[Edit 2025-11-29: I wrote this post when I was very new to meditation, long before experiencing stream entry.]

Proponents of meditation claim it causes long-term beneficial changes to a person's mind. Does it? Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by science journalist Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard (Richie) Davidson attempts to answer this question using the newest research.

The book has three main themes.

It starts by establishing what constitutes rigorous research.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to asking "Does meditation make you a better person?" where "better" can mean "healthier", "more capable" or "more altruistic". This section is focused on ordinary practitioners.
The book ends with a yogi in a brain scanner.

Obstacles to Research

The United States government suppresses research into mind-altering drugs under penalty of imprisonment. Research into mind-altering contemplative practices got caught in the crossfire. For this and other reasons ^[[1]] , there has been little research into meditation in the Western world until very recently. Much of what we do have is shoddy.

Meditation is hard to study scientifically for all the reasons it's hard to study sleep plus all the reasons it's hard to study weightlifting.

Sleep is hard to study because it happens invisibly inside a person's head and if you ask them what's going on they wake up and the altered state of consciousness disappears.
Weightlifting is hard to study because weightlifting involves hard work applied over a long time with proper technique. Optimal training for a beginner is different from optimal training for an athlete. Optimal training for an athlete depends on the sport an athlete is training for. Even if you could handwave away liability concerns, it's hard to pay volunteers to participate in a 20-year-long weightlifting program. Weightlifting is impossible to double-blind. (I'm going to ignore how many weightlifters take drugs while pretending not to.)

Due to the dearth of research, it is plausible Western science has left low-hanging fruit unpicked. If LSD can cure PTSD and MDMA can help autistic people socialize then it's conceivable meditation might cultivate altered traits too.

The Frontiers of Science

The first several chapters of Altered Traits explain the challenges associated with studying meditation scienti...

Cyberbuddhism