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

by Daniel Goleman

The original aim, embraced in some circles to this day, focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being.

An altered trait—a new characteristic that arises from a meditation practice—endures apart from meditation itself. Altered traits shape how we behave in our daily lives, not just during or immediately after we meditate.

As we see it, the most compelling impacts of meditation are not better health or sharper business performance but, rather, a further reach toward our better nature.

The further reaches of the deep path cultivate enduring qualities like selflessness, equanimity, a loving presence, and impartial compassion—highly positive altered traits.

The meetings are organized by the Mind and Life Institute, itself formed in 1987 by the Dalai Lama, Francisco, and Adam Engle, a lawyer turned businessman. We were founding board members. The mission of Mind and Life is “to alleviate suffering and promote flourishing by integrating science with contemplative practice.”

Khunu’s qualities—a loving attention to whoever came to see him, an ease of being, and a gentle presence—struck Dan as quite unlike, and far more positive than, the personality traits he had been studying for his degree in clinical psychology at Harvard.

There was something about his ineffable state of mind that Dan had never sensed in anyone before meeting Maharaji. No matter what he was doing, he seemed to remain effortlessly in a blissful, loving space, perpetually at ease. Whatever state Maharaji was in seemed not some temporary oasis in the mind, but a lasting way of being: a trait of utter wellness.

Spiritual literature throughout Eurasia converges in descriptions of an internal liberation from everyday worry, fixation, self-focus, ambivalence, and impulsiveness—one that manifests as freedom from concerns with the self, equanimity no matter the difficulty, a keenly alert “nowness,” and loving concern for all.

Clinical psychology, Dan’s field, was fixated on looking for a specific problem like high anxiety and trying to fix that one thing. Asian psychologies had a wider lens on our lives and offered ways to enhance our positive side. Dan resolved that on his return to Harvard from India, he would make his colleagues aware of what seemed an inner upgrade far more pervasive than any dreamed of in our psychology.5

Though centuries old, the Visuddhimagga remained the definitive guidebook for meditators in places like Burma and Thailand, that follow the Theravada tradition, and through modern interpretations still offers the fundamental template for insight meditation, the root of what’s popularly known as “mindfulness.”

The experiential landmarks along the way to meditative attainments were spelled out matter-of-factly. For instance, the path of concentration begins with a mere focus on the breath

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. As our concentration strengthens, wandering thoughts subside rather than pulling us down some back alley of the mind. The stream of thought flows more slowly, like a river—and finally rests in the stillness of a lake, as an ancient metaphor for settling the mind in meditation practice tells us. Sustained focus, the manual notes, brings the first major sign of progress, “access concentration,” where attention stays fixed on the chosen target without wandering off. With this level of concentration come feelings of delight and calm, and, sometimes, sensory phenomena like flashes of light or a sense of bodily lightness. “Access” implies being on the brink of total concentration, the full absorption called jhana (akin to samadhi in Sanskrit), where any and all distracting thoughts totally cease. In jhana the mind fills with strong rapture, bliss, and an unbroken one-pointed focus on the meditation target. 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 sen...

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

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.

Beyond transitory states like samadhi (or their equivalent, the absorptive jhanas), there can be lasting changes in our very being. The Vissudhimagga holds this transformation to be the true fruit of reaching the highest levels of the path of insight. 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.

Valuing just the heights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves in lasting ways day to day.

But then he added, “The true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.”

we articulated a hypothesis: The after is the before for the next during.

When you move your finger far to the right, but stay focused straight ahead, it lands in your peripheral vision, the outer edge of what your visual system takes in.13 Most people lose sight of their finger as it moves to the far right or left of their nose. But one group does not: people who are deaf.

The chunk of neural real estate that usually operates as the primary auditory cortex (known as Heschl’s gyrus) receives no sensory inputs in deaf people. The brains of deaf people, Neville discovered, had morphed so that what is ordinarily a part of the auditory system was now working with the visual circuitry.14

As Alexander the Great was leading his armies through what is now Kashmir, legend has it he met a group of ascetic yogis in Taxila, then a thriving city on a branch of the Silk Road leading to the plains of India.

The Greek-derived word for these yogis is gymnosophists,

Today’s psychology uses the term well-being for a version of the Aristotelian meme flourishing. University of Wisconsin psychologist (and Richie’s colleague there) Carol Ryff, drawing on Aristotle among many other thinkers, posits a model of well-being with six arms:

Self-acceptance, being positive about yourself, acknowledging both your best and not-so-good qualities, and feeling fine about being just as you are. This takes a nonjudgmental self-awareness. Personal growth, the sense you continue to change and develop toward your full potential—getting

“Each of you is perfect the way you are,” Zen master Suzuki Roshi told his students, adding, “and you can use a little improvement”—neatly reconciling acceptance with growth. Autonomy, independence in thought and deed, freedom from social pressure, and using your own standards to measure yourself.

Mastery, feeling competent to handle life’s complexities, seizing opportunities as they come your way, and creating situations that suit your needs and values. Satisfying relationships, with warmth, empathy, and trust, along with mutual concern for each other and a healthy give-and-take. Life purpose, goals and beliefs that give you a sense of meaning and direction.

To dig down a bit, mindfulness has become the most common English translation of the Pali language’s word sati.

Another common meaning of mindfulness refers to a floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting. Perhaps the most widely quoted definition comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience.”

Everything you do, be it great or small, is but one-eighth of the problem,” a sixth-century Christian monk admonished his fellow renunciates, “whereas to keep one’s state undisturbed even if thereby one should fail to accomplish the task, is the other seven-eighths.”

