How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [43]
God is a noun, and nouns stimulate the “where” and “what” part of the brain, specifically regions in the parietal lobe.15 This region is responsible for identifying and integrating shapes it perceives in the world,16 and from what we know about how the brain processes visual objects, we can assume that a child's parietal lobe is very active when thinking about the nature of God. Thus, the brain attempts to place God somewhere within the physically observed universe. As a result, it might be less likely that children can purposefully feel a sense of unity with God. As our brain-scan research has shown, only advanced meditators can willfully suppress activity in the parietal area.
However, older children may be able to alter the brain by shifting neurological attention from the visual centers to the frontal regions where abstract thinking takes place. Brain-scan studies show that this occurs when adults focus on complex ideas, and when this happens, we neurologically disconnect from our visual orientation. This would allow God to lose his gender, face, and position in relationship to ourselves, and thus the boundaries “God” and “self” begin to blur or merge. As we will describe in the next few sections, some adult believers represented this spiritual experience by drawing mirrors to symbolize God and oneself as being the same.
Mature frontal lobe processes are also responsible for the greater imagination, creativity, and originality adults use when they attempt to describe the immaterial qualities of God. If these new ideas are repeated, old memory circuits can be permanently altered and changed. Still, our childhood notions of God will continue to influence our thoughts. This too is seen in adult pictures of God.
EXAMINING ADULT PICTURES OF GOD
Based upon the changes reflected in children's pictures of God, we reasoned that adult drawings should reflect similar developmental patterns. After all, neurological growth continues well into middle age—shouldn't our concepts of God also mature?
To test this assumption, we set up our experiment to address several issues. First, we presumed that adults who regularly attended church or engaged in spiritual activities would produce more abstract drawings than children. Second, we presumed that the abstract drawings would be different in content and meaning from those done by children. Third, we presumed that most of the drawings made by non-religious adults and atheists would be anthropomorphic, reflecting little maturity or change. Our first two presumptions were right, but our presumption about atheists was wrong.
Participants included congregational members from four different Religious Science churches, congregants from a Unitarian church, students from a community college, and members of a California Free-Thought/Atheist society. For our preliminary evaluation, we collected 256 pictures. Most of the college students were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, whereas the average age in the other groups was between forty and seventy, so we certainly had a wide range of adults we could analyze. Nearly half of these individuals had spent at least four decades seriously contemplating God, in both positive and negative ways.
ADULT CHURCH ATTENDEES
Of our survey participants, 160 were members of the Church of Religious Science (not to be confused with Christian Science),∗ and most had been members for many decades. This spiritual group was founded in the early twentieth century by Ernest Holmes, and they subscribe to a New Thought philosophy that sees God, the universe, the mind, and one's personal self as interconnected. As stated in the philosophical tenets of the United Church of Religious Science:
The Science of Mind is built on the theory that there is One Infinite