Altered Traits
Good Fit
- Readers who want to follow real scientific research on meditation and the brain, written in accessible popular-science language
- Anyone skeptical of the marketing hype around the "mindfulness" boom, looking for a healthy dose of scrutiny
- Fans of Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence curious to see its author's underlying research career
- Readers who enjoy a personal, self-critical "how we got here" narrative told by two scientists
Not a Fit
- Readers looking for a concrete, step-by-step meditation guide or practical instructions
- Anyone expecting a text that only confirms meditation's positive, hyped-up benefits (the book does the opposite — it criticizes exactly these claims)
- Readers who don't enjoy dense discussions of scientific methodology (sample sizes, confounding variables)
The book opens by describing a hostile academic climate at Harvard in the mid-1970s. In a psychopathology seminar, Richard Davidson catches a professor's pointed remark aimed at his unconventional dress (a colorful woven belt included) — "one sign of schizophrenia is odd dress" — and when he says he wants to devote his dissertation to meditation, he's bluntly told it would be career suicide. Daniel Goleman's own clinical psychology professor compares mantra repetition to an obsessive patient who can't stop saying "blah-blah-blah." The authors frame this hostility as a kind of institutional PTSD, still lingering in the shadow of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's LSD scandal that had gotten them expelled from the department a few years earlier.
Despite this hostile climate, the authors introduce the concept of an "altered trait" — not a fleeting state produced only during or immediately after meditation practice, but a lasting change that shapes everyday behavior. This sets up the book's central distinction: the "wide path" (everyday benefits like stress reduction and sharper work performance, the kind that goes viral on social media) versus the "deep path" (the traditional spiritual goal — deeper, more lasting changes like altruism and compassion).
In 2000, during a scientific dialogue on "destructive emotions" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Dalai Lama turns to Davidson with a provocative challenge: his own tradition has a wide range of centuries-tested practices for taming destructive emotions — so why not strip them of their religious trappings and rigorously test whether they help people in the lab? The authors write that this challenge set the overall course for the research presented in the book, with planning beginning that very night over dinner.
The chapter continues with a cautionary episode dubbed "Swami X": in the 1970s, a self-styled swami approaches Harvard eager to have his yogic powers scientifically tested, claiming he can control his blood pressure at will. In the actual tests, he does the opposite of what's asked each time, and ultimately sends his heart into a dangerous atrial fibrillation. He's later revealed to be a former shoe-factory manager who'd abandoned his wife and two children to seek his fortune in America — the authors treat this as an early harbinger of the exaggerated marketing that would later plague the meditation industry.
The chapter closes with the authors leveling sharp scientific criticism at today's "mindfulness" boom: the widely cited study on amygdala shrinkage, they note, used an unreliable measurement method, while a much-quoted study on slower aging conflated meditation with a special diet and intensive exercise, making it impossible to isolate meditation's actual effect. A chart shows that where only a handful of papers existed on the topic in the 1970s, annual publications had reached 1,113 by 2016 — a boom the authors warn has outpaced the field's scientific rigor.
- The two authors write in a shared "we" voice, narrating the personal, self-critical history of their own scientific careers — a candor rarely seen in popular science books
- The structure uses "Quick Recap" sections at the end of chapters to orient readers, blending scientific rigor with an accessible popular format
The same author's landmark popular-science work, and the source of the academic voice behind this book
A similar science-meets-philosophy approach to Buddhist meditation practice, viewed through an evolutionary psychology lens
In chapter 11 the Tibetan monk Mingyur Rinpoche comes to Davidson's lab and is fitted with a 256-sensor EEG cap, which proves harder than expected because the skin of a shaved head has thickened. Chapter 12 reveals the book's «hidden treasure»: in yogis who have meditated for years, gamma waves last not fractions of a second but minutes, synchronised across wide areas of the brain. In the authors' words, no lab had ever recorded anything like it — and it is not a passing state but a genuine «altered trait».
Beginners trained in the same practices for a week show no such difference. Chapter 13 sorts the benefits into three levels: beginners (usually under 100 hours; after about 30 hours of practice over eight weeks the amygdala becomes less reactive, though the effects are unlikely to last without continued practice), long-term meditators (roughly 1,000–10,000 hours) and the very few yogis. The authors sum it up with Milarepa's riddle: «In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes».
If you see a problem, write to us. Publisher, author, rights holder, or just a reader — it doesn't matter. If there's something problematic about copyright in this review, if the review's author has broken the site's rules, or if you simply have a suggestion or complaint, hey@kitabdanevar.com. We'd rather resolve this between ourselves than go to court: we review requests within 48 hours and, if needed, correct or fully remove the review.
