How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [17]
Desire and focus is enough to permanently alter the brain, but spiritual devotees have discovered additional ways to improve neural functioning. Regulated breathing will affect mechanisms that control emotions and sensory perception, but if you do it too deeply, you can evoke hallucinogenic visions and sounds. Slower regulated breathing has a calming effect on both your body and mind, and it also decreases metabolic activity in different parts of the brain. This is very important because our frontal lobe tends to be overly active. It uses up a lot of energy that is needed to efficiently run other neural mechanisms, and so we need to give this part of the brain a rest. Thinking uses up a lot of neural energy, but slow, deep breathing replenishes it. We'll discuss this in greater depth in later chapters.
The sa-ta-na-ma meditation, like other spiritual practices, allows your brain to rest while maintaining an acute awareness of the environment, which is a very useful skill to develop. By adding repetitious hand movements and speech to your meditation, you further enhance the motor and coordination centers in your brain. Thus, by increasing efficiency throughout the brain, more neural and metabolic energy is conserved. This, in turn, enhances memory formation and retrieval.
Gus wanted to improve his memory, and so he did. But other people, using similar meditation techniques, have achieved other significant goals. Some have created lasting states of tranquility and peace, while others have become more productive at work. When you intensely meditate on a specific goal over an extended period of time, your brain begins to relate to your idea as if it were an actual object in the world by increasing activity in the thalamus, part of the reality-making process of the brain. The concept begins to feel more obtainable and real, and this is the first step in motivating other parts of the brain to take deliberate action in the world.
HAVING FAITH IN REACHING YOUR GOALS
Underlying these four steps—desire, focus, regulated body control, and practice—is a fifth process, one that is essential for obtaining your desire or goal. We call it “expectation,” a term, much like faith, that reflects our neurological propensity to believe that we can, and will, accomplish our goals. Expectation is different from hope because it gives you the inner conviction that your goal is attainable, even if it seems irrational. It is one of the underlying principles of optimism, and it also governs the neurological mechanism known as the “placebo effect.” If you strongly believe in something—in other words, if you have enough faith in yourself—you will stimulate both your immune system and your motivational system into action.36
This is not a magical process, nor something that quantum physics validates, as some self-help books like to claim. Rather, it is simply the brain doing what millions of years of evolution have led it to do: accomplish goals that we set our minds to. The same is true for religious pursuits. If you set your mind on reaching a spiritual goal, you'll neurologically enhance your sense that a spiritual reality can be experienced. One can argue that Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha all reached spiritual enlightenment because they devoted years to intense meditation and prayer. And we believe that cognitively impaired patients like Gus can similarly reach their goals of memory enhancement through the practice of daily meditation.
PROTECTING THE AGING BRAIN
The evidence clearly shows that most forms of contemplative practice will improve cognition, but how do you decide which technique to use? More to the point: Is the meditation that Gus used better than other spiritual practices? It will take a long time before we have a definitive answer, but we do have several working hypotheses supported by the years of research that we and others have done.
We believe that this meditation is more likely to show improvement in memory and cognition because