TruthBook Religious News Blog

David Ian Miller
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.

The remainder of this article consists of an interview with the author about his research. Please click on "external source" to access the complete article.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, David Ian Miller, meditation, neuroscience, prayer

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Book Review: Perceptions of God will shape future of religion

By Ray Waddle • April 18, 2009

We've got God on the brain. The Master of the Universe comes as a storm of neurological impulses that can change the brain for better or for worse.

Thinking of God as All Compassionate can do you good. It makes you more empathetic and improves brain health. Extremist religion only increases anger, risking brain damage.

Such conclusions and more arise from the much-discussed research collected in a new book, How God Changes Your Brain, by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and therapist Mark Robert Waldman.

Please click on "external source" for complete book review.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, God, Mark Robert Waldman, neuroscience, Ray Waddle

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Friday, January 23, 2009

Searching for enlightenment

Is Google's 'school of personal growth' a spiritual boon or corporate fig leaf?

Business initiatives trumpeted as selfless efforts to boost human welfare understandably evoke cynicism. The conflict between the profit motive and talk of employee wellbeing seems too tense to be soothed by a few in-house yoga classes, the traditional giant cheques handed out at local schools, or office recycling schemes.

So no doubt the news that Google is offering training to foster employees' spiritual growth will be met with some disdain, especially as this could well be the first example of a major modern corporation taking staff development into the transpersonal arena.

The story has emerged from a presentation made by Chade-Meng Tan, a former software engineer who now heads up the company's "school of personal growth", one of four faculties operating as Google University in a street adjacent to the firm's main Silicon Valley base. Speaking at the "Happiness and its Causes" conference in San Francisco, Tan suggested that the school's ethos could be a blueprint for workplace education. "Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels," he said, "emotional, mental, physical and 'beyond the self'."

It is the final ingredient in this formula which is striking – Tan is a Buddhist, and the idea of people growing "beyond the self" sounds like an allusion to the Buddhist notion of "interdependent arising" – characterised by the insight that what we experience as "me" is not a separate, solid, unchanging entity but a fluid, evolving process that is inextricably connected to and interacting with the whole web of existence. This appears to be reflected in the courses on offer at the school, which includes classes on "the neuroscience of empathy" led by Stanford psychologist Philippe Goldin, as well as instruction in mindfulness meditation from Zen teacher Norman Fischer, who has been dubbed "the abbot of Google".

The emphasis on evidence-based disciplines such as neuroscience and psychology suggests that the school's approach is based on the rigours of science rather than the superstition of church or crystal ball. At a time when many traditional religious institutional forms are associated with war, superstition, or scandal, or are failing to adapt to 21st-century life, it may be that our continued evolution is more likely to be spurred by organisations with a track record of cutting-edge services that improve the quality of lives and relationships.

It seems that in the west, it is mixing most creatively with the fields of science, technology and communications – another example of the commercial appropriation of "interdependent arising" being the recent Orange "I Am Everyone" adverts.

Whether the Google initiative leads to further innovation, greater wellbeing and continued success, or turns into a cloak for materialistic greed, will depend largely on the company's ability to sustain a skillful and compassionate modus operandi in the midst of a corporate world dominated by self-interest. Having made its fortune through improving networks, it might understand better than most firms the glaring implications of interdependence - that sustained abundance is only possible through willingness to share it with others.

As to its capacity for wisely acting on that understanding and resisting the allure of corporate egotism – the very antithesis of going "beyond the self" – that very much remains to be seen.

Labels: Buddhism, Chade-Meng Tan, Google, neuroscience, spiritual growth, transpersonal

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Selflessness Has Neuropsychological Connection

By: University of Missouri - Wed, 12/17/2008

All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain. The study is one of the first to use individuals with traumatic brain injury to determine this connection. Researchers say the implication of this connection means people in many disciplines, including peace studies, health care or religion can learn different ways to attain selflessness, to experience transcendence, and to help themselves and others.

