{"id":3597,"date":"2009-07-17T14:56:59","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T19:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=3597"},"modified":"2013-05-29T11:53:03","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T15:53:03","slug":"july-17-2009-faith-and-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/07\/17\/july-17-2009-faith-and-the-brain\/3597\/","title":{"rendered":" Faith and the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOB ABERNETHY<\/strong>, anchor: Scientists have long found an association between relaxation and health. Now, there is new evidence that meditation and other spiritual practices have a beneficial and measurable effect on the brain. In a new book, “How God Changes Your Brain,” Andrew Newberg reports that meditation improves memory and reduces stress and that the kind of God you worship can affect the structure of your brain. Lucky Severson has the story.<\/p>\n

VINCENT FEDOR<\/strong> (meditating and reciting mantra):\u00a0Sa, ta, na, ma… <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"LUCKY SEVERSON<\/strong>: As unlikely as it may seem, Vincent Fedor is practicing meditation.<\/p>\n

VINCENT FEDOR<\/strong>:\u00a0…and you go into the whisper sa, ta, na, ma…<\/em><\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Vincent and his wife, Judy, started meditation after they answered a questionnaire about improving their memory.\u00a0That was one objective of Dr. Andrew Newberg. The other was that he wanted to scan their brains while they did it. Here are Vincent\u2019s scans before he learned to meditate and after he had been doing it for eight weeks.<\/p>\n

DR. ANDREW NEWBERG<\/strong> (University of Pennsylvania, with brain scans): Okay, so it is asymmetric, more active here than here, and after meditation it’s more active here than here. So simply doing the practice of the meditation he has altered the activity in this very, very important part of the brain, and this is really important, because this means he has changed the way his brain is working.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Since meditating Vincent feels he\u2019s become a better high school track coach.<\/p>\n

VINCENT FEDOR<\/strong>: I think I\u2019ve become a calmer, more tolerant person. If the situation comes up I don\u2019t go to the angry side. I go take the calmer road. And you know, I think the kids see this. I think I\u2019ve become a better coach because of it.<\/p>\n

NEWBERG<\/strong>: It makes sense that if by doing this practice he has increased the activity in that frontal lobe, he’s actually able to improve the way in which he monitors his emotional responses to people and perhaps can treat them with more compassion.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Dr. Newberg has studied nuns who do repetitive prayer, and he has seen the same kind of results. He\u2019s been studying the effects of meditation and prayer on the brain for several years and is considered one of the leading experts in a new field called neurotheology.<\/p>\n

\"\"DR.\u00a0NEWBERG<\/strong>: We\u2019ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over times.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Here at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Spirituality and the Mind, images of the brain are taken during or after a person prays or meditates.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: The more you use a part of the brain the more blood flow\u00a0it gets and the brighter or more red it looks on the scans.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Over the years Dr. Newberg has adapted a 12-step mediation exercise that includes sound, movement, and breathing.<\/p>\n

JUDY FEDOR<\/strong>: Sa, ta, na, ma.\u00a0The first two minutes the mantra is sung. The second two minutes the mantra is whispered. The third sequence is silence, back into the whisper and finishing with the song.\u00a0After that it\u2019s deep breathing, holding in, that\u2019s done three times, body relaxes, and the mantra is completed.<\/p>\n

The minute I can start doing it and moving my fingers my body gets calmer. It\u2019s very soothing. To me it gets almost in a passive mode, and then you have energy afterwards because you became so calm.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: Religion and spirituality do help to lower a person\u2019s feelings of depression, anxiety, gives them some meaning in life, helps them to cope with things, and that\u2019s going to have a potentially very beneficial effect.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: But Newberg has made another discovery, a controversial one, that our belief system, how we view God, can make a huge difference in how it affects our well being.\u00a0 If we believe in a loving God it can have a positive effect, even prolong our lives.\u00a0But believing in a judgmental, authoritarian God can produce fear, anger, and stress, and that\u2019s not healthy.<\/p>\n

\"\"Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: When it ultimately turns towards hatred, and whether it\u2019s people who believe in abortion versus those who don\u2019t, whether it\u2019s just one religion versus another, when you hear rhetoric which is hateful, filled with anger, that turns on the different parts of the brain that are involved in our stress response and our anger response.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: George Handzo is a chaplain with the Healthcare Chaplaincy of New York City. He says Newberg\u2019s conclusions, that a person\u2019s belief in a certain kind of God can be unhealthy, is bound to be controversial among people of faith.<\/p>\n

