A review by sanjeevp
Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Richard J. Davidson, Daniel Goleman

4.0

Even though we evolved from Homo erectus more than 1.8 million years ago, our radar system for existential threats is still overactive and keeps sounding false alarms for flight and fight - causing distress to self and others. Look at President Trump: all the power, wealth, beautiful women - but the man is always pissed off. Distresses the whole world.

And look at Dalai Lama. Who would you rather be? This book is about how meditation and compassion have made Dalai Lama's brain different from Donald Trump's brain.

Although I read The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience in early 1990's, for me, Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ was life-changing and I have been a fan ever since.

In this book, with his friend and colleague Richard Davidson, they explore the permanent effects on brain of meditation, compassion, loving kindness and mindfulness. They call them Altered Traits. Enormous changes in emotional brain - amygdala; executive brain - pre-frontal cortex; automatic/habit brain - basal ganglia; and reward/self centered brain - nucleus accumbens.

Some of this material was already covered in his earlier book - Destructive Emotions by Daniel Goleman. Many of you may have seen the functional MRI scan images of the happiest man on earth - Matthieu Ricard - from Davidson's lab. Very impressive. Matthieu attributes all that to compassion and altruism. Buddha learnt the power of compassion in 5th century BC. And Francis of Assisi said in 12th century AD "is in giving that we receive".

Dan & Richie trace their introduction to meditation and eastern philosophy in early 1970s, when they were in Harvard with Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Jeffrey Kagel (Krishna Das). They all went to India, learnt meditation from Naeem Karoli Baba and SN Goenka and ended up spending their lives in meditation in a variety of ways.

Davidson is best known for his studies on the brains of Tibetan Monks with fMRI and they explore his findings at length. But also cover the works of Tania Singer, Lobsang Tenzin Negi, Amishi Jha, Sara Lazar and others.

Being a long-term meditator with science and medical background, I can see why they get into the nitty gritty of scientific studies with the study design, biases, sample sizes, statistics etc. to establish the reliability or fallacies of research findings. Probably more so because some of the work reported in Destructive Emotions turned out to be non replicable. But for the lay reader, all that makes a dreary read. I read the advance review copy and may be they can tone down technical intricacies in the final version of the book.

Otherwise, it is another great book from Goleman that has the potential to be life changing for some. Especially when you find out the monumental effects of compassion on brain. And if that inspires you to sprinkle a little of that compassion in your daily life, wouldn't that make the world a better place?