Summary: Altered Traits

The GIST

Altered Traits, by science journalist Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard Davidson, is a hard-headed look at one of the most hyped practices of our age. Published in 2017 (in Britain as The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body), it asks a simple question with a complicated answer: does meditation actually change us, not just while we sit on the cushion but in lasting ways? To answer it, Davidson's research group combed through more than 6,000 scientific studies and kept only the 60 or so that met the strictest standards. What survives that filter is the backbone of the book.

The authors bring unusual credentials to the job. Goleman is best known for his work on emotional intelligence. Davidson is a pioneer in studying meditation's effects on the brain. They met as Harvard graduate students in the 1970s after attending meditation retreats in Asia, and they have spent the decades since watching the field grow from a few shaky papers into a large and growing evidence base. The result is a book that reviewers praised for refusing to sensationalize. UC Berkeley's Greater Good Magazine called it a guide to separating "the wheat from the chaff" of mindfulness science. It lays out what meditation can do, what it can't, and how much practice each benefit takes.

The Big Ideas

States Fade, Traits Endure

The book's central distinction is in its title. An altered state is what happens during a meditation session: a feeling of calm, focus or even bliss that ends when the session does. An altered trait is a lasting change in how a person thinks, feels and responds, and it carries over into ordinary life. The authors care far more about traits. A pleasant half hour is nice. Being a different, steadier person is something else.

Back in their Harvard days, Goleman and Davidson summed up their hunch about how states become traits in a memorable phrase: "the after is the before for the next during." Whatever lingers after one session becomes a calmer, more balanced starting point for the next. Over time those small carry-overs stack up into a changed baseline.

They also describe two ways of practicing. The deep path is intensive discipline aimed at total self-transformation, the kind pursued by monks and yogis on long retreats. The wide path is lighter practice that can reach millions of ordinary people through things like workplace mindfulness programs and phone apps. The book covers both. It starts with everyday practitioners and saves the most extraordinary findings, about the most advanced meditators, for the end.

Science That Can Actually Be Trusted

Before making any claims, the authors explain why so much meditation research is unreliable. Studying it, as one reviewer put it, combines the difficulties of studying sleep with the difficulties of studying weightlifting. Like sleep, meditation happens invisibly inside a person's head, and asking about it can disrupt the very state you want to measure. Like weightlifting, it takes long, hard work with good technique. What helps a beginner differs from what helps an expert, and nobody can be paid to follow a twenty-year program, let alone be fooled about whether they are doing it.

The authors also stress that "meditation" is not one thing. They compare it to sports, a broad category of very different activities. The book focuses mainly on three. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a structured program for managing stress. Loving-kindness meditation means sending goodwill to oneself and others. Vipassana is an insight practice built on close self-observation. These methods are not interchangeable, yet studies often lump them together. Studies also lump together beginners and people with thousands of hours of practice, even though their brains behave very differently.

Other pitfalls get careful attention:

• Expectation effects. Early benefits may come partly from participants' hopes or an enthusiastic teacher.
• Active control groups. A fair comparison needs another activity that feels just as worthwhile, not simply no activity at all.
• Replication and publication bias. Many positive findings have never been repeated, and studies that find nothing are less likely to be published.

Some readers find these chapters slow going. They are the reason the rest of the book carries weight, and the authors report contrary evidence alongside the good news.

A Calmer Mind and a Kinder Heart

The first payoff concerns stress reactivity. About 30 hours of MBSR practice, typically over eight weeks, is linked to reduced activation in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. Long-term practice goes further and strengthens the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, so the brain's planning and regulating regions can calm emotional reactions more effectively. Practitioners with thousands of hours also appear to release less of the stress hormone cortisol in response to triggers.

The second payoff is compassion. The authors separate three kinds of empathy:

• Cognitive empathy is understanding how someone else thinks.
• Emotional empathy is feeling what they feel.
• Empathic concern is caring enough to act.

The last one matters most, because it is the one that leads people to help reduce suffering. The authors first confirm that a compassionate attitude really does produce more altruistic behavior, and that it brings more joy and happiness too. Then they show that as little as eight hours of loving-kindness meditation can increase empathic concern.

One form of the practice starts with loved ones and gradually widens the circle until it takes in strangers and even enemies. Whether it reduces hatred is still unknown. One study, though, found that loving-kindness meditation reduced unconscious prejudice, measured with a reaction-time bias test. The comparison group was taught about the value of loving-kindness meditation but never actually practiced it.

Retraining Attention

At its core, the authors argue, all meditation is a way of retraining attention. Here the evidence includes some genuine surprises.

In the 1970s, researchers brought an EEG machine into a Zen meditation hall and played monks a monotonous series of sounds. Normally the brain tunes out a repeated sound long before the tenth one. Three of the most advanced monks responded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first. A later study by Elena Antonova found similarly reduced tuning-out among meditators who had completed three-year retreats in the Tibetan tradition. A story about the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki shows what this looks like in daily life. Sitting motionless on an outdoor panel, apparently lost in thought, he was the only panelist to snatch at papers when a gust of wind blew them across the table.

