Brain on Religion
Monday, December 9, 2013
Monday, April 27, 2009
Want
to build a better brain? Ramp up your spiritual practice, says Andrew Newberg,
a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Meditation and prayer can
improve your physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being and may even slow
the brain's aging process.
Newberg, who is also the director of the Center
for Spirituality and the Mind, is the author of four books,
including the recently released "How God Changes Your Brain," which
discusses the results of brain scans that he and his team conducted on more
than 100 meditating or praying people. The research shows that the physical and
emotional benefits of spiritual observances dramatically accrue over years of
practice, but even recent converts exhibit healthier brains -- in one study
Newburg's team scanned the brains of people who had never meditated before,
then taught them simple meditative methods. After eight weeks of meditating 12
minutes a day, an evaluation showed considerable improvement in memory scores
and a measurable decrease in anxiety and anger.
Atheists can feel free to jump right in here as
Newburg's research indicates that faith in a divine being isn't required to
benefit from meditation. But pessimists may be out of luck -- faith in a
positive outcome is necessary for the best results.
In your book, you write that religion is a
"wonderful tool because it helps the brain perform its primary
functions." Which functions are you talking about, and how does religion
help those functions?
The brain has basically two main functions, globally
speaking. It helps us to survive, and it helps us to adapt and grow. Religion
is extremely valuable in both respects.
A lot of the new research that we've been doing
shows that when people engage in religious or spiritual activities and
practices, or they have religious experiences, by and large they tend to have a
positive impact on a person's mental health and wellbeing. That helps them
accomplish their goals, to set a path for themselves, and therefore helps them
survive. At the same time, religion and spiritual pursuits help us change and grow
over time by giving us a model for transforming ourselves. Ultimately, they're
our way of asking ourselves to follow the ideals of what we think a good human
being should be.
You measured the effects of doing a practice like
meditation or prayer on the brains of long-term practitioners in different
spiritual traditions. What did you notice about the brain of a meditator that's
different from someone who is not meditating?
When we compare the baseline brain scans -- meaning
when the person is at rest -- of long-term practitioners to those of
non-practitioners, we see substantial changes in many parts of the brain.
For example, long-term meditators have higher
activity in their frontal lobes, the part of the brain that helps us focus our
attention and will on whatever behaviors we need to do. Another interesting
finding we have noticed occurs in the thalamus, the central structure that
helps different parts of the brain communicate with each other and is very
involved in processing all of our sensory information. We find there is a
difference in how the thalamus is acting in long-term meditators compared to
non-meditators. We think this may have something to do with, on the one hand,
enabling the brain to function in a heightened way, but it also suggests that
it really does alter our way of looking at reality when one engages in these
practices. It changes how the brain works.
When you talk about the effects of religious beliefs
or activities on the brain, that's a very broad spectrum of possibilities to
consider. Does it matter what you believe or what sort of practices you're
doing?
The particular beliefs and practices are very
important. One major point is the difference between having a loving and
compassionate view of God versus a God that is vengeful, angry, and exclusive.
We know from other research that if you focus your mind on positive emotions,
and if you have an optimistic outlook, then that is going to activate the areas
of your brain that help you lower stress, which helps you to function better
and ultimately to be healthier physically and mentally. And if you focus on a
God that's angry and vengeful, that activates the anger centers of your brain,
the strong emotional centers, which creates stress and anxiety. When that
happens, your body releases hormones that can actually damage the way your
brain functions which fosters more negative emotions and negative behaviors
outwardly. That can be destructive both for the individual as well as on
society as a whole.
There was a statistic cited in your book showing
that Americans mostly view God as authoritarian, critical, or distant -- only
23 percent of believers see God as gentle and forgiving ...
That's one of the things that we really want to
advocate for, that people have to be cautious about the beliefs they hold in
terms of whether they focus on God and religion as something that's a positive
influence in their lives and provides forgiveness and compassion or whether they're
going to look at God and religion as exclusive and negative, because that
really does have a detrimental effect.
The good news is that the brain does have the
ability to continually change and adapt, and therefore, even if you have gone
down a fairly long path of negative emotions, you do have an opportunity, if
you start to focus anew on the other side, so to speak, to bring about changes
that are more positive. I don't mean to make it sound simplistic -- it's not
like you are just going to flip a switch, most likely, and change your whole
way of being. It does take effort.
You're studying religion in a laboratory. Do you see
a limit as to what you can learn about faith through science?
Well, I don't want it to be construed that, because
we can do this kind of research, we are explaining away what religion is. You
know, when we get a brain scan of somebody describing their vision of God, for
example, that tells us what the brain is doing in the midst of that experience,
but it doesn't prove to us whether God was really in the room with them, or
that one person's religious or spiritual beliefs are right and somebody else's
is wrong. What it shows is how these experiences affect us, and I think
ultimately it can contribute to our knowledge, not only of the brain, but also
to our perspective on spiritual and theological ideas.
How did you become interested in this field of
study?
As a child I was always asking questions like, why
are there different religions? Why do some people believe one thing over something
else? As I got older, I had a deep desire to learn about science, which seemed
to provide answers to these questions. But I began to explore other
philosophical and spiritual traditions in college that made me realize that
what we can know by science is just one part of the discussion, and that we
need to think very hard about what religious and spiritual perspectives bring
to the table in helping us understand reality. When I went into medical school,
I had the good fortune of meeting a mentor who was interested in these same
questions, and how it ultimately came about, in terms of my own journey, is
that I wanted, somehow, to find a way of integrating these two perspectives.
Science and religion, you mean?
Yes. I don't know how much integration there needs
to be, but... there are certain fundamental paradoxes that science will never
help us transcend. The big one, which always creates a problem in my own mind,
is how do you get outside of your own brain so that you can look at what is
happening inside and figure out whether or not they match? The interesting
thing is that religious and spiritual traditions are the only places in human
experience that I know of where people at least describe that they have gone
beyond their minds, their brains. And, if that's the case, we need to look at
what those experiences are because that may be our only way of actually getting
to what absolute reality is all about.
Are you a spiritual person yourself?
I would say that this whole process is my spiritual
journey. I guess to some degree I'm not totally sure what we mean by spiritual
or religious -- in fact, in my classes, I always start out by saying: How do
you define these terms? Everybody defines them a little bit differently. I
guess the reason why I'm comfortable saying that this work I do is spiritual is
that it's my way of trying to connect with the universe, with all the things
that are.
Are you a member of an organized religion?
I identify culturally with being Jewish, which is my
upbringing, but I don't think I've ever come across one specific viewpoint that
seems to answer all of the questions. I really do struggle with where the truth
is. I also think that if I want to do this kind of research, I have to keep as
neutral a stance as I can. I'm sure people are going to say, "He's biased
towards religion," or, "He's biased against it." But I really
try to maintain, to the best of my ability, a healthy respect both for what
religion and science can do.
Have you ever had a mystical experience?
I think I have had experiences that helped me
realize what people are talking about when they describe their own mystical and
spiritual experiences. Of course, one of the problems in trying to answer the
question of "have you had a mystical experience" is that to some
degree, they are by definition indescribable. So I'm not sure that I could
definitively answer the question. But I think that studying other people's
experience is getting me closer to an understanding. Maybe in 10 or 15 years
I'll have a different answer for you.
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