How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [22]
STRIATUM Inhibits activity in the amygdala, allowing you to feel safe in the presence of God, or of whatever object or concept you are contemplating.
ANTERIOR CINGULATE Allows you to experience God as loving and compassionate. It decreases religious anxiety, guilt, fear, and anger by suppressing activity in the amygdala.
Anatomical location of specific brain structures. The limbic system consists of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and thalamus, in addition to other regions not shown.
CAN YOU SEPARATE SPIRITUALITY FROM GOD?
In the past, our research focused on individuals who were deeply committed to their religious and spiritual beliefs, and we could not separate them from the specific practices they used. As far as we could tell, each neurologically reinforced the other. The practitioners began with a specific goal associated with their religious beliefs and engaged in a ritual activity that strengthened that belief. If you removed the rituals, you might be left with little more than an intellectual understanding of God.
But we discovered that you could take God out of the ritual and still influence the brain. This is what our memory research demonstrated. Our patients were taught a traditional Eastern meditation, using sounds and movements that had deep religious meaning, but we did not emphasize the spiritual dimensions of the ritual. No one reported having a spiritual experience, and no one mentioned God.
If you improve your cognition by 10 percent, as our memory patients did, your age-related anxieties will decrease and you'll be pleased, but I don't know how excited you'll feel. If you change your perception of God by 10 percent, however, that can be a very big deal, especially to people who have maintained their childhood images and beliefs. As you will see in the following chapter, people who alter their concepts of God often feel as if their entire life has been transformed.
Spiritual practices are designed to stimulate dramatic experiences, but you can also transfer nearly any religious ideology from one spiritual practice to another and still receive the same neurological benefits from the experience. Herbert Benson first demonstrated this at Harvard in the early 1970s, when he extracted several key elements from Buddhist meditation and turned them into the now-famous relaxation response. Through dozens of well-designed studies, he demonstrated that you could consciously reduce stress and tension throughout your body by breathing slowly and repeating a word or phrase that gives you a sense of comfort (God, om, peace, etc.).
Today, Benson's “relaxation response” has been incorporated into many aspects of medicine and psychotherapy because it effectively treats hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic pain, PMS, insomnia, anxiety, depression, hostility, and infertility. It even lessens the side effects caused by cancer treatments and AIDS.3 This simple meditation also improves cognition in healthy aging adults.4
Benson also discovered that the same benefits could be elicited by different forms of meditation and relaxation, including yoga, Zen, hypnosis, and progressive muscle relaxation (see Table 1). All of these techniques utilize breathing and relaxation while the mind stays focused and alert.
EASTERN MEDITATION AND WESTERN PRAYER
In the 1970s, as a result of the societal problems centered around the Vietnam war and civil rights, many young adults became disenchanted with the traditional values of America. Two-thirds of this “baby boom” generation turned away from the religious activities of their parents to seek a more personal spiritual connection.5 Many turned to the philosophies of the East, in part because those traditions provided techniques that gave them direct experiences of peace.
In response to the 50 percent drop in church attendance, many Christian denominations reinvented themselves, introducing contemporary music and a vast array of social incentives. This joyful celebration