Altered Traits

Altered Traits has a unique angle: the authors are meditation practitioners themselves, and precisely because of that, they feel comfortable criticizing what is commonly said about it. Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and writer, and Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, have been friends since their student days and have followed the subject for decades.

Their starting point is a sense of unease. Meditation has become a trend, showing up in apps, corporate training, and mattress commercials, and it almost always comes with grand promises: it reduces stress, cures anxiety, improves memory, and makes people kinder. The authors want to know how much of all this is backed by high-quality research.

The answer, they tell us up front, is mixed. There is serious science showing real effects, but much of what gets publicized is weaker than it looks, and the most impressive results come from a kind of practice that almost no one actually does.

The distinction that gives the book its title is between altered states and altered traits. A state is what a person feels while meditating: calm, concentration, sometimes a sense of lightness. It fades when the session ends, like that good feeling after a walk.

A trait, on the other hand, is a change that stays with you in daily life, off the cushion. A person reacts differently to criticism, regains balance faster after a scare, pays attention for longer, and treats others with greater care. It is this lasting transformation that interests science, because it tells us something about how the mind can change.

The authors argue that many people confuse the two. Feeling good during meditation is pleasant, but it does not prove that anything has changed in a person's life. The right question is what remains after the session is over.

To evaluate the field, the authors examined thousands of studies on meditation and concluded that only a tiny fraction, around one percent, had enough rigor to support firm conclusions. The rest suffered from problems well known to researchers.

Among them were small samples, the lack of a control group, results based solely on what participants say about themselves, and researchers' own bias toward finding a positive effect. There is also the problem of comparing meditation to doing nothing, when the right approach would be to compare it to another activity that also requires time and attention, such as exercise or relaxation.

That is why the book urges caution with headlines. When a news story says that eight weeks of meditation changes the brain, it is worth asking how many people were studied, whether there was a proper comparison, and whether the effect was measured in real-life situations or only in a lab test.