As these stressful thoughts were presented, the patients used either of two different attentional stances: mindful awareness of their breath or distraction by doing mental arithmetic. Only mindfulness of their breath both lowered activity in the amygdala—mainly via a faster recovery—and strengthened it in the brain’s attentional networks, while the patients reported less stress reactivity.

we were impressed by the precision with which one of his interpreters, Alan Wallace, was able to equate scientific terms with their equivalent meanings in Tibetan, a language lacking any such technical terminology. Alan, it turned out, had a PhD in religious studies from Stanford University, extensive familiarity with quantum physics, and rigorous philosophical training, in part as a Tibetan Buddhist monk for several years. Drawing on his contemplative expertise, Alan developed a unique program that extracts from the Tibetan context a meditation practice accessible to anyone, what he calls Mindful Attention Training. This program starts with full focus on the breath, then progressively refines attention to observe the natural flow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.

In Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend their mental reactions and categorization of whatever arises in their minds or around them, and this mental stance gradually spills over into everyday life.12 “The experienced practitioner of zazen does not depend on sitting quietly,” as Ruth Sasaki, a Zen teacher, put it, adding, “States of consciousness at first attained only in the meditation hall gradually become continuous in any and all activities.”

The more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we are under such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains seemed to disconnect the usual link between executive center circuits where we evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain (This burns). In short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain as though it was a more neutral sensation. In more technical language, their brains showed a “functional decoupling” of the higher and lower brain regions that register pain—while their sensory circuitry felt the pain, their thoughts and emotions did not react to it. This offers a new twist on a strategy sometimes used in cognitive therapy: reappraisal of severe stress—thinking about it in a less threatening way—which can lessen its subjective severity as well as the brain’s response. Here, though, the Zen meditators seemed to apply a no-appraisal neural strategy—in keeping with the mind-set of zazen itself.

Such constant stress sculpts the brain for the worse, it seems.15 Brain scans of people who for years had faced work that demanded up to seventy hours each week revealed enlarged amygdalae and weak connections between areas in the prefrontal cortex that can quiet the amygdala in a disturbing moment. And when those stressed-out workers were asked to reduce their emotional reaction to upsetting pictures, they were unable to do so—technically, a failure in “down-regulation.”

They found that the stronger a person’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recovered from a lab stressor.16

The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts.

He was astonished—he’d never heard of this. He had, the Dalai Lama replied, always assumed that people naturally loved themselves.

The word empathy entered the English language only in the early years of the twentieth century, as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which might be translated as “feeling with.” Purely cognitive empathy has no such sympathetic feelings, while the defining sign of emotional empathy is feeling in your own body what the suffering person seems to feel.

Before they had learned this loving-kindness method, when the volunteers saw graphic videos of people suffering, only their negative circuits for emotional empathy activated: their brains reflected the state of the victims’ suffering as though it were happening to themselves. This left them feeling upset, an emotional echo of distress that transferred from the victims to themselves.

But when another group instead got instructions in compassion—feeling love for those suffering—their brains activated a completely different set of circuits, those for parental love of a child.8 Their brain signature was clearly different from those who received instructions in empathy.

As Martin Luther King Jr. commented on the Good Samaritan tale, those who did not help asked themselves, If I stop to help, what will happen to me? But the Good Samaritan asked, If I don’t stop to help, what will happen to him?

Those who did not avert their eyes but took in that suffering were, seven years later, better able to remember those specific pictures. In cognitive science, such memory betokens a brain that was able to resist an emotional hijack, and so, take in that tragic image more fully, remember it more effectively—and, presumably, act.

good for trauma recovery

The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain’s circuitry for happiness energizes, along with compassion.19 Loving-kindness also boosts the connections between the brain’s circuits for joy and happiness and the prefrontal cortex, a zone critical for guiding behavior.20 And the greater the increase in the connection between these regions, the more altruistic a person becomes following compassion meditation training.

The first mental training, “Presence,” entailed a body scan and breath focus. Another, “Perspective,” included observing thoughts via a novel interpersonal practice of “contemplative dyads,” where partners share their stream of thought with each other for ten minutes daily, either through a cell phone app or in person.23 The third, “Affect,” included loving-kindness practice. Results: the scan increased body awareness and lessened mind-wandering. Observing thoughts enhanced meta-awareness, a by-product of mindfulness. On the other hand, loving-kindness boosted warm thoughts and feelings about others. In short, if you want to increase your feelings of kindness most effectively, practice exactly that—not something else.

A 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.

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

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. But compassion meditation enhances empathic concern, activates circuits for good feelings and love, as well as circuits that register the suffering of others, and prepares a person to act when suffering is encountered. Compassion and loving-kindness increase amygdala activation to suffering while focused attention on something neutral like the breath lessens amygdala activity. Loving-kindness acts quickly, in as little as eight hours of practice; reductions in usually intractable unconscious bias emerge after just sixteen hours. And the longer people practice, the stronger these brain and behavioral tendencies toward compassion become. The strength of these effects from the early days of meditation may signal our biological preparedness for goodness.

William James made explicit what that Zen master may have been hinting at: “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. James went on to say that “an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”

While most monks showed nothing remarkable, three of the most “advanced” monks did: their brains responded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first. This was big news: ordinarily the brain would tune out, showing no reaction to the tenth bing, let alone the twentieth.

In habituation, cortical circuits inhibit the RAS, keeping this region quiet when we see the same old thing over and over.