to one hundred hours of the same toward a friend or loved one.

How can we extend the compassion we feel for our immediate loved ones to the entire human family, including people we don’t like?

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.”30

The Dalai Lama tells of his half century of working at cultivating compassion. At the start, he says, he had enormous admiration for those who had developed genuine compassion for all beings—but he was not confident he could do so himself.

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.

There are three forms of empathy—cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern. Often people empathize emotionally with someone’s suffering but then tune out to soothe their own uncomfortable feelings.

The Zen master, without hesitating, took up his brush and wrote: Attention. His student, a bit dismayed, asked, “Is that all?” Without a word, the master took to his brush again, and wrote, Attention. Attention. His student, feeling that was not so profound, got a bit irritated, complaining to the master there was nothing so wise about that. Again the master responded in silence, writing Attention. Attention. Attention. Frustrated, the student demanded to know what he meant by that word, attention. To which the master replied, “Attention means attention.”1

“The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character and will,” he declared in his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.

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 example, noticing when your mind wanders or you’ve made a mistake.

Enter the meditators at the annual three-month vipassana course at the Insight Meditation Society, the same ones who did so well on the test of selective attention. Vipassana meditation, on the face of it, might lessen the blink, since it cultivates a continuous nonreactive awareness of whatever arises in experience, an “open-monitoring” receptive to all that occurs in the mind. An intensive vipassana course creates something akin to mindfulness on steroids: a nonreactive hyperalertness to all the stuff that arises in one’s mind.

Richie’s group measured the attentional blink in vipassana meditators before and after that three-month retreat. After the retreat there was a dramatic reduction, 20 percent, in the attentional blink.9

Then, too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Did you ever have the impulse to tell a child to put down her phone and look in the eyes of the person she is talking to? The need for such advice is becoming increasingly common as digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social presence.

The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what we are doing to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around us sends a message of indifference.