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

by Daniel Goleman

The after is the before for the next during. To unpack this idea, after refers to enduring changes from meditation that last long beyond the practice session itself. Before means the condition we are in at baseline, before we start meditating. During is what happens as we meditate, temporary changes in our state that pass when we stop meditating. In other words, repeated practice of meditation results in lasting traits—the after.

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.

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.”17

The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice. Other mindfulness training shows a similar benefit, and there are hints in the research that these changes are traitlike: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state, with reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent. Such lessening of the brain’s stress reactions appears in response not simply to seeing the gory pictures used in the laboratory but also to more real-life challenges like the stressful Trier interview before a live audience. More daily practice seems associated with lessened stress reactivity. Experienced Zen practitioners can withstand higher levels of pain, and have less reaction to this stressor. A three-month meditation retreat brought indicators of better emotional regulation, and long-term practice was associated with greater functional connectivity between the prefrontal areas that manage emotion and the areas of the amygdala that react to stress, resulting in less reactivity. And an improved ability to regulate attention accompanies some of the beneficial impact of meditation on stress reactivity. Finally, the quickness with which long-term meditators recover from stress underlines how trait effects emerge with continued practice.

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?

Simply learning about compassion does not necessarily increase compassionate behavior. In the arc from empathizing with someone suffering to actually reaching out to help, loving-kindness/compassion meditation ups the odds of helping. 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.

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.”

Meditation, at its root, retrains attention, and different types boost varying aspects of attention. MBSR strengthens selective attention, while long-term vipassana practice enhances this even more. Even five months after the three-month shamatha retreat, meditators had enhanced vigilance, the ability to sustain their attention. And the attentional blink lessened greatly after three months on a vipassana retreat—but the beginnings of this lessening also showed up after just seventeen minutes of mindfulness in beginners, no doubt a transitory state for the newcomers, and a more lasting trait for those retreatants. That same practice-makes-perfect maxim likely applies to several other quickie meditations: just ten minutes of mindfulness overcame the damage to concentration from multitasking—at least in the short term; only eight minutes of mindfulness lessened mind-wandering for a while. About ten hours of mindfulness over a two-week period strengthened attention and working memory—and led to substantial improved scores on the graduate school entrance exam. While meditation boosts many aspects of attention, these are short-term gains; more lasting benefits no doubt require ongoing practice.

The brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing that demands mental effort, just letting our mind wander; we hash over thoughts and feelings (often unpleasant) that focus on ourselves, constructing the narrative we experience as our “self.” The default mode circuits quiet during mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation. In early stages of meditation this quieting of the self-system entails brain circuits that inhibit the default zones; in later practice the connections and activity within those areas wane. This quieting of the self-circuitry begins as a state effect, seen during or immediately after meditation, but with long-term practitioners it becomes an enduring trait, along with lessened activity in the default mode itself. The resulting decrease in stickiness means that self-focused thoughts and feelings that arise in the mind have much less “grab” and decreasing ability to hijack attention.

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-inflamatory cytokines, along with an increased connectivity between regulatory circuitry and sectors of the brain’s self system, particularly the posterior cingulate cortex. Among experienced meditation practitioners, a daylong period of intensive mindfulness practice down-regulates genes involved in inflammation. The enzyme telomerase, which slows cellular aging, increases after three months of intensive practice of mindfulness and loving-kindness. Finally, long-term meditation may lead to beneficial structural changes in the brain, though current evidence is inconclusive about whether such effects emerge with relatively short-term practice like MBSR, or only become apparent with longer-term practice. A...

Although meditation was not originally intended to treat psychological problems, in modern times it has shown promise in the treatment of some, particularly depression and anxiety disorders. In a meta-analysis of forty-seven studies on the application of meditation methods to treat patients with mental health problems, the findings show that meditation can lead to decreases in depression (particularly severe 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. Loving-kindness meditation may be particularly helpful to patients suffering from trauma, especially those with PTSD. The melding of mindfulness with cognitive therapy, or MBCT, has become the most empirically well-validated psychological treatment with a meditation basis. This integration continues to have a wide impact in the clinical world, with empirical tests of applications to an ever larger range of psychological disorders under way. While there are occasional reports of negative effects of meditation, the findings to date underscore the potential promise of meditation-based strategies, and the enormous increase in scientific research in these areas bodes well for the future.

At first Richie’s lab found it impossible to get the cooperation of the most highly experienced yogis. But when Matthieu Ricard, a seasoned yogi himself with a PhD in biology, assured his peers their participation might be of benefit to people, a total of twenty-one yogis agreed. Matthieu, in an innovative collaboration with Richie’s lab, helped design the experimental protocol. The next yogi to come to the lab, Mingyur Rinpoche, was also the one with most lifetime hours of practice—62,000 at the time. When he meditated on compassion there was a huge surge in electrical activity in his brain as recorded by EEG; fMRI images revealed that during this meditation his circuitry for empathy jumped in activity by 700 to 800 percent compared to its level at rest. And when he later went on retreat as a wanderer for four and a half years, the aging of his brain slowed, so that at forty-one his brain resembled the norm for thirty-three-year-olds.

The massive levels of gamma activity in the yogis and the synchrony of the gamma oscillations across widespread regions of the brain suggest the vastness and panoramic quality of awareness that they report. The yogis’ awareness in the present moment—without getting stuck in the anticipation of the future or ruminating on the past—seems reflected in the strong “inverted V” response to pain, where yogis show little anticipatory response and very rapid recovery. The yogis also show neural evidence of effortless concentration: it takes only a flicker of the neural circuitry to place their attention on a chosen object, and little to no effort to hold it there. Finally, when generating compassion, the brains of yogis become more connected to their bodies, particularly their hearts—indicating emotional resonance.

From the beginning hours, days, and weeks of meditation, several benefits emerge. For one, beginners’ brains show less amygdala reactivity to stress. Improvements in attention after just two weeks of practice include better focus, less mind-wandering, and improved working memory—with a concrete payoff in boosted scores on a graduate school entrance exam. Some of the earliest benefits are with compassion meditation, including increased connectivity in the circuitry for empathy. And markers for inflammation lessen a bit with just thirty hours of practice. While these benefits emerge even with remarkably modest hours of practice, they are likely fragile, and need daily sessions to be sustained. For long-term meditators, those who have done about 1,000 hours or more of practice, the benefits documented so far are more robust, with some new ones added to the mix. There are brain and hormonal indicators of lowered reactivity to stress and lessened inflammation, a strengthening of the prefrontal circuits for managing distress, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, signaling less reactivity to stresses in general. Compassion meditation at this level brings a greater neural attunement with those who are suffering, and enhanced likelihood of doing something to help. When it comes to attention, there are a range of benefits: stronger selective attention, decreased attentional blink, greater ease in sustaining attention, a heightened readiness to respond to whatever may com...