healthy spirituality and its biology

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Andrew Newberg, benefits of spiritual practices, brain scan, depth of meditation, God Spot, mindfulnes, Mood and Anxiety, Mystical Mind, Neurotheology, psychological and physical health, Religion and Spirituality, self-maintenance, self-transcendence, Spiritual Brain, spiritual neuroscience, spiritual state of mind, well-being

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Today, I want to share how research provides a link between spiritual experiences and health and well-being.

According to research, spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self. Prayer, meditation, and mindfulness to name a few, are healthy. Similar to good diet, exercise and rest, regular spiritual experiences contribute to overall health.

I previously explained spiritual experiences this way:

Spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self. I’ll use this as a definition for a spiritual state of mind: a non-tangible state of mind that brings profound meaning into one’s life as one transcends oneself.

Use something else if you like — we can’t say spiritual is universally anything religious though. Spiritual is as much a secular term as it is a religious term.

Neurotheology, also known as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain spiritual and religious experience and behavior in neuroscientific terms. By understanding how the brain works during certain spiritual experiences and practices (e.g., prayer, meditation, and mindfulness), science can explore related psychological and physical health connections; for example, brain activity during meditation indicates that people who frequently practice meditation do also experience lower blood pressure, lower heart rates, decreased anxiety, and decreased depression.

Just as our spiritual teachers have always said, the health benefits as well as the spiritual practices are important.

Dr. Andrew Newberg is a neuroscientist who studies the relationship between brain function and various mental states. He is a pioneer in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences, a field known as “neurotheology.”

Newberg’s research includes making brain scans while people practice prayer, meditation, rituals, and during trance states. The scans are analyzed in an attempt to better understand the effects, nature of and the benefits of the various religious and spiritual practices and attitudes. 

Findings:

Spiritual experiences are typically highly complex, involving emotions, thoughts, sensations, and behaviors. These experiences seem far too rich and diverse to derive solely from one part of the brain. For example, a near-death experience might result in different activity patterns from those found in a person who is meditating. Such evidence indicates that more than a single “God spot” is at work — that, in fact, a number of structures in the brain work together to help us experience spirituality and religion.

According to Newberg (and others) humans are compelled to act out myths due to the biological operations of their brains. An “inbuilt tendency of the brain to turn thoughts into actions,” they say is responsible. Says Newberg, “The main reason God won’t go away is because our brains won’t allow God to leave. Our brains are set up in such a way that God and religion become among the most powerful tools for helping the brain do its thing — self-maintenance and self-transcendence. Unless there is a fundamental change in how our brain works, God will be around for a very long time.”

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Andrew Newberg: Three main changes in meditative brains
To look at the neurophysiology of religious and spiritual practices, we used a brain imaging technology called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which allows us to measure blood flow. The more blood flow a brain area has, the more active it is (see here).

When we scanned the brains of Tibetan Buddhist meditators, we found decreased activity in the parietal lobe during meditation. This area of the brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our orientation in space and time. We hypothesize that blocking all sensory and cognitive input into this area during meditation is associated with the sense of no space and no time that is so often described in meditation.

The front part of the brain, which is usually involved in focusing attention and concentration, is more active during meditation.  This makes sense since meditation requires a high degree of concentration. We also found that the more activity increased in the frontal lobe, the more activity decreased in the parietal lobe.

When we looked at the brains of Franciscan nuns in prayer, we found increased activity in the frontal lobes (same as Buddhists), but also increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe (the language area). This latter finding makes sense in relation to the nuns using a verbally based practice (prayer) rather than visualization (meditation). The nuns, like the Buddhists, also showed decreased activity in the orientation area (superior parietal lobes) of the brain.

We also looked at the brain of a long-term meditator who was an atheist. We scanned the person at rest and while meditating on the concept of God. The results showed that there was no significant increase in the frontal lobes as with the other meditation practices. The implication is that the individual was not able to activate the structures usually involved in meditation when he was focusing on a concept that he did not believe in.

The temporal lobes are clearly important in religious and spiritual experiences. The amygdala and hippocampus have been shown to be particularly involved in the experience of visions, profound experiences, memory, and meditation. However, Andrew feels that the temporal lobe must interact with many other parts of the brain to provide the full range of religious and spiritual experiences. For more information on the research, click here.

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Putting mindfulness into practice is easy if you take it a few minutes at a time. Here are two simple routines: morning Meditation and practicing mindfulness.

You may be interested to know that Andrew Newberg has 2 courses available.

• The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience
  24 lecture explore the neurotheology aimed at understanding the connections between our brains and different kinds of religious phenomena
• Spiritual Practices for a Powerful Brain
  Six sessions detail the spiritual practices and offer guidelines for implementation along with the science and research behind them

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Journal Articles (PDF downloads)

1. Effects of an 8-Week Meditation Program on Mood and Anxiety in Patients With Memory Loss
2. The Neuroscientific Study of Religious and Spiritual Phenomena
3. A Preliminary Study of the Acute Effects of Religious Ritual on Anxiety
4. Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated With Different Meditation Practices and Perceived Depth of Meditation
5. Cerebral Blood Flow During Meditative Prayer
6. Putting the Mystical Mind Together
7. Complementary and Alternative Medicine Therapies in Mood Disorders

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My purpose for pressing these science articles is to demonstrate health and spiritual benefits of spiritual practices. I hope you’ll come back often — there is more to be discovered.

Need help or want to collaborate with me?
Just e-mail me at thehunt4truth@yahoo.com

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Thanks for learning with me.

 Eric

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See also:

• Is the brain spirituality wired? 
  Theory of mind… evolving spirituality
  mindfulness and prayerful healing
  Meditation energizes
• A place called Heaven 
• Only one Word was on my mind 
• morning Meditation
  practicing simply: mindfulness
• Do you have a need to change the world?
• Scientist debunks Hawking’s ‘no God needed’ theory
  C. S. Lewis: The Magician’s Twin

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theory of mind… evolving spirituality

Tags

Gospel of Matthew, Neurotheology, science of spirituality, spiritual scientific evidence, spirituality and science

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I have an article and some video to share on the progress of spiritual practices and on the evolution of spirituality… Let’s look first at spirituality practices. There are two examples today.

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Prayer Changes Things
Preacher: John Piper, Teaching Pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church

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The research and the evidence is clear that the Christianity so many of us grew up with, the Christianity of the 20th century and earlier, is changing. In place of dogma, Christians are seeking connections in prayerful joyous worship experiences. We want to sharpen our spiritual practices. We just know that inspiration is an important part of our fellowship.

Not sure about how prayer works? Here is a sample Christian prayer.

Prayer is one method of spirituality that has been evolving for at least 3000 years. Here is more information on how mindfulness and prayerful healing is being scientifically demonstrated as healthy.

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Life is Now… using meditation and mindfulness
PRESENT MOMENT: Eckhart Tolle
“The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.”

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For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a “mystic,” and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives. It sounds like fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known worldwide for his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the present moment.

The UnCourse provides you with free resources to work towards a deeper level of consciousness. There are nine units of teachings and exercises in the UnCourse. As you finish each unit, your progress forward will be visible. You can return to the UnCourse site at any time; record your feelings and ideas as you progress.

For more information on how meditation evolves healthy spiritual and physical changes, see developing better brains and meditation changes brains.

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Additionally today, I have a short video and an article presenting some scientific evidence that spiritual practices change our physiology — so we continue to evolve these experiences — we want to because its beneficial.

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Andrew Newberg:
What is the evolutionary reason for our capability to achieve spiritual states?

Evidence of biological basis for religion in human evolution

Date: January 17, 2014
Source: Auburn University

An Auburn University researcher teamed up with the National Institutes of Health to study how brain networks shape an individual’s religious belief, finding that brain interactions were different between religious and non-religious subjects.

Gopikrishna Deshpande, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, and the NIH researchers recently published their results in the journal, “Brain Connectivity.”

The group found differences in brain interactions that involved the theory of mind, or ToM, brain network, which underlies the ability to relate between one’s personal beliefs, intents and desires with those of others. Individuals with stronger ToM activity were found to be more religious. Deshpande says this supports the hypothesis that development of ToM abilities in humans during evolution may have given rise to religion in human societies.

“Religious belief is a unique human attribute observed across different cultures in the world, even in those cultures which evolved independently, such as Mayans in Central America and aboriginals in Australia,” said Deshpande, who is also a researcher at Auburn’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center. “This has led scientists to speculate that there must be a biological basis for the evolution of religion in human societies.”

Deshpande and the NIH scientists were following up a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to scan the brains of both self-declared religious and non-religious individuals as they contemplated three psychological dimensions of religious beliefs.

The fMRI — which allows researchers to infer specific brain regions and networks that become active when a person performs a certain mental or physical task — showed that different brain networks were activated by the three psychological dimensions; however, the amount of activation was not different in religious as compared to non-religious subjects.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Auburn University. The original article was written by Morgan Stashick. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Gopikrishna Deshpande, Frank Krueger, Matthew P Thornburg, Jordan Henry Grafman. Brain Networks Shaping Religious Belief. Brain Connectivity, 2013; 131126141800007 DOI: 10.1089/brain.2013.0172

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 I hope you’ll come back often — there is more to be discovered.

I promote spiritual authors
artists, and bloggers… free…
Need help or want to collaborate with me?
Just e-mail me at thehunt4truth@yahoo.com

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Thanks for learning with me.

 Eric

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See also:

• • Is the brain spirituality wired?
  • Only one Word was on my mind
    A place called Heaven
    morning Meditation
    Do you have a need to change the world?
  • Sacred Technology?
  • Scientist debunks Hawking’s ‘no God needed’ theory
    How the Universe Works (in 25 minutes)
    Hawking: ‘Heaven is a place for people afraid to die’
  • C. S. Lewis – why he still matters so much today
    C. S. Lewis: The Magician’s Twin

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Auburn University. “Evidence of biological basis for religion in human evolution.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2014.

[www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140117153635.htm]

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