Prayers and Meditations

Want to build a better brain?

Ramp up your spiritual practice, says Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Meditation and prayer can improve your physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being and may even slow the brain's aging process.

Newberg, who is also the director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, is the author of four books, including the recently released "How God Changes Your Brain," which discusses the results of brain scans that he and his team conducted on more than 100 meditating or praying people. The research shows that the physical and emotional benefits of spiritual observances dramatically accrue over years of practice, but even recent converts exhibit healthier brains -- in one study Newburg's team scanned the brains of people who had never meditated before, then taught them simple meditative methods. After eight weeks of meditating 12 minutes a day, an evaluation showed considerable improvement in memory scores and a measurable decrease in anxiety and anger.

Atheists can feel free to jump right in here as Newburg's research indicates that faith in a divine being isn't required to benefit from meditation. But pessimists may be out of luck -- faith in a positive outcome is necessary for the best results.
In your book, you write that religion is a "wonderful tool because it helps the brain perform its primary functions."


Which functions are you talking about, and how does religion help those functions?

The brain has basically two main functions, globally speaking. It helps us to survive, and it helps us to adapt and grow. Religion is extremely valuable in both respects