The most striking finding involves the attentional blink, the brief blind spot after we notice one thing during which we tend to miss a second thing that follows quickly. Cognitive scientists believed it was hardwired. Then Davidson's group measured vipassana meditators before and after a three-month retreat and found the blink had shrunk by about 20 percent. The brain was reacting less to the first stimulus, so it stayed calm enough to catch the second. Researchers in Germany later found that practitioners of open monitoring, a spacious awareness of whatever arises, reversed the usual worsening of the blink with age and even outperformed a younger group.

Smaller doses help too, though the effects are shorter-lived. In one study, a two-week mindfulness course of about six hours, plus short daily sessions at home, improved concentration and reduced mind-wandering compared with a group that studied nutrition. It also unexpectedly improved working memory, the ability to hold information in mind. Other studies the book draws on found that a brief meditation session sharpened focus most for heavy multitaskers, and that students who meditated for two weeks before a graduate school entrance exam raised their scores. A separate study by Cliff Saron found gains in impulse control and emotional well-being. The authors are careful to say that some of these links are correlations and not yet proof from controlled, long-term studies.

Quieting the Self, Helping the Body

Next the book turns to the sense of self and to a network of brain regions that switches on when we aren't busy. The default mode network, centered on the midline of the prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, is responsible for the mind-wandering that fills our idle moments. That mind-wandering tends to be about ourselves and is often unpleasant: replaying mistakes, worrying about what's coming. A wandering mind, research suggests, is an unhappy one.

Meditation seems to change this network in stages. Early on, brain circuits learn to catch the wandering and pull attention back. With long practice, activity in the network itself goes down. Experienced meditators showed a relatively quieted default mode network, and when activity in the posterior cingulate dropped, they described the experience in terms like "undistracted awareness" and "effortless doing." This is the point where Buddhist ideas about loosening our grip on the self start to line up with brain scans.

On physical health, the authors are measured. Meditation wasn't designed to treat illness, but it shows some real benefits, including lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, molecules involved in inflammation. They admit these effects are not yet well understood, and that benefits such as reduced inflammation are modest and depend on sustained practice. Meditation can ease the emotional burden of chronic pain or illness without removing its biological causes. For mental health, they cite a meta-analysis of 47 studies that found meditation as effective as medication for depression, anxiety and pain, without medication's side effects. They also note that meditation was never designed to treat psychological disorders.

Olympic-Level Minds

The book builds to its most dramatic material. With help from the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Davidson's lab recruited highly advanced Tibetan practitioners, including Mingyur Rinpoche, to meditate inside the lab's scanners. When Mingyur meditated on compassion, the researchers recorded large surges in electrical activity on EEG and in the brain's empathy circuits on fMRI. The study has been cited widely ever since.

Across these yogis, the lab found strikingly high levels of gamma waves, the fast brain rhythms linked to highly integrated awareness. The yogis showed little anticipation of pain and recovered from it very quickly. They could refocus and hold their attention with almost no effort. These look like altered traits in their fullest form.

The authors then pull everything together into three tiers of benefit. Beginners get real but short-lived gains in calm and focus. Long-term meditators show lasting changes in stress reactivity, attention and compassion. "Olympic-level" practitioners with tens of thousands of hours show changes rarely seen anywhere else. The final chapter looks ahead to new uses for this research. It also looks back at how thin the evidence was in the 1970s compared with today.

Putting It to Work

• Aim for traits, not highs. Judge your practice by how you respond to daily life, not by how blissful a session feels.
• Be consistent. No benefit lasts without continued practice. Regular sessions are what turn one session's "after" into the next one's "before."
• Expect a dose-response curve. More practice brings deeper, longer-lasting change, but even a few hours of training shows measurable effects.
• Match the method to the goal. MBSR-style mindfulness targets stress, loving-kindness builds compassion and the urge to help, and focused or open-monitoring practices sharpen attention.
• Swap multitasking for a short sit. A few minutes of meditation before demanding work seems to sharpen focus, especially for chronic multitaskers.
• Keep claims honest. Meditation is not a cure-all. Treat it as a complement to care for illness, and be skeptical of studies without active control groups.
• Open questions remain. Science still can't say whether two short sessions beat one long one, or whether a quiet room beats a noisy commute. Experiment and see what you'll actually keep doing.

Who Should Read It

This is the book for the skeptic who suspects meditation is a fad, the curious beginner who wants to know whether ten minutes a day is worth it, and the longtime practitioner who wants to understand what decades of sitting may be doing to the brain. Anyone drawn to the meeting point of contemplative tradition and rigorous neuroscience will find it both reassuring and sobering. Readers who want quick tips may find the methodology chapters slow, but the payoff is a clear, trustworthy picture of what the evidence really shows.

This has been a summary of Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.