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

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Their research focuses on the short and especially the long-term effects of meditation. The problem with the short term effects is that they are highly contingent on self-reporting and therefore less scientifically substantial. Chapter 4 focuses a lot on kindness-meditation and it’s effects. These can be nicely observed as the assumed result is kinder behaviour. This was measured in dictator games and shows significant effects for everyone directly after meditating as well as permanent effects for very experienced meditators (thousands of hours). Goleman stresses that every form of mediation has it’s own results, kindness-meditation increases kind behaviour, awareness-meditation increases focus etc. these effects should not be put into one bucket, as meditation is not some magic but just a broad term for training the mind in various ways. For example does attention training decrease habituation and therefore prolongs focus on very dull tasks, which is in todays world more important than our evolutionary history made us adapt to. Parts of the brain that are trained expand in size.

Meditation has health and psychotherapy applications.

Experienced mediators show altered traits in the form of gamma-waves. These are the brain waves associated with high focus. Research shows that with experience focusing on things becomes much more effortless. Mediation practice influences the relative sizes of the parts of the brain.