Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body
by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson
- Below you can find my top highlights (quotes may be edited for readability)
- Skim… then slow down on the paragraphs that catch your interest. Reflection requires pause.
- If it resonates, you can purchase the full book here.
One Line Summary: What are the real benefits of meditation? What is the difference between techniques and duration of practice? Do retreats matter or is daily practice enough? A much needed update on the benefits of meditation from a scientific perspective.
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the entire range of emotional disorders … mindfulnes … was not intended to be such a cure
The original aim, … focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being.
Because this wide approach has easy access, multitudes have found a way to include at least a bit of meditation in their day.
meditation comes in forms that leave behind parts of the original Asian source that might not make the cross-cultural journey so easily.
Transcendental meditation (TM) … offers classic Sanskrit mantras to the modern world in a user-friendly format.
the lessons scientists have learned in studying all the other levels will lead to innovations and adaptations that can be of widest benefit
Our teachers said if any aspect of meditation could help alleviate suffering, it should be offered to all, not just those on a spiritual search.
The science and the data we needed to support our ideas have only recently matured.
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.
beyond the pleasant states meditation can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result.
Altered traits shape how we behave in our daily lives, not just during or immediately after we meditate.
the most compelling impacts of meditation are not better health or sharper business performance but, rather, a further reach toward our better nature.
Scientific lense: When does it work, and when does it not? Will this method help everyone? Are its benefits any different from, say, exercise?
Not all meditation techniques have the same impact: the end results vary depending on what you actually do.
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.
the specific benefits from one or another type get stronger the more total hours of practice you put in.
we bring open but skeptical minds – the scientist’s mind-set
The mix of meditatino and monetizing has a sorry track record
THE ACCELERATION
1830s, Thoreau and Emerson, along with their fellow American Transcendentalists, flirted with these Eastern inner arts …. but had no instruction in the practices
The West’s more serious engagement took hold mere decades ago
As a serious meditation practitioner, Francisco (Varela) could see the promise for a full collaboration between seasoned meditators and the scientists studying them.
as meditation trains the mind, it reshapes the brain
At the outset, mere minutes a day of practice have surprising benefits (though not all those that are claimed0. Beyond such payoffs at the beginning, we can now show that the more hours you practice, the greater the benefits you reap.
ANCIENT CLUES
No matter what he was doing, he seemed to remain effortlessly in a blissful, loving space, perpetually at ease. (Maharaji)
Insight into pain … reveals how we attach a sense of “I” so it becomes “my pain” rahter 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 to all.
In contrast, modern psychology, just about a century old, was clueless about this range of human potential.
Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism – all the religions that sprouted within Indian civilization – share the concept of “liberation” in one form or other.
“unshakeable conviction” that “our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciouness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” “We may go through life without suspecting their existence” – William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
the original terms for psychedelics was “psychotomimetic” drugs – psychosis mimics.
Sustained focus … brings … “access concentration”
With this level of concentration come feelings of delight and calm, and sometimes, sensory phenomena like flashes of light or a sense of bodily lightness.
Jhana alone (full absorption), the Buddha is said to have declared, was not the path to a liberated mind.
the meditator simply notes without reactivity whatever comes into mind, such as thoughts or sensory impressions like sounds – and lets them go.
Beyond transitory states like samadhi/jhana (concentration) there can be lasting changes in our very being … the true fruit of reaching the highest levels of the path of insigh … 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.
The trouble with drug-induced states is that after the chemical clears your body, you remain the same person as always … the same fading away happens with highs in meditation.
The mark of progress along this path is whether our reactions in daily life signal a shift toward healthy states. The goal is to establish the healthy states as predominant, lasting traits.
Valuing just the heights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves in lasting ways day by day.
It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.
THE SCIENCE CATCHES UP
If only skeptics pursued science, little innovation would occur.
A mind free from disturbance has value in lessening human suffering; a goal shared by science and meditative paths alike.
a more practical potential within reach of every one of us: a life best described as flourishing.
we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot.