This study, along with other recent neuroradiological studies of Buddhist meditators and Francescan nuns, suggests that all individuals, regardless of cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences, such as transcendence. Transcendence, feelings of universal unity and decreased sense of self, is a core tenet of all major religions. Meditation and prayer are the primary vehicles by which such spiritual transcendence is achieved.

“The brain functions in a certain way during spiritual experiences,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the MU School of Health Professions. “We studied people with brain injury and found that people with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences, such as transcendence.”

This link is important, Johnstone said, because it means selflessness can be learned by decreasing activity in that part of the brain. He suggests this can be done through conscious effort, such as meditation or prayer. People with these selfless spiritual experiences also are more psychologically healthy, especially if they have positive beliefs that there is a God or higher power who loves them, Johnstone said.

“This research also addresses questions regarding the impact of neurologic versus cultural factors on spiritual experience,” Johnstone said. “The ability to connect with things beyond the self, such as transcendent experiences, seems to occur for people who minimize right parietal functioning. This can be attained through cultural practices, such as intense meditation or prayer or because of a brain injury that impairs the functioning of the right parietal lobe. Either way, our study suggests that ‘selflessness’ is a neuropsychological foundation of spiritual experiences.”

The research was funded by the MU Center on Religion and the Professions. The study – “Support for a neuropsychological model of spirituality in persons with traumatic brain injury” – was published in the peer-reviewed journal Zygon.

“Our research focused on the personal experience of spiritual transcendence and does not in any way minimize the importance of religion or personal beliefs, nor does it suggest that spiritual experience are related only to neuropsychological activity in the brain,” Johnstone said. “It is important to note that individuals experience their God or higher power in many different ways, but that all people from all religions and beliefs appear to experience these connections in a similar way.”

Labels: brain, Brick Johnstone, neuroscience, selflessness, spiritual experience, spirituality, Zygon

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Friday, May 16, 2008

“Neural Buddhism” as religion’s future

Written by Clint Rainey
May 14, 2008 14 Comments

In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

Labels: David Brooks, God, neural Buddhism, neuroscience, religion, religious 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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Monday, March 24, 2008

Brains Are Hardwired To Act According To The Golden Rule

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2008)

— Wesley Autrey, a black construction worker, a Navy veteran and 55-year-old father of two, didn’t know the young man standing beside him. But when he had a seizure on the subway platform and toppled onto the tracks, Autrey jumped down after him and shielded him with his body as a train bore down on them. Autrey could have died, so why did he put his life on the line — literally — to save this complete stranger?

Donald Pfaff, the author of the new book The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule, thinks he has the answer. Our brains, he says, are hardwired to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Individual acts of aggression and evil occur when this circuitry jams.

“If it’s really true that all religions have this ethical principle, across continents and across centuries, then it is more likely to have a hardwired scientific basis than if it was just a neighborhood custom,” says Pfaff, whose laboratory at Rockefeller University studies various hormones and brain signals that influence positive social behavior.

In his book, Pfaff proposes a theory that explains, in a parsimonious way, how people manage to behave well when they do, and under what conditions they deviate from good behavior. He describes how memories of fear, as well as various brain hormones, can play a vital role in whether people choose to act ethically or violently toward others. One’s behavior is a balance, he says, between “prosocial” and “antisocial” traits — a balance shaped by early life experiences.

“You have some people who are prosocial, who face the world with a smile and are uniformly nice to other people,” says Pfaff. “Others face the world with a snarl and are routinely aggressive and thoughtless. Most of us are a balance — we are able to treat each other almost all the time in a civil and thoughtful way.” But nobody’s perfect, he adds. “Even those in the prosocial group have cheated on their taxes.”

Donald W. Pfaff, Ph.D., is professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Rockefeller, where he has studied the brain and behavior for more than 30 years, he discovered the brain-cell targets for steroid hormones and proved that these chemicals, among others, could elicit specific behaviors when reaching the right brain areas.

Labels: brain, Donald Pfaff, Golden Rule, neuroscience, social behavior

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