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

by Daniel Goleman

Not everything chalked up to meditation’s magic actually stands up to rigorous tests. And so we have set out to make clear what works and what does not. Some of what you know about meditation may be wrong. But what is true about meditation you may not know.

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.

the pragmatic applications of meditation—like the mindfulness that helped Steve recover from trauma—appeal widely but do not go so deep. Because this wide approach has easy access, multitudes have found a way to include at least a bit of meditation in their day.

There are, then, two paths: the deep and the wide. Those two paths are often confused with each other...

We see the deep path embodied at two levels: in a pure form, for example, in the ancient lineages of Theravada Buddhism as practiced in ...

At Level 2, these traditions have been removed from being part of a total lifestyle—monk or yogi, for example—and adapted into forms more palatable for the West. At Level 2, meditation comes in forms that leave behind parts of the original Asian source that might not make the cross-cultural journey so easily. Then there are the wide approaches. At Level 3, a further remove takes these same meditation practices out of their spiritual context and distributes them ever more widely—as is the case with mindfulness-based stress reduction

The even more widely accessible forms of meditation at Level 4 are, of necessity, the most watered-down, all the better to render them handy for the largest number of people. The current vogues of mindfulness-at-your-desk, or via minutes-long meditation apps, exemplify this level.

Our own meditation practice has been mainly at Level 2. But from the start, the wide path, Levels 3 and 4, has also been important to us. Our Asian teachers said if any aspect of meditation could help alleviate suffering, it should be offered to all, not just those on a spiritual search.

While we were both trained as psychologists, we bring complementary skills to telling this story. Dan is a seasoned science journalist who wrote for the New York Times for more than a decade. Richie, a neuroscientist, founded and heads the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds, in addition to directing the brain imaging laboratory

we aim to shift the conversation with a radical reinterpretation of what the actual benefits of meditation are—and are not—and what the true aim of practice has always been.

We had a big idea: beyond the pleasant states meditation can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result.

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.

Only of late have the scientific data reached critical mass, confirming what our intuition and the texts told us: these deep changes are external signs of strikingly different brain function.

The very idea of “awakening”—the goal of the deep path—seems a quaint fairy tale to a modern sensibility. Yet data from Richie’s lab, some just being published in journals as this book goes to press, confirm that remarkable, positive alterations in brain and behavior

We have both been longtime board members of the Mind and Life Institute, formed initially to create intensive dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists on wide-ranging topics.

But viewing mindfulness (or any variety of meditation) through a scientific lens starts with questions like: When does it work, and when does it not? Will this method help everyone? Are its benefits any different from, say, exercise?

Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.

keep in mind that as with gaining skill in a given sport, finding a meditation practice that appeals to you and sticking with it will have the greatest benefits. Just find one to try, decide on the amount of time each day you can realistically practice daily—even as short as a few minutes—try it for a month, and see how you feel after those thirty days.

As we’ll see, the specific benefits from one or another type get stronger the more total hours of practice you put in.

With such cautionary incidents in mind, we bring open but skeptical minds—the scientist’s mind-set—to the current wave of meditation research.

The mix of meditation and monetizing has a sorry track record as a recipe for hucksterism, disappointment, even scandal. All too often, gross misrepresentations, questionable claims, or distortions of scientific studies are used to sell meditation.

So we offer a clear-eyed view based on hard science, sifting out results that are not nearly as compelling as the claims made for them.

The neural and biological benefits best documented by sound science are not necessarily the ones we hear about in the press, on Facebook, or from email marketing blasts. And some of those trumpeted far and wide have little scientific merit.

we can now show that the more hours you practice, the greater the benefits you reap. And at the highest levels of practice we find true altered traits—changes in the brain that science has never observed before, but which we proposed decades ago.

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.

Bodh Gaya, in the North Indian state Bihar, is a pilgrimage site for Buddhists the world over,

Munindra had studied vipassana (the Theravadan meditation and root source of many now-popular forms of mindfulness) under Burmese masters of great repute.

Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk who, as part of a cultural renaissance in the early twentieth century meant to counter British colonial influence, revolutionized meditation by making it widely available to laypeople. While meditation in that culture had for centuries been the exclusive provenance of monks and nuns,

This gathering in the winter of 1970–71 was a seminal moment in the transfer of mindfulness from an esoteric practice in Asian countries to its current widespread adoption around the world. A handful of the students there, with Joseph Goldstein leading the way, later became instrumental in bringing mindfulness to the West.

Goenka’s method started with simply noting the sensations of breathing in and out—not for just twenty minutes but for hours and hours a day. This cultivation of concentration then morphed into a systematic whole-body scan of whatever sensations were occurring anywhere in the body.

Such transformative moments mark the boundary of mindfulness, where we observe the ordinary ebb and flow of the mind, with a further reach where we gain insight into the mind’s nature.

The next step, insight, brings the added realization of how we claim those sensations as “mine.” Insight into pain, for example, reveals how we attach a sense of “I” so it becomes “my pain” rather than being just a cacophony of sensations that change continuously from moment to moment.

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. In contrast, modern psychology, just about a century old, was clueless about this range of human potential. Clinical psychology, Dan’s field, was fixated on looking for a specific problem like high anxiety and trying to fix that one thing.

the total absorption in undistracted concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit, an altered state reached through meditation.

So the question remained about these rarefied qualities of being: fact or fairy tale?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, William James became Harvard’s first professor of psychology, a field he had a major hand in inventing as he transitioned from the theoretical universe of philosophy to a more empirical and pragmatic view of the mind.

James’s transcendent moments with the help of nitrous oxide led him to what he called an “unshakable conviction” that “our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”14

James adds, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”

And, he observed, “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” The very existence of these states “means they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

By the 1960s, psychologists routinely dismissed drug-triggered altered states as artificially induced psychosis (the original term for psychedelics was “psychotomimetic” drugs—psychosis mimics). As we found, similar attitudes applied to meditation—this

In brain science, excitement revolved around the recent discovery of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that send messages between neurons, like the mood regulator serotonin—magic

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.

That sobering experience fed into what was to become a burning scientific question: How long do state effects—like Richie’s meditative highs—last? At what point can they be considered enduring traits?

the Visuddhimagga. This fifth-century text, which means Path to Purification in Pali (the language of Buddhism’s earliest canon), was the ancient source for those mimeographed manuals Dan had pored over in Bodh Gaya.

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 highways to the jackpot of utter peace, the manual revealed, were a keenly concentrated mind on the one hand, merging with a sharply mindful awareness on the other.

the path of concentration begins with a mere focus on the breath (or any of more than forty other suggested points of focus, such as a patch of color—anything to focus the mind). For beginners this means a wobbly dance between full focus and a wandering mind.

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.