How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [16]
Our study also shows that meditation can be separated from its spiritual roots and still remain a valuable tool for cognitive enhancement. Thus, different types of meditation can be introduced into our public school systems to improve our children's academic performance. In a longitudinal study completed in 2007, students showed “decreased test anxiety, nervousness, self-doubt, and concentration loss” simply by using a deep-breathing technique.29 In another study, supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, researchers at the Medical College of Georgia found that African-American adolescents who were trained in a simple meditation (involving relaxation, breathing, and the repetition of a sound) showed a significant decline in “absenteeism, school rule infractions, and suspension days.”30 Students who took up tai chi (a gentle movement exercise) at Boston Public Middle School reported enhanced personal well-being and social awareness.31 And for a group of young teens who attended a yoga camp, their spatial memory scores improved by 43 percent.32 What parent, when shown this evidence, would not want to teach their children how to meditate, breathe, and relax?
GUS'S LEGACY: THE POWER OF SELECTIVE ATTENTION
Gus symbolizes the brain's remarkable capacity to heal itself and change, especially in the areas that make us uniquely human: our frontal lobes. Here we find the neurological roots of our imagination and creativity, our capacity to reason and communicate with others, and our ability to become more peaceful, compassionate, and motivated.
Our frontal lobe holds the secret for making our dreams come true. That secret can be summarized in two words—selective attention—the ability to voluntarily choose, from millions of pieces of data, which ones seem most relevant to your life. Daily meditation enhances our ability to focus our attention on virtually any goal we wish to achieve, and selective attention improves the memory functions of the brain. Specifically, meditation helps to maintain working memory—the information we need to make any conscious decision—and it does this by discarding irrelevant and distracting data.33 Our study specifically showed changes in those parts of the brain related directly to the structures that are part of the working-memory circuit.34
Spiritual experiences, and the techniques we use to evoke them, involve a complex network of interconnecting neural functions that are equally influenced by our thoughts, feelings, memories, physical conditions, genetic predispositions, and the personal experiences we've had throughout our lives. But the key to meditation—and thus our ability to change our brain—can be reduced to a handful of specific steps. Thus, Gus's memory improved for the following reasons:
He wanted to improve.
He stayed focused on his intention and goal.
He consciously regulated his breathing, posture, and body movements.
He practiced the skill over a period of time.
The first step begins with a desire—the conscious wish to change. Once that decision is made, you must train yourself to remain focused on your goal. This takes practice, but our experiments suggest that this happens rapidly. Focused attention begins to build new neuronal circuits that, once established, will automatically activate those parts of the brain that involve motivational activity. And the more that activity is repeated, the stronger those neural circuits become. This mechanism is known as Hebbian learning—often stated as “cells that fire together, wire together”—and it is the primary mechanism by which all living organisms gain new knowledge about the world. Repeating a new task, such as meditation or prayer, changes the synaptic activity at the end of a neuron and will eventually change the structure of the cell.35 Such changes