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

by Daniel Goleman

Elena Antonova, a British neuroscientist who has attended the SRI, found that meditators who had done a three-year retreat in the Tibetan tradition had less habituation of eye blinks when they heard loud bursts of noise.3 In other words, their blinks continued unabated. This replicates (at least conceptually) that study from Japan where advanced Zen meditators did not habituate to repetitive sounds.

While William James wrote about attention as though it were one single entity, science now tells us the concept refers not just to one ability but to many. Among them: 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.

Her lab, now based at the University of Miami, found that novices trained in MBSR significantly improved in orienting, a component of selective attention that directs the mind to target one among the virtually infinite array of sensory inputs.

Conclusion: mindfulness (at least in this form) strengthens the brain’s ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions. The neural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained—contrary

For those few moments, research tells us, the nervous system takes our focus off-line and relaxes, in what amounts to a short neural celebration party. If another Waldo were to pop up during the party, our attention would be occupied elsewhere. That second Waldo would go unseen. This moment of temporary blindness is like a blink in attention, a short pause in our mind’s ability to scan our surroundings (technically, a “refractory period”). During that blink, the mind’s ability to notice goes blind and attention loses sensitivity. A slight change that might otherwise catch our eye goes by unnoticed. The blink measure reflects “brain efficiency,” in the sense that not getting too caught up in one thing leaves our finite attentional resources available for the next. Speaking practically, the lack of blink reflects a greater ability to notice small changes—e.g., nonverbal emotional cues of a person’s shifting emotions telegraphed by fleeting shifts in the small muscles around the eyes. Insensitivity to such minor signals can mean we miss major messages.

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 The key neural shift was a drop in response to the first glimpse of a number (they were just noting its presence) so the mind remains calm enough to also notice the second number, even if very soon after the first one.

Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”

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 brains activate many more areas than just those relevant to the task at hand—a neural indicator of distraction. 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 concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.

The good news for multitaskers: cognitive control can be strengthened.

A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory.

Another way cognitive control helps us is in managing our impulses, technically known as “response inhibition.”

In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus our attention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usually what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost. Such awareness of awareness itself lets us monitor our mind without being swept away by the thoughts and feelings we are noticing. “That which is aware of sadness is not sad,” observes philosopher Sam Harris. “That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as anyone else.”18

Though while we sit we ordinarily are oblivious to our subtle shifts in posture and the like, these small movements relieve stress that’s building in our body. When you don’t move a muscle, that stress can build into excruciating pain. And if, like Richie, you are scanning those sensations, a remarkable shift in your relationship to your own experience can occur where the feeling of “pain” melts away into a mélange of physical sensations.

What troubled him: during highly demanding cognitive tasks—like counting backward by 13s from the number 1,475—there were a set of brain regions that deactivated.

So, where are all those neurons, chatting back and forth while we do nothing in particular? Raichle identified a swath of areas, mainly the mPFC (short for midline of the prefrontal cortex) and the PCC (postcingulate cortex), a node connecting to the limbic system. He dubbed this circuitry the brain’s “default mode network.”

In short, our mind wanders mostly to something about ourselves—my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page—all the minutiae of our life story. By framing every event in how it impacts ourselves, the default mode makes each of us the center of the universe as we know it.

For this reason, when Harvard researchers asked thousands of people to report their mental focus and mood at random points through the day, their conclusion was that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

One of the great appeals of high-risk sports like rock climbing seems to be just that—the danger of the sport demands a full focus on where to put your hand or foot next. More mundane worries take backstage in the mind. The same applies to “flow,” the state where people perform at their best. Paying full attention to what’s at hand, flow research tells us, rates high on the list of what puts us into—and sustains—a joyous state. The self, in its form as mind-wandering, becomes a distraction, suppressed for the time being.

This shift in how we experience ourselves—our pain and all that we attach to it—points to one of the main goals of all spiritual practice: lightening the system that builds our feelings of I, me, and mine.

Meditative traditions of all kinds share one goal: letting go of the constant grasping—the “stickiness” of our thoughts, emotions, and impulses—that guides us through our days and lives. Technically called “dereification,” this key insight has the meditator realize that thoughts, feelings, and impulses are passing, insubstantial mental events. With this insight we don’t have to believe our thoughts; instead of following them down some track, we can let them go.

We’ve often heard the Dalai Lama talk about “emptiness,” by which he means the sense in which our “self’—and all seeming objects in our world—actually emerge from the combination of their components. Some Christian theologians use the term kenosis for the emptying of self, where our own wants and needs diminish while our openness to the needs of others grows into compassion. As a Sufi teacher put it, “When occupied with self, you are separated from God. The way to God is but one step; the step out of yourself.”

The volunteers had never meditated before, but in this mindfulness course they learned that if you are lost in some personal melodrama (a favorite theme of the default mode), you can voluntarily drop it—you can name it, or shift your attention to watching your breath or to bare awareness of the present moment. All of these are active interventions, efforts to quiet the monkey mind.

The seasoned meditators in the Brewer study had the same strong connection between the control circuit and the default mode seen in beginners, but in addition had less activation within the default mode areas themselves. This was particularly true when they practiced loving-kindness meditation—a corroboration of the maxim that the more we think of the well-being of others, the less we focus on ourselves.8 Intriguingly, the long-term meditators seemed to have roughly the same lessened connectivity in the default mode circuitry while they just rested before the test as they displayed during mindfulness.

Along these lines, Richie’s group found that meditators who had an average 7,500 lifetime hours, compared to people their own age, had decreased gray matter volume in a key region: the nucleus accumbens.

