Altered Traits
Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body
Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson · 2017 · Mindfulness
13 min · 12 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Goleman and Davidson argue that meditation's real value is not the pleasant states it produces during a sitting but the durable changes it can make to a person's baseline temperament, attention, and physiology when practiced intensively over years. Drawing on decades of neuroscience, including studies of Tibetan monks with tens of thousands of practice hours, they separate rigorous findings from overhyped claims, arguing that most popular mindfulness research is thin while long-term contemplative training produces measurable, lasting change.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- Meditators who want to know whether their practice is doing anything beyond making them feel calm for an hour - Psychologists and neuroscientists curious about the actual evidence behind mindfulness claims, separated from marketing - General readers interested in how sustained mental training might reshape emotional reactivity, attention, and compassion over years, not weeks
What’s inside
- 1States Are Not Traits1 min
The lasting value of meditation lies not in the temporary calm or bliss felt during practice but in whether that experience carries over into a person's ordinary, unmeditating life.
- 2A History of Sloppy Science1 min
Much of the early enthusiasm about meditation's benefits rested on studies too small, too uncontrolled, or too vulnerable to bias to support the claims made from them.
- 3Dosage: Novices, Long-Termers, and Yogis1 min
Meditation's effects scale with cumulative practice hours in a rough dose-response pattern, so casual practice and monastic-level practice are not the same intervention.
- 4Attention and the Wandering Mind1 min
Sustained meditation practice measurably strengthens attentional control and reduces the brain's default tendency to wander into self-referential thought.
- 5Taming the Amygdala1 min
Long-term meditation practice reduces both the intensity and the duration of the brain's threat response, producing faster emotional recovery rather than the absence of emotion.
- 6Compassion Is a Trainable Skill1 min
Compassion is not simply a stable personality trait but a mental skill that specific meditation practices can strengthen, with measurable downstream effects on helping behavior.
- 7The Yogis: Extraordinary Baselines1 min
A small number of practitioners with tens of thousands of meditation hours show physiological baselines so different from ordinary subjects that they suggest ceiling-level trait change is possible, though rare.
- 8Traits in the Body: Cells, Genes, and Aging1 min
Sustained meditation practice appears to influence physical health markers such as inflammation and cellular aging, though this evidence is more preliminary than the brain-based findings.
- 9Neuroplasticity as the Underlying Mechanism1 min
The changes described throughout the book are made possible by the brain's general capacity for experience-dependent structural change, meaning meditation is one instance of a broader principle rather than a unique exception to how brains work.
About Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson
Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science journalist, wrote the bestselling Emotional Intelligence. Richard J. Davidson is a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who founded the Center for Healthy Minds and pioneered brain imaging studies of Buddhist monks, including work initiated through his decades-long collaboration with the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute.
