Is your brain more adaptable than you think? Can meditation really change your fundamental traits?
Meditation and neuroplasticity are closely linked, offering exciting possibilities for personal growth. Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson contend that our brains can change in response to mental training, potentially altering our basic characteristics.
Read on to explore how meditation can reshape your brain and transform your life, from the book Altered Traits.
Meditation Induces Neuroplasticity
The brain’s innate ability to adapt to stimulation is neuroplasticity. Meditation induces this ability, write Goleman and Davidson. After neuroplasticity was discovered, the doors to the scientific study of meditation were opened. The authors explain that, when they first pushed to study meditation, the conventional academic perspective was against them. Most serious research scientists thought that meditation was too subjective or woo-woo, and that the mind was a black box—impossible to study rigorously.
Despite this resistance, the authors hypothesized early on that meditation could produce the titular “altered traits”—lasting changes to people’s basic characteristics. Depending on how you meditate, these can include increased stress resilience, emotional intelligence, and cognitive capacities such as attention, focus, and more.
(Shortform note: The authors’ use of the term “altered traits” builds on the conventional way that psychologists use “traits” to refer to a person’s relatively fixed characteristics. The idea that you can alter traits runs in the face of long-standing ideas that we don’t and can’t change much throughout our lives. While researchers now recognize that traits can be altered, as we’ll discuss soon, the fact that this may only happen in response to long-term meditation practice suggests that the traditional theories aren’t entirely wrong, either. That is, for most people, traits do remain fairly stable throughout life.)
Early on, the techniques available to measure the effects of meditation weren’t effective enough. However, the discovery of neuroplasticity provided a broad, scientifically viable basis for their research.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change in response to some activity or stimulus. For instance, research on rats found that their brain health worsened after they were merely placed closer to unhealthy rats. When it comes to meditation, the discovery of neuroplasticity made it reasonable to claim that meditation could alter the brain. And, as it turns out, the authors explain, the mental training of meditation does physically modify the structure, size, and functioning of brain tissue. As a result, traits that relate to those brain changes can shift as well.
(Shortform note: While neuroplasticity is an exciting and promising discovery, keep in mind that the brain isn’t infinitely plastic. As you age, plasticity tends to decline in proportion to how actively you use your brain—specifically, by stepping outside of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to develop new skills, cognitive capacities, and so on. If you want to stay mentally fit as you age, meditation is a good way to do so. Other plasticity-stimulating activities include learning a second language, learning a musical instrument, or journaling and writing regularly.)
| 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. |
