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Source: Reuters
Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns boost their brain power through
meditation and prayer, but even atheists can enjoy the mental
benefits that believers derive from faith, according to a popular
neuroscience author.
The key, Andrew Newberg argues in his new book How God Changes Your
Brain, lies in the concentrating and calming effects that
meditation or intense prayer have inside our heads.
Brain scanners show that intense meditation alters our gray matter,
strengthening regions that focus the mind and foster compassion
while calming those linked to fear and anger.
Whether the mediator believes in the supernatural or is an atheist
repeating a mantra, he says, the outcome can be the same - a growth
in the compassion that virtually every religion teaches and a
decline in negative feelings and emotions.
"In essence, when you think about the really big questions in life
- be they religious, scientific or psychological - your brain is
going to grow," says Newberg, head of the Center for Spirituality
and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania.
"It doesn't matter if you're a Christian or a Jew, a Muslim or a
Hindu, or an agnostic or an atheist," he writes in the book written
with Mark Robert Waldman, a therapist at the Center.
Neurotheology
In his office at the University of Pennsylvania's hospital, Newberg
said that neurotheology - the study of the brain's role in
religious belief - is starting to shed light on what happens in
believers' heads when they contemplate God.
Science and religion are often seen as opposites, to the point
where some in each camp openly reject the other, but this medical
doctor and professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies
sees no reason not to study them together.
"The two most powerful forces in all of human history have been
religion and science," he said. "These are the two things that help
us organise our world and understand it. Why not try to bring them
together to address each other and ultimately our world in a more
effective way?"
Atheists often see scanner images tracking blood flows in brains of
meditating monks and nuns lost in prayer as proof that faith is an
illusion.
Newberg warns against simple conclusions:
"If you see a brain scan of a nun who's perceiving God's presence
in a room, all it tells you is what was happening in her brain when
she perceived God's presence in a room.
"It may be just the brain doing it, but it may be the brain being
the receiver of spiritual phenomena," said Newberg, whose research
shows the short prayers most believers say leave little trace on
the brain because they are not as intense as meditation.
"I'm not trying to say religion is bad or it's not real," he
added.
"I say people are religious and let's try to understand how it
affects them."
No God spot
Another notion Newberg debunks is the idea there is a single God
spot in the brain responsible for religious belief: "It's not like
there's a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody
thinks of God."
Instead, religious experiences fire neurons in several different
parts of the brain, just like other events do.
Locating them does not explain them, but gives pointers to how
these phenomena occur and what they might mean.
In their book, Newberg and Waldman sketch out some of the God
circuits in the brain and their effects, especially if trained
through meditation as muscles are through exercise.
Meditation both activates the frontal lobe, which creates and
integrates all of your ideas about God, and calms down the
amygdala, the emotional region that can create images of an
authoritative deity and fog our logical thinking.
The parietal-frontal circuit gives us a sense of the space around
us and our place in it. Meditation suppresses this sense, giving
rise to a serene feeling of unity with God or the world.
"Even 10 to 15 minutes of meditation appear to have significantly
positive effects on cognition, relaxation and psychological
health," the authors declare in the book.
Newberg, who grew up in a Reform Jewish family and has studied many
religions, said his work might help both believers and atheists
understand religious feelings, which he said were among the most
powerful and complex experiences people have.
But he cautioned against expecting neurotheology to come up with
surprising insights soon:
"As good as our techniques are, they are still incredibly crude. We have a long way to go."