This decrease in gray-matter volume in the nucleus accumbens may reflect a diminished attachment in the meditators, particularly to the narrative self.

For instance, Hindu contemplative paths describe vairagya, a later stage of practice where attachments drop away—renunciation, in this sense, happens spontaneously rather than through force of will. And with this shift emerges an alternate source of delight in sheer being.

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.

When the Dalai Lama once was asked what had been the happiest point in his life, he answered, “I think right now.”

Having a method they can use on their own to ease their pain gave these patients a sense of “self-efficacy,” a feeling that they can control their destiny to some extent.

Human skin has an unusually large number of nerve endings (about five hundred per square inch), each a pathway for the brain to send signals for what’s called “neurogenic,” or brain-caused, inflammation.

One of the areas triggered by messages from the insula is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which modulates inflammation and also connects our thoughts and feelings and controls autonomic activity, including heart rate. Richie’s group discovered that when the ACC activates in response to an allergen, people with asthma will have more attacks twenty-four hours later.

Important: these seasoned practitioners were not meditating when these measures were taken—this was a trait effect. Mindfulness practice, it seems, lessens inflammation day to day, not just during meditation itself.

After the day of practice the meditators had a marked “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes—something that had never been seen before in response to a purely mental practice. Such a drop, if sustained over a lifetime, might help combat diseases with onsets marked by chronic low-grade inflammation.

an epigenetic boost was found in research with two other meditation methods. One is Herb Benson’s “relaxation response,” which has a person silently repeat a chosen word like peace as if it were a mantra.16 The other is “yogic meditation,” where the meditator recites a Sanskrit mantra, at first aloud and then in a whisper, and finally silently, ending with a short deep-breathing relaxation technique.

A meta-analysis of four randomized controlled studies involving a total of 190 meditators found practicing mindfulness was associated with increased telomerase activity.

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

A group who went through a six-day panchakarma treatment, compared to another group who were just vacationing at the same resort, showed intriguing improvements in a range of sophisticated metabolic measures that reflect both epigenetic changes and actual protein expression.21 This means genes are being directed in beneficial ways.

Comparing each to a nonmeditator of the same age and sex, the meditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly.

The results: certain areas of the brain seemed to enlarge in meditators, among them: The insula, which attunes us to our internal state and powers emotional self-awareness, by enhancing attention to such internal signals. Somatomotor areas, the main cortical hubs for sensing touch and pain, perhaps another benefit of increased bodily awareness. Parts of the prefrontal cortex that operate in paying attention and in meta-awareness, abilities cultivated in almost all forms of meditation. Regions of the cingulate cortex instrumental in self-regulation, another skill practiced in meditation. The orbitofrontal cortex, also part of the circuitry for self-regulation.

at age fifty, longtime meditators’ brains are “younger” by 7.5 years compared to brains of nonmeditators of the same age.27 Bonus: for every year beyond fifty, the brains of practitioners were younger than their peers’ by one month and twenty-two days.

More right-side activity than left correlated with negative moods like depression and anxiety; relatively more left-side activity was associated with buoyant moods like energy and enthusiasm. That ratio appeared to predict a person’s day-to-day mood range.

IN A NUTSHELL None of the many forms of meditation studied here was originally designed to treat illness, at least as we recognize it in the West. Yet today the scientific literature is replete with studies assessing whether these ancient practices might be useful for treating just such illnesses. MBSR and similar methods can reduce the emotional component of suffering from disease, but not cure those maladies. Yet mindfulness training—even as short as three days—produces a short-term decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines, the molecules responsible for inflammation. And the more you practice, the lower the level becomes of these pro-inflammatory cytokines. This seems to become a trait effect with extensive practice, with imaging studies finding in meditators at rest lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, along with an increased connectivity between regulatory circuitry and sectors of the brain’s self system, particularly the posterior cingulate cortex.

Tara’s book Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart was the first to integrate mindfulness with cognitive therapy.1

In a prominent article in one of the JAMA journals (the official publications of the American Medical Association), the researchers concluded that mindfulness (but not mantra-based meditation like TM, for which there were too few well-designed studies to make any conclusions) could lessen anxiety and depression, as well as pain. The degree of improvement was about as much as for medications, but without troubling side effects—making mindfulness-based therapies a viable alternative treatment for these conditions.

The review’s conclusion: meditation (in particular, mindfulness) can have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and pain—about as much as medications but with no side effects. Meditation also can, to a lesser degree, reduce the toll of psychological stress. Overall, meditation has not been proven better for psychological distress than medical treatments, though the evidence for stronger conclusions remains insufficient.

The remarkable finding from John Teasdale’s group at Oxford, that MBCT cut relapse in severe depression by around 50 percent, energized some impressive follow-up research. After all, a 50 percent drop in relapse outreaches by far what any medication used for severe depression can claim.

Those patients who, after treatments, showed a greater increase in the activity of their insula had 35 percent fewer relapses. The reason? In a later analysis, Segal found the best outcomes were in those patients most able to “decenter,” that is, step outside their thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming and going, rather than getting carried away by “my thoughts and feelings.”

In a series of books integrating psychoanalytic and Buddhist views of mind, Mark has continued to lead the way. His first book had the intriguing title Thoughts Without a Thinker, a phrase from the object relations theorist Donald Winnicott, which also voices a contemplative perspective.

That number includes seven Westerners who have done at least one three-year retreat at the center in Dordogne, France, where Matthieu has practiced,

Just as Mingyur began the meditation, there was a sudden huge burst of electrical activity on the computer monitors displaying the signals from his brain. Everyone assumed this meant he had moved; such movement artifacts are a common problem in research with EEG, which registers as wave pattern readings of electrical activity at the top of the brain.