**48th book of 2020: Mind Traits and States **

Altered traits promises to be an objective look at how meditation can cause long-lasting, provable changes in the mind, but while the book promises a 12 course meal of science, it only delivers an appetizer.

Mindful attention seems to be effective at calming the amygdala, which interferes with both our focus and is a key center causing emotional hijack in stressful situations. Still, this is a state, and requires conscious focus, rather than a trait with permanent effects. When it comes to trait effects, the meta analysis revealed that there is “insufficient evidence of any effect" noting that most studies are the equivalent of a low-dose, short term trial.

Most compelling to me was the ‘good samaritan test’, where taking courses in mindfulness was able to encourage a group of participants to do good deeds more than courses teaching of the value of good deeds.(1) The author hypothesizes that it is due to the ability of meditation to help with emotional regulation, enabling practicers to confront the negative emotions that helping somebody in need would entail. Compassion meditation literally makes me a better person? Sign me up.

One yogi, with 62,000 hours of meditation, was able to juice his ‘circuitry for empathy’ by 700 to 800 percent compared to its level at rest. That sounds pretty profound, and was repeated in other meditation practitioners, but what it means for every-day behavior remains unclear.

‘Altered Traits’ has more insight into measuring meditation than about meditation itself. There are three main types of meditation:

  • Attentional: Focus on one thing
  • Constructive: Cultivate virtuous qualities.
  • Deconstructive: Use self observation to pierce the nature of experience.

Each of these types of meditation will have a substantial dosage effect, and while it is easy for meditation to affect your state, it is harder for meditation to affect traits, harder to measure those traits directly, and harder still to translate these measurements into useable findings. There were more anecdotes than I would like for a science book, a slight over-reliance on correlative studies, and the overall conclusion is: more research needed. Constructive meditation seemed to have the most measurable effects on traits, attentional has some effect on state, and deconstructive didn’t seem to have anything conclusive.

(1) Results of one test: “those with the training in compassion gave almost two times as much to the victim as did the group who had learned how to reappraise their feelings. And their brain showed increased activation in circuits for attention, perspective taking, and positive feelings; the more of this activation, the more alturistic. (Olga Klimecki et al)

(2) VA Taylor et al “Impact fo Mindfulness on the Neural Responses