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

by Daniel Goleman

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.