🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Beyond changes brought by meditative states (→ in a meditation), contemplative practices have shown to create lasting changes in people’s neural structure, processes and health - in other words, Altered Traits
2. The central mechanism is a transformation of the brain’s default mode to resemble the meditative state
3. Effects center around attention (less mind-wandering, higher proficiency in selective attention) and detachment (decoupling of experience and evaluation)

📝 TLDR: Benefits of Meditation

• Increased operative connectivity between prefrontal cortex and amygdala leads to reduced emotional volatility and susceptibility to rumination
• Functional Decoupling of sensory and evaluative circuits leads to higher tolerance of discomfort
• By allowing practitioners to sit with the discomfort arising from empathising with people that suffer, Metta practice drives empathetic concern (→ the actionable part of empathy)
• By preventing the inhibition of the reticular activating system, Zen practice prevents or reverses habituation to stimuli, replacing dull familiarity with textured novelty in everyday experience
• Attentive practices improve selective attention (via cortical specificity) and vigilance
• Repeated inhibition of mind-wandering by conscious attention (technically: inhibiting the Default Mode Network via the dorsal prefrontal cortex) reduces overall activation of the Default Mode Network, which is responsible for Rumination and the “stickiness” of thoughts and emotions to the self
• Contents:

🎨 Impressions

Daniel Goleman & Richard Davidson are uniquely qualified to write this book - a detailed account of the state of the art in contemplative neuroscience (→ the discipline investigating the quantifiable effects of meditative practices). Why? Because they basically started it back in the 1970s, when they were grad students at Harvard.

A taxing read packed to the brim with research that is occasionally lightened up by personal stories about the history behind contemplative neuroscience. The book gets so dense that I read half of it in mid-2022, only to leave it be for a good 8 months and pick it back up in Feb 2023. But when I did, I finished the second half in two days.

How I Discovered It

I listened to a Podcast with Daniel Goleman on my way to Fiji and got basically all of his books.

Who Should Read It?

It caters to quite the niche audience - people into Psychology and Meditation. The subject matter should be of everyone’s concern, but I feel the writing style makes it accessible only to those already committed to the field. For those, however, it’s a fascinating read.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me