What does long-term meditation do to your brain? Can it really change who you are as a person?
Yogi Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain scans reveal fascinating insights into the effects of long-term meditation. Scientists have found evidence of increased brain activity, improved brain health, and enhanced emotional regulation in meditation masters.
Keep reading to discover how a dedicated meditation practice can lead to profound changes in your mental and emotional states.
The Effects of Long-Term Meditation
In the book Altered Traits, psychologists Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson discuss the longitudinal research they performed on living masters of meditation. Much of their data on the effects of long-term meditation comes from studies of the brain of Tibetan yogi Mingyur Rinpoche. Mingyur Rinpoche began meditating at nine years old and hails from a lineage of teachers and masters of Tibetan Buddhism.
(Shortform note: Mingyur Rinpoche is also the author of five books as well as the head teacher of Tergar, a community that teaches meditation practices to both secular and Buddhist students. Mingyur Rinpoche comes from the Nyingma, or “Ancient School,” lineage of Buddhism that originated in the eighth and ninth centuries when Tibetan kings began inviting Buddhist practitioners and scholars to Tibet.)
The authors’ lab studied Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain with electroencephalographic (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technologies. EEG measures brain activity across time, whereas fMRI measures it across the three-dimensional space of the brain. With these variables, scientists can locate brain activity in time and space. The results of three studies of Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain—in 2002, 2010, and 2016—include:
- When instructed to meditate on compassion, he was able to generate huge surges of brain activity in the areas that correspond to such positive emotions. The authors measured spikes of 700% to 800% in activity compared to resting levels.
- According to anatomical measures of brain health on standard distribution established by neuroscientists, Rinpoche’s brain fell in the 99th percentile for men of his age (41 years at the time). That is, his brain was as fit as that of a typical 33-year-old man.
(Shortform note: While there doesn’t seem to have been any further research conducted on Mingyur Rinpoche since the authors’ reports in the book, the master continues to advocate widely for the benefits of meditation and the importance of studying it scientifically. He recommends starting with five minutes of meditation daily for 30 days, beyond which he suggests you’ll feel greater control over your impulses. He also argues that meditation changes the “set point” of your happiness. A set point is a balance that your body and mind work to maintain, such as your weight, which you can lower by fasting. If meditation is like fasting from impulsivity, it might lower the set point of your happiness so that you need less to feel good.)
Trait Changes in Meditation Masters
The authors say that data collection and analysis of meditation masters is ongoing. They’ve worked thus far with twenty-one meditation masters—yogis with thousands of hours of lifetime practice—and the data are promising. In general, the effects of long-term meditation do appear to include genuine altered traits. The resting states of the brains of these yogis displayed complex, highly developed gamma wave activity. In other words, initial brain scans suggest that these yogis genuinely do live in states of tranquility, bliss, and presence that characterize nirvana, as Buddhist tradition claims.
(Shortform note: The gamma wave scans that the authors describe hint at a potentially valid scientific basis for enlightenment—and in Stealing Fire, Stephen Kotler and Jamie Wheal report similar findings from other studies on Tibetan monks. These monks appeared to have a distinct mix of neurochemicals at play in their brains when in deep meditation. While the neurochemical signature of resting consciousness is a mix of norepinephrine and cortisol, the advanced meditators had higher levels of dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin.)
Several other findings further support the conclusion that meditation masters do experience profound, tranquil states. Studies on the yogis’ brains found that, while at rest, they exhibited extraordinary responses related to:
- Pain: The yogis’ brains exhibited an effortless response to pain. They demonstrated neither the anticipatory anxiety nor the lingering stress that normal people feel—instead, they appeared to experience pain as it came and to not stress over it at all.
- Focus: The yogis’ brains could effortlessly deploy different functions of attention. They easily switched the objects of their attention, showed sustained attention, and demonstrated deep focus.
- Compassion: The yogis’ brains showed a stronger connection to the nervous system circuitry of their hearts. This connection manifested as an extraordinarily strong neural response that primed the body for altruistic behavior in the face of suffering.
All of this suggests that altered traits are real and that the ordinary mode of consciousness that we take as a fixed fact of life isn’t set in stone. Lifelong training in meditation, the data suggest, genuinely changes your brain. And, in doing so, it can transform your subjective experience of life and reality, the quality of your conscious awareness, and the behaviors that flow from that more enlightened way of being.
| Altered Traits Demonstrate How Malleable We Are These meditation-induced trait effects reveal that the brain is far more malleable than we once believed. Only decades ago, the view was that many of our traits and behaviors were more or less genetically predetermined and that they solidified in early development. While neuroplasticity was accepted in basic sensory and motor domains, the idea of radically altered traits has seemed far-fetched until recently. Today, these deep transformations exhibited by the yogis give legs to the emerging scientific appreciation for just how open and reprogrammable the brain remains throughout life. Given committed practice, even our most entrenched mental patterns can be changed. This means that, if we can establish ways of training these capacities—even at a basic level—in a wider range of people, the potential for human goodness may expand greatly. Put another way, the remarkable brains of these yogis may suggest that human nature can’t be understood as simply as “people are fundamentally good or bad,” but that it’s something over which we have a good deal of influence. |
