The Science of Meditation: The expert guide to the neuroscience of mindfulness and how to harness it

by Daniel Goleman

Yet mindfulness, part of an ancient meditation tradition, was not intended to be such a cure; this method was only recently adapted as a balm for our modern forms of angst. 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.

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.

In the wake of the tsunami of excitement over the wide path, the alternate route so often gets missed: that is, the deep path, which has always been the true goal of meditation. 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.

A stream of findings from the deep path markedly boosts science’s models of the upper limits of our positive potential. The further reaches of the deep path cultivate enduring qualities like selflessness, equanimity, a loving presence, and impartial compassion—highly positive altered traits.

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 along the lines of those long described for the deep path are not a myth but a reality.

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. Some practical advice: for those about to start a meditation practice, or who have been grazing among several, 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. Just as regular workouts give you better physical fitness, most any type of meditation will enhance mental fitness to some degree. As we’ll see, the specific benefits from one or another type get stronger the more total hours of practice you put in.

At the outset, mere minutes a day of practice have surprising benefits (though not all those that are claimed). Beyond such payoffs at the beginning, 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.

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 After pointing out the existence of altered states of consciousness (though not by that name), 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.”

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.

Ordinarily our thoughts compel us: our loathing or self-loathing generates one set of feelings and actions; our romantic fantasies quite another. But with strong mindfulness we can experience a deep sense in which self-loathing and romantic thoughts are the same: like all other thoughts, these are passing moments of mind. We don’t have to be chased through the day by our thoughts—they are a continuous series of short features, previews, and outtakes in a theater of the mind.

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. There we progress through shifting again and again our relationship to that inner show—each time yielding yet more insights into the nature of consciousness itself.

In India they tell of a yogi who spent years and years alone in a cave, achieving rarefied states of samadhi. One day, satisfied that he had reached the end of his inner journey, the yogi came down from his mountain perch into a village. That day the bazaar was crowded. As he made his way through the crowd, the yogi was caught up in a rush to make way for a local lord riding through on an elephant. A young boy standing in front of the yogi stepped back suddenly in fright—stomping right on the yogi’s bare foot. The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strike the youngster. But suddenly seeing what he was about to do—and the anger that propelled his arm—the yogi turned around and went right back up to his cave for more practice.

The tale speaks to the difference between meditation highs and enduring change. 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.

Fast-forward to another politics of consciousness in the 1960s, during the heady days of the psychedelic fad. The sudden revelations of drug-induced altered states led to assumptions like, as one acidhead put it, “With LSD we experienced what it took Tibetan monks 20 years to obtain, yet we got there in 20 minutes.”20 Dead wrong. The trouble with drug-induced states is that after the chemical clears your body, you remain the same person as always. And, as Richie discovered, the same fading away happens with highs in meditation.

Some people fixate on the remarkable states attained during a meditation session—particularly during long retreats—and give little notice to how, or even if, those states translate into a lasting change for the better in their qualities of being after they’ve gone home. 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.” That rule of thumb has stayed constant since before the time of the Visuddhimagga: It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.

Puzzling over how to reconcile the meditation map with what we had experienced ourselves, and then with the admittedly scant scientific evidence, we articulated a hypothesis: The after is the before for the next during.

For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot. Today that creed finds an echo in the popularized Twelve Step version of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

These Western thinkers and Asian spiritual traditions alike saw the value in cultivating a virtuous life via a roughly similar transformation of being. In Buddhism, for example, the ideal of inner flourishing gets put in terms of bodhi (in Pali and Sanskrit), a path of self-actualization that nourishes “the very best within oneself.”20

the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.

As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings. A more modern sentiment comes from poet Charles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that drive us mad, but “the shoelace that snaps with no time left.”

About the same time as Alan’s findings that mindfulness calms the amygdala, other researchers had volunteers who had never meditated before practice mindfulness for just twenty minutes a day over one week, and then have an fMRI scan.10 During the scan they saw images ranging from gruesome burn victims to cute bunnies. They watched these images in their everyday state of mind, and then while practicing mindfulness. During mindful attention their amygdala response was significantly lower (compared to nonmeditators) to all the images. This sign of being less disturbed, tellingly, was greatest in the amygdala on the brain’s right side (there are amygdalae in both right and left hemispheres), which often has a stronger response to whatever upsets us than the one on the left.

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.

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.”

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.

Years after her return from India, Sharon was a panelist in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama in 1989, for which Dan was moderator.4 At one point Sharon told the Dalai Lama that many Westerners felt loathing toward themselves. He was astonished—he’d never heard of this. He had, the Dalai Lama replied, always assumed that people naturally loved themselves.

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 to the standard wisdom where attention was assumed to be hardwired and so, beyond the reach of any training attempt.

An intensive vipassana course creates something akin to mindfulness on steroids: a nonreactive hyperalertness to all the stuff that arises in one’s mind.

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.”

This training in mindfulness occurred while the students in the study were still in school. The boost to their attention and working memory may help account for the even bigger surprise: mindfulness upped their scores by more than 30 percent on the GRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note.

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.

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

“a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

This simple mental move has a neural correlate: activating the connection between the dorsolateral PFC and the default mode—a connection found to be stronger in long-term meditators than in beginners.3 The stronger this connection, the more likely regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the default areas, quieting the monkey mind—the incessant self-focused chatter that so often fills our minds when nothing else is pressing.

Stickiness seems to reflect the dynamics of the emotional circuitry of the brain, including the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.

And the big news about meditation for older folks comes from a study at UCLA that finds meditation slows the usual shrinkage of our brain as we age: 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.

In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.” That enigmatic riddle comes from Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet’s eminent twelfth-century poet, yogi, and sage.

Matthieu Ricard unpacks Milarepa’s puzzle this way: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilizes, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.