The classical way to the “wisdom to know the difference” lay in mental training.
The Greek practices for developing virtues were to some extent taught openly, while others were apparently given only to initiates like Alexander, who noted that the philosopher’s texts were more fully understood in the context of these secretive teachings.
THE BEST WE HAD
psychology, like all sciences, has a strong inbuilt publication bias: scientists rarely try to publish studies when they get no significant results.
Back in 1975 we were quite naive about how important these variations in (meditation) technique were.
The rule of thumb – that what gets practices gets improved – underscores the importance of matching a given mental strategy in meditation to its result. … They are not all the same.
calculating lifetime hours of practice … goes missing in the vast majority of meditation studies … the more you do it, the better the payoff.
any positive intervention (and, perhaps, simply having someone observe your behavior) will move people to say they feel better or improve in some other way.
Just finding that people practicing one or another kind of meditation report improvements compared to those in a control group who do nothing does not mean such benefits are due to the meditation itself. Yet this is perhaps the most common paradigm still used in research on the benefits of meditation.
Any questionnaire that asks people to report on themselves … can be gamed.
of the original 231 reports on cultivating loving-kindness or compassion … only 8 or so studies (met top design standards and did not overlap).
A MIND UNDISTURBED
States of consciousness at first attained only in the meditation hall gradually become continuous in any and all activities.
victims of burnout are no longer able to put a halt to their brain’s stress response – and so, never have the healing balm of recovery time.
the stronger a person’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recovered from a lab stressor.
it seems likely that the states we practice in meditation gradually spill over into daily life to mold our traits – at least when it comes to handling stress.
the ability to manage distress … will be greater in long-term meditators compared to those who have only done the MBSR training.
the more hours practice, the more quickly the amygdala recovered from distress.
PRIMED FOR LOVE
When we are rushing though a busy day, worried about getting to the next place on time, we tend literally not to notice the people around us, let alone their needs.
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.
Loving-kindness meditation acts quickly, in as little as eight hours of practice; reductions in usually intractable unconscious bias emerge after just sixteen hours.
ATTENTION!
“The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgement, character and will, an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” – William James
we notice something unusual just long enough to be sure it poses no threat, or simply to categorize it. Then habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar.
Habituation makes life manageable but a bit dull.
It seemed the Zen brains could sustain attention when other brains would tune out.
This attention training … might well enrich our lives, giving us the choice to reverse habituation by focusing us on a deeply textured here and now, making “the old new again.”
There was no scientific concept for the volitional control of attention … the reality of their own experience was simply ignored in favour of what could be objectively observed. // Note by Miguel: this is a plague in self-proclaimed rational thinkers
Attention … refers not just to one ability but to many: Selective, Vigilance, Allocating, Goal focus, Meta-awareness.
mindfulness strengthens the brain’s ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions … selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained
An intensive vipassana course creates something akin to mindfulness on steroids: a nonreactive hyperalertness to all the stuff that arises in one’s mind.
“What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon
mindfulness also improved working memory … upped their scores by more than 30 percent on the GRE
just ten minutes of mindfulness overcame the damage to concentration form multitasking
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
While meditation boosts many aspects of attention, these are short-term gains; more lasting benefits no doubt require ongoing practice.
LIGHTNESS OF BEING
every waking moment of our lives, we construct our experience around a narrative where we are the star
while we’re doing nothing there are brain regions that are highly activated, even more active than those engaged during a difficult cognitive task
(the brain’s 20% oxygen consumption) remains more or less constant no matter what we are doing – including nothing at all.
The brain, it seems, stays just as busy when we are relaxed as when we are under some mental strain.
The default mode … blossoms during the mind’s downtime. Conversely, as we focus on some challenge … the default mode quiets.
With nothing much else to capture our attention, our mind wanders, very often to what’s troubling us – a root cause of everyday angst.
“a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
the same applies to “flow” … the self … becomes a distraction, suppressed for the time being.
When we become lost in thoughts during meditation, we’ve fallen into the default mode and its wandering mind.
meditation urges us to notice when our mind has wandered and then return our focus
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 beginnners.
The stronger this connection, the more likely regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the default areas, quieting the monkey mind.
“So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.”
While most ways to relieve us from the burden of self are temporary, meditation paths aim to make that relief an ongoing fact of life – a lasting trait.
one of the main goals of all spiritual pracitce: lightening the system that builds our feelings of I, me, and mine.
Some Christian theologians use the term kenosis for the emptying of self
Though the bill still must be paid, the lighter our “selfing”, the less we anguish about that bill and the freer we feel. We still find a way to pay it but without the extra load of emotional baggage.
While almost every contemplative path holds lightness of being as a primary aim … very little scientific research speaks to this goal.
loving-kindness … the more we think of the well-being of others, the less we focus on ourselves.
The segue from at first making an effort to later effortlessness seems a universal, though little-known, theme in meditation paths.
the prefrontal areas no longer make an effort to do the work, as the basal ganglia lower in the brain can take over – a neural mode that marks effortlessness.
The rule of thumb: the brain of a novice works hard while that of the expert expends little energy.
The same sorts of thoughts can arise in your mind, but they are lighter: not so compelling, with less emotional oomph, and so float away more easily.
The Dalai Lama’s emotional life seems to include a remarkably dynamic range of strong and colourful emotions, from intense sadness to powerful joy. His rapid, seamless transitions from one to the another are particularly unique
One trait that emerges from living without getting stuck seems to be an ongoing positivity, even joy.
MIND, BODY, AND GENOME
medicine sometimes falters when it comes to treating chronic pain.
A key element for long-term benefit is the continuity of practice, and despite MBSR’s long history, we still have virtually no good information on the extent to which those who have taken an MBSR course continue to engage in formal practice in the years following their initial training.
no research so far has found that meditation produces clinical improvements in chronic pain by removing the biological cause of the pain – the relief comes in how people relate to their pain.
the key to a lifetime relatively free from the experience of pain, both physical and emotional, is continuing one’s mindfulness practice day after day in the following months, years, and decades.
Mindfulness practice … lessens inflammation day to day, not just during meditation itself. The benefits seem to show up even with just four weeks of mindfulness practice (around thirty hours total), as well as with loving-kindness meditation.
a large drop in cortisol under stress seems to kick in at some point with continued practice.
there’s biological confirmation of what meditators say: it gets easier to handle life’s upsets.
Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
putting the brakes on destructive self-talk … also lowered cytokine levels. How we relate to our gloomy self-talk has a direct impact on our health.
a mental exercise, meditation, could be a driver of benefits at the level of genes.
Lonelines, for instance, spurs higher levels of pro-inflammatory genes; MBSR can not only lower those levels – but also lessen the feeling of being lonely.
Among experienced meditation practitioners, a daylong period of intensive mindfulness practice down-regulates genes involved in inflammation.
MEDITATION AS PSYCHOTHERAPY
mindfulness (but not TM) could lessen anxiety and depression, as well as pain … about as much as medications but without no side effects
Loving-kindness meditation may be particularly helpful to patients suffering from trauma, especially those with PTSD.
A YOGI’S BRAIN
(Mingyur Rinpoche) went on retreat as a wanderer for four and a half years, the aging of his brain slowed, so that a forty-one his brain resembled the norm for thirty-three-year-olds.
yogis show very little anticipatory response (to pain) and very rapid recovery
it takes them little to no effort to place their attention on a chosen object and hold it there
ALTERING TRAITS
For long-term meditators, those who have done about 1,000 hours or more of practice, the benefits documented so far are more robust
Just as math and poetry are different ways of knowing reality, science and religion represent disparate magisteria, realms of authority, areas of inquiry and ways of knowing – religion speaking to values, beliefs, and transcendene, and science to fact, hypotheses, and rationality.
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