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

by Daniel Goleman

But compelling research at Stanford University has shown that this very idea is a myth—the brain does not “multitask” but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts . . . ).12

Attention tasks don’t really go on in parallel, as “multitasking” implies; instead they demand rapid switching from one thing to the other. And following every such switch, when our attention returns to the original task, its strength has been appreciably diminished. It can take several minutes to ramp up once again to full concentration.

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...

Even the ability to multitask efficiently suffers. As the late Clifford Nass, one of the researchers, put it, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentra...

IN A NUTSHELL Meditation, at its root, retrains attention, and different types boost varying aspects of attention. MBSR strengthens selective attention, while long-term vipassana practice enhances this even more. Even five months after the three-month shamatha retreat, meditators had enhanced vigilance, the ability to sustain their attention. And the attentional blink lessened greatly after three months on a vipassana retreat—but the beginnings of this lessening also showed up after just seventeen minutes of mindfulness in beginners, no doubt a transitory state for the newcomers, and a more lasting trait for those retreatants.

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.

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.

Paul Ekman, a world expert on emotions and their expression, says this remarkable affective flexibility in the Dalai Lama struck him as exceptional from their very first meeting. The Dalai Lama reflects in his own demeanor the emotions he feels from one person, and then immediately drops that feeling as the next moment brings him another emotional reality.18

The Dalai Lama’s emotional life seems to include a remarkably dynamic range of strong and colorful emotions, from intense sadness to powerful joy. His rapid, seamless transitions from one to another are particularly unique—this swift shifting betokens a lack of stickiness.

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.

Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.

And this epigenetic impact, remember, was a “naive” idea that countered the then prevailing wisdom in genetic science. Despite assumptions to the contrary, Richie’s group had shown that a mental exercise, meditation, could be a driver of benefits at the level of genes. Genetic science would have to change its assumptions about how the mind can help manage the body.

Then there’s panchakarma, Sanskrit for “five treatments,” which mixes herbal medicines, massage, dietary changes, and yoga with meditation.

While a quicker heartbeat seems a side effect of these warmhearted meditations—a state effect—when it comes to the breath, the trait payoff goes in the other direction. Science has long known that people with problems like anxiety disorders and chronic pain breathe more quickly and less regularly than most folks. And if you’re already breathing fast, you are more likely to trigger a freeze-fight-or-flight reaction when confronting something stressful.

First findings say Steve’s instincts had it right. At the Seattle Veterans Administration hospital, forty-two vets with PTSD took a twelve-week course in loving-kindness meditation, the kind Steve found helped him.12 Three months later their PTSD symptoms had improved, and depression—a common side symptom—had lessened a bit.

That seems to embody the advice of Tibetan meditation master (and Matthieu’s main teacher) Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche to yogis such as these: “Develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages. . . .”8

This indicates an extraordinary selectivity of attention: a brain effortlessly able to block out the extraneous sounds and the emotional reactivity they normally elicit. What’s more, this means traits continue to alter even at the highest level of practice. The dose-response relationship does not seem to end even up to 50,000 hours of practice. The finding of a switch to

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.

Sticking with meditation over the years offers more benefits as meditators reach the long-term range of lifetime hours, around 1,000 to 10,000 hours. This might mean a daily meditation session, and perhaps annual retreats with further instruction lasting a week or so—all sustained over many years. The earlier effects deepen, while others emerge.

Just as math and poetry are different ways of knowing reality, science and religion represent disparate magisteria, realms of authority, areas of inquiry and ways of knowing—religion speaking to values, beliefs, and transcendence, and science to fact, hypotheses, and rationality.

When it comes to attention, there are a range of benefits: stronger selective attention, decreased attentional blink, greater ease in sustaining attention, a heightened readiness to respond to whatever may come, and less mind-wandering.

We envision a time when our culture treats the mind in the same way it treats the body, with exercises to care for our mind becoming part of our daily routine.

In the decade before our Harvard years philosopher Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, holding that science shifts abruptly from time to time as novel ideas and radically innovative paradigms force shifts in thinking. This idea had caught our fancy as we searched for paradigms that posited human possibilities undreamt of in our psychology. Kuhn’s ideas, hotly discussed in the scientific world, spurred us on despite opposition from our own faculty advisers.

views fostered by focusing on the bad that happens each day rather than the far more numerous acts of goodness. In short, we have ever greater need for the human qualities altered traits foster.