My experience with meditation is that immediately after a long sitting, my awareness of the various "mental events" bump up an order of magnitude. I was indeed seeing the subtle fluctuation of emotions in myself and my family that I didn't even know existed. It was a pretty eerie experience at first, then I gradually got used to it. It's more like a drug-induced experience than something I naturally run into.

It took me several months of experimenting to get to that point when it just "clicked". Before that each sitting did leave me refreshing, like after an exercise, a cold shower, or a long introspection, but there wasn't the same degree of amplified sense of awareness. I believe the latter is what the author is talking about.

What you experience with your newly developed awareness probably depends on your environment. For me, as a newbie, I can't sustain this mental state for more than a few hours. Within those hours I generally feel like staying home, so I don't know what it's like in a social event. Supposedly it takes years of practice for this awareness to stabilize and become permanent, so perhaps by then I can gain more perspective on the various walks of life like the author described.

So yeah, the skeptic part of me can't let me vouch for the specifics, but there's a good chance the author isn't bullshitting.