How accurate was my "Altered Traits" book review?

post by lsusr · 2025-02-18T17:00:55.584Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

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4.4 years ago, I posted a review of Altered Traits [LW · GW], a book about the science of meditation. At the time, I was a noob. I hadn't hit any important checkpoints yet. Since then, I have sat [LW · GW] quietly [LW · GW]. In this post, I will review whether the claims in my original post are consistent with my subsequent lived experience.

The first thing the authors do is confirm that a compassionate attitude actually increases altruistic behavior. It does.

While this may be true, I think the reverse is more important. Altruistic behavior increases compassion. More generally, acting non-compassionately is an obstacle to insight. In this way, mystic practice is intimately intertwined with morality.

Compassion increases joy and happiness too.

Directionally true, with a qualifier. There are many mental states that feel better than joy and happiness. "Compassion makes you feel better" is true, but feeling better may not precisely coincide with joy and happiness. Is absolute zero "ice cold"?

[T]hey can investigate whether meditation produces longterm increases in compassion.

Yes. Longterm meditation increases compassion, with the qualifier that the meditation must be done correctly.

One form of lovingkindness meditation starts by cultivating compassion for the people close to you and then gradually widening the ingroup until it includes everyone―including your enemies. Does this practice help reduce hatred?

It's not just lovingkindness meditation that reduces hatred. Non-dual meditation does too, because hatred is predicated on a self-other separation.

[T]hree of the most "advanced" monks…[brains'] responded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first. This was big news: ordinarily the brain would tune out, showing no reaction to the tenth bing, let alone the twentieth.

This constitutes objective external verification of my own and others' subjective experiences in zendo. It makes total sense if you are familiar with Zen and it is strong evidence that meditation may be a path off of the hedonic treadmill.

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Zen's priority is on mindful attention (as opposed to, say, lovingkindness) so we would expect one of the strongest effects within this tradition but increased attention is found in other traditions too.

Nothing to add here.

[M]editators who have done a three-year retreat in the Tibetan tradition had less habituation of eye blinks when they heard loud bursts of noise.

I have had a related experience this last year, which is that large noises that used to startle me often don't anymore. Instead of resisting them, I just let them dissipate. This happens at the reflexive level, faster than my conscious decisionmaking.

[R]esearchers gave volunteers a two-week course in mindfulness…for a total of six hours, plus ten-minute booster sessions at home daily. The active control group studied nutrition for the same amount of time. Again, mindfulness improved concentration and lessened mind-wandering.

A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory―the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory.

Is there an effect here? Maybe for some people. For me, at least, the positive effect to working memory isn't super cumulative nor important. Does a little meditation before work help me concentrate? Sure, but so does weightlifting, taking a shower, and going for a walk.

Meanwhile, the effect of deep meditation insight on long-term memory seems to be negative. This isn't because I can't memorize things anymore—I'm just less interested in doing so. I'm not the only person to report this.

According to Buddhist lore, suffering is caused by unsatisfactoriness, non-self and impermanence. These are three kinds of attachment. Freedom from suffering comes from releasing attachment to the self, attachment to the state of the world and attachment to one's desires. Releasing attachment to one releases attachment to all. Freedom from suffering comes from letting go.

Not only is this true, you can observe it for yourself by doing meditation.

Another experience meditators consistently report is the deconstruction of sensory inputs into vibrations.

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Meditators learn to deconstruct their high-level cognitive constructs into low-level sensory inputs…. Pain and suffering are above the lowest level of abstraction. Thus, perceptually deconstructing one's ontologies lets a person transcend pain….

This is true. It's why protesting monks can sit calmly while burning alive. I've never gone that far, but I have dissolved less intense painful stimulus into vibrations. Please don't test this by hurting me.

This creates a physical measure connected to self-reports of "ego death".

Ego death is a real thing.

Does all this "renouncing attachment" mean meditators live cold hollow indifferent existences? No. Definitely not. Meditators consistently report the opposite. There are dangers to watch out for (and I will address them at the end) but disconnecting yourself from pleasure is not one of them.

It is true that meditators don't live cold, hollow, indifferent existences. It is also true that there are dangers to watch out for. Also, I think pleasure may get dissolved the way pain does, depending on your definition of "pleasure".

More generally, I feel that the books on meditation I read weren't quite comprehensive in bluntly stating quite how much of myself I'd ultimately sacrifice going down this road. That said, it was worth it—there's no doubt about that.

For me, personally, I think the biggest danger isn't wireheading myself (which is a bigger danger to practitioners of samadhi) or getting trapped in a vortex of despair (which might happen if your ego refuses to let go of suffering). It's going crazy. The meditation I practice feels like staring into the maw of Cthulhu.

Yup lol. I never came close to wireheading myself (since I do comparatively little samadhi) and I got through my first (and worst) Dark Night in three days. As for getting too much insight too fast and frying myself…see my previous post on Awakening [LW · GW].

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