Correlations between brain activity and spiritual exercises are beginning to bear interesting fruits, scientists and writers who stand in the intersection of the two are reporting.
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly‘s Lucky Severson visited with University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Andy Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain.
Severson recently filed an item in which Newberg said
You know, if we get a brain scan of somebody while they’re experiencing being in God’s presence, as I’ve always said that doesn’t prove that God was in the room. It doesn’t prove that God wasn’t in the room. What it proves is that when the person had the experience of interacting with God this is what change was going on in their brain.
Nevertheless,
We’ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over time.
Newberg told Religion Dispatches that
Spiritual practices, secular or religious, are inherently good for your body, and especially your brain. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will strengthen important circuits in your brain, making you more socially aware and alert while reducing anxiety, depression, and neurological stress. And meditation can be adapted in endless ways. You can use it to become more motivated to succeed in business. You can apply it to communication to reduce relationship conflicts. You can do a sixty-second meditation involving yawning to quickly relax your body and mind. Indeed, you can use the same technique to bring a roomful of children, students, or CEOs to attention with their brains becoming acutely attuned to each other: a fancy way of saying that yawning can actually evoke social empathy with many living species on this planet.
This is all in rhythm with recent work by NPR and by NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty, author of tFingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Hagerty went labs of folks like Newberg and neuroscientist Richard Davison, who told her:
“You can sculpt your brain just as you’d sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym… Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly.”
It’s called neuroplasticity. For years Davidson, who is at the University of Wisconsin, has scanned the brains of Buddhist monks who have logged years of meditation. When it comes to things like attention and compassion, their brains are as finely tuned as a late-model Porsche. Davidson wondered: Could ordinary people achieve the same kind of connection with the spiritual that the monks do — without so much effort?
….
“Just two months’ practice among rank amateurs led to a systematic change in both the brain as well as the immune system in more positive directions,” he said.
All of which seems like – what? – a nice tangential benefit to an essential practice.