CHAPLAIN GEORGE HANDZO<\/strong> (Healthcare Chaplaincy of NYC): They\u2019re saying that there is one word of God, and God commands us to follow that word, and if we want to save people from God\u2019s anger and condemnation we\u2019re obliged to get other people to believe as we do<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: I\u2019m not arguing that people need to change their beliefs per se.\u00a0 I mean\u00a0if they feel that their perspective on God is right, I mean then that\u2019s terrific.\u00a0 But I think\u00a0that\u00a0 what we have to all be careful about is the anger and the hatred. That\u2019s what has detrimental effects both on the individual as well as on society as a whole.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Skeptics of Newberg\u2019s work question if science should be delving into religion and spirituality in the first place, and they ask if his research has actually proven much of anything.<\/p>\n

HANDZO<\/strong>: Faith is, by definition, reliance on things you cannot see and cannot know.\u00a0Faith is something we believe\u00a0God gives to us. It\u2019s not something we invent. As a person of faith, this whole debate about what is going to be knowable is not a particularly interesting question to me.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: You know, if we get a brain scan of somebody while they\u2019re experiencing being in God\u2019s presence, as I\u2019ve always said, that doesn\u2019t prove that God was in the room.\u00a0It doesn\u2019t prove that God wasn\u2019t in the room. What it proves is that when the person had the experience\u00a0of interacting with God this is what\u00a0change was going on in their brain.<\/p>\n

\"\"DONNA MORGAN<\/strong>: Can I just praise the Lord right now?\u00a0I feel like if I don\u2019t praise the Lord I\u2019m going to bust\u2026Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus…<\/em><\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Dr. Newberg has found there are some religious practices where the person is intensely focused and others where they just allow themselves to be taken over, for example, \u00a0speaking in tongues.\u00a0Dr. Newberg has scanned the brains of people of all belief systems, of people with no faith, and those of deep conviction, like Donna Morgan, who is a Pentecostal.<\/p>\n

DONNA MORGAN<\/strong>: When are you in that realm of praise you just give over to the Holy Spirit. Then\u00a0you let him take control, and when he\u2019s taking control, right, you can speak in tongues, if you\u2019ve been given that gift.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong> (with brain scans): Speaking in tongues you’re going to see that the frontal lobes are going to decrease in activity. So that means the frontal lobes,\u00a0the part of the brain that normally makes them feel like they are in control of what they are doing, is shutting down.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong> (to Dr. Newberg): It is shutting down because…<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: It is consistent with the feeling that they are not in charge\u00a0of the process.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: There are some who argue that certain people are predisposed or hard-wired toward transcendent experiences, and some are not. It\u2019s an argument Chaplain Handzo disagrees with.<\/p>\n

HANDZO<\/strong>: I don\u2019t believe in a God that creates people, especially selectively, in a way that makes it difficult for them to access this God. That\u2019s not my God.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: I think to some degree we all are hard-wired to be able to think about things on these levels. It\u2019s just a matter of how much we engage that and if we find a path that does help us to engage that for ourselves.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: Newberg says people of faith shouldn\u2019t worry that his research will ever diminish their faith.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: I don\u2019t think that\u00a0our science is going to be able to definitively prove that God exists or doesn\u2019t exist. It is, ultimately, a leap of faith.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>:\u00a0Newberg believes the number one activity that can exercise your brain and enrich your life is faith.<\/p>\n

Dr. NEWBERG<\/strong>: When you have those kind of positive, optimistic beliefs in the world, in God or religion, depending on the person, that that really, over the long haul, seems to be the thing that really provides a benefit for us in terms our mental state and in terms of our physical health and well-being.<\/p>\n

SEVERSON<\/strong>: As for his own faith, he describes himself as a searcher who is still searching. For Religion\u00a0& Ethics NewsWeekly, I\u2019m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Scientists have long found an association between relaxation and health. Now, there is new evidence that meditation and other spiritual practices have a beneficial and measurable effect on the brain. 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