TruthBook Religious News Blog

Wednesday May 13, 2009

In February "Time" Magazine published some fascinating articles on the "biology of belief": how faith can heal us. Folks who attend church services on Sunday have a lower risk of dying in any one year than the guys who sleep in, read the paper, and skip all holy activities. "Spirituality predicts for better disease control," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief.

Okay. So how? What exactly happens in a brain when a person sings "Alleluia!" that makes her more resilient to illness than the nonbeliever? Here are 8 ways faith can heal.

Please click on "external source" to raed the list of eight ways that faith can heal. This is an interesting and hopeful article.

Labels: biology, faith, Gail Ironson, health, spirituality

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

What Happens When We Die?

By M.J. STEPHEY Tue Sep 23

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain.

What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?

When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases - as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.

How does this project relate to society's perception of death?

People commonly perceive death as being a moment - you're either dead or you're alive. And that's a social definition we have. But the clinical definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light into someone's pupil, it's to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem, and that's the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn't work, then that means that the brain itself isn't working. At that point, I'll call a nurse into the room so I can certify that this patient is dead. Fifty years ago, people couldn't survive after that.

How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?

Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now - who knows if they'll ever make it to the market - that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine you fast-forward to 10 years down the line; and you've given a patient, whose heart has just stopped, this amazing drug; and actually what it does is, it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

But what is happening to the individual at that time? What's really going on? Because there is a lack of blood flow, the cells go into a kind of a frenzy to keep themselves alive. And within about 5 min. or so they start to damage or change. After an hour or so the damage is so great that even if we restart the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable, because the cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it's not a moment; it's a process that actually begins when the heart stops and culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What's going on to a person's mind? What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death? Does that cease immediately as soon as the heart stops? Does it cease activity within the first 2 sec., the first 2 min.? Because we know that cells are continuously changing at that time. Does it stop after 10 min., after half an hour, after an hour? And at this point we don't know.

What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?

Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than 10 years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened, and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles - not just the patients' side but also the doctors' side - and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.

Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours?

Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that, well, when you die, you die; that's it. Death is a moment - you know you're either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically valid, but they're social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of motion, and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was out there in the universe. When we look at the world around us, Newtonian physics is perfectly sufficient. It explains most things that we deal with. But then it was discovered that actually when you look at motion at really small levels - beyond the level of the atoms - Newton's laws no longer apply. A new physics was needed, hence, we eventually ended up with quantum physics. It caused a lot of controversy - even Einstein himself didn't believe in it.

Now, if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in 99% of circumstances we can't separate the mind and brain; they work at the exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the Big Bang, the very beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us. Does something continue?

Labels: biology, brain, consciousness, death, Dr. Sam Parnia, M.J. Stephy, mind, out of body experience

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Thursday, May 08, 2008

The Spiritual Brain

Is there a specific part of the brain for feelings of spirituality? Many lines of evidence suggests it is the temporal lobes. Dr. David Comings, a renown human geneticist, neuroscientist and physician proposes that spirituality is genetically hardwired into a specific part of the brain, is pleasurable, is critical to the evolution and survival of man, and will never go away. Understanding the biology of the spiritual brain can help us to develop a rational spirituality where are rational brain and spiritual brain can live in peace.

Labels: biology, Dr. David Comings, God, neuroscience, spiritual reality, video

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Friday, July 13, 2007

The Early Science of Altruism

By Brandon Keim
July 12, 2007

Treat others as you'd like to be treated: that's the Golden Rule, present in some variation in just about every major culture and religion -- and, perhaps, coded into the structure of our brains.

The biological aspects of altruism are a new and exciting field of scientific research. Perhaps the insights gained in these early days will someday help us understand our own virtues and vices, and illuminate some way of nourishing a healthier, happier society -- or, from another perspective, a healthier, happier superorganism.

That, at least, is the hope -- and Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, was kind enough to talk with me about research into human altruism and what it all might mean for our future....

Traditionally, with language, object, and face recognition, we know a fair amount about those. But it’s more challenging and difficult to investigate altruism or attitudes or moral cognition.... But scientists have pressed forwards, and it’s a burgeoning literature now.

On animal studies into altruism, Grafman cautions that they involve behaviors more limited than our own: when animals help each other out -- when, for example, one bird combs another for parasites -- the reward, such as a reciprocated grooming, is almost immediate. Altruism in humans is more far-sighted, and may not involve any reward at all.

Studies have shown that altruistic behavior activates the pleasure centers that reward our most basic, immediate urges for food and sex -- something that has helped to preserve these tendencies, said Grafman, but not enough to explain the complexities of our selflessness.

It feels good, for lack of a better way to say it, so you’re more likely to do that again. But that isn’t selective *for* altruistic behavior. It gets fired off in response to lots of activities.... It's not unique to altruism. There must be other brain areas that the system partners with, leading to human behaviors in particular.

That’s likely to be an area in the prefrontal cortex. Certainly in the frontal lobes we seem to have structures activated when people feel more bonding to another person or entity. That area is also activated during altruistic behavior.... That area is very important for altruistic behavior, particularly when you have to overcome constraint -- for example, you want to give, but it’s going to cost you something. The anteriopolar prefrontal cortex is one of the most evolved areas of the brain, and it’s just a very very important part for overcoming primitive responses -- [i.e.,] I’m going to do something for that person and get something immediately back....

No animal gives to an institution, whereas we’re willing to donate to United Way, which will distribute money in the future, in a way you’re not aware, to other entities, and you won’t get anything directly back.... So that, in some sense, is an internalized agreement. You give, and you'll be rewarded because you have a belief system that says it’s good. That’s human. That is human.

There’s another approach that has forced this into the open: neuroeconomic research. It's an area that’s taken classic economic experiments and put people in a brain scanner while doing these kinds of tasks. It's pushing this whole literature about higher-level human behavior. Much of economics is concerned with human economic behaviors in societies -- that's a social behavior.... Another component to this is evolutionary psychology, biology. It’s a good thing, but challenging and frightening -- the more we make this mundane, it takes the magical aspects out of that, in terms of why people give.... It’s big for day to day life.

A lot of our mores -- from religions, for example, ethics, principles -- were first put into the bibles of different religions: the Koran, New Testament, a variety of other documents serve as foundations for religious, general cultural practices. Many ethical principles, people believe to some degree, were handed down by higher authority; if that’s the case, we’re making an argument, that the brain developing in such a way that it enacts these behaviors partly because of the way that the biology of the brain is designed. It forces people to think about the issue in a more experimental way -- a testable way, rather than a more mystical one. And a lot of people live lives based on mystical ideas.

This will cause people to debate and think, and that’s good. We’ve always done that, without biology, as new ideas come. Now biology is going to put in its two cents. That alone makes it provocative. Then there are other issues that come up. In a sense, also provocative: the more we know, the more we can record information related to these kinds of behaviors, the better we can assess or predict them in others, without people telling us what they're going to do.

Labels: altruism, biology, brain, Brandon Keim, Golden Rule, Jordan Grafman, neuroeconomic research, principles, reward