How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [24]
MEDITATION AND PRAYER: ARE THEY REALLY THE SAME?
Most dictionaries define prayer as the act of communicating with a deity, especially in the form of a request or a petition for help. Meditation, however, is commonly defined as a contemplative reflection or mental exercise designed to bring about a heightened level of spiritual awareness, trigger a spiritual or religious experience, or train the mind in a specific way We consider prayer to be a specialized form of meditation, in which the practitioner makes a specific request to a spiritual entity or presence. We also view guided imagery, hypnosis, and the psychoanalytic technique of free association as forms of contemplative activity.
Both prayer and meditation can include the use of religious texts, songs, or movement rituals, but meditation usually refers to a longer, more intensive activity. Neurologically, we have found that the longer one prays or meditates, the more changes occur in the brain. Five minutes of prayer once a week may have little effect, but forty minutes of daily practice, over a period of years, will bring permanent changes to the brain.
However, we have discovered that other forms of religious practice have very different neurological effects. In 2003, I brought in members from a Pentecostal church and scanned them while they engaged in the practice of speaking in tongues. To those unfamiliar with this practice, it may sound like a foreign language or babble, but I have heard renditions that reminded me of medieval Italian liturgies and ancient Assyrian poems. For the Pentecostal practitioner, it is an energizing state, filled with profound spiritual meaning and joy.
“Glossolalia,” as it is academically called, is not a form of contemplative meditation. Rather, it is a type of spontaneous verbal monologue that may or may not be accompanied by body gyrations and shaking, similar to the ecstatic trances found in various spiritual and shamanic traditions. Instead of focusing one's attention on a specific phrase or ideal, which increases activity in the frontal lobe, the practitioner surrenders voluntary control—and thus a significant degree of ordinary consciousness—by deliberately slowing down frontal lobe activity. This, in turn, allows the limbic areas of the brain to become more active, which neurologically increases the emotional intensity of the experience. With the nuns and Buddhists, the opposite experience occurs. Frontal lobe activity increases, limbic activity decreases, and the combination generates a peaceful and serene state of consciousness. Interestingly, both the nuns and Pentecostalists felt that our study demonstrated that God could intervene and directly influence the brain.
THE NEURAL CONSTRUCTION OF GOD
When we analyzed the research from all of our studies, we found that different parts of the brain produced different experiences that affected the way we perceive or think about God, the universe, our mind, and our lives. For example, our frontal lobes (the newest part of the human brain) provide us with a logical concept of a rational, deliberate, and loving God, while our limbic system (the oldest part of the brain) creates an emotionally meaningful experience of God. If either part of the brain malfunctions, unusual thoughts and perceptions can occur. Some people with neural damage can become obsessed with God, while others can lose all interest in religion. A person with an overly active limbic system might ruminate day after day on original sin, while a person with an overly active frontal lobe might become absorbed in mathematically proving the ontological existence of God, as Kurt Gödel attempted to do.13
An overly active limbic system, which generates our emotional states, is physically and psychologically dangerous, but we now have evidence, gathered from our recent study on yoga, that a twelve-week training program (that includes various postures, movements, stretches, and meditations) lowers activity in the amygdala, the key organ in the limbic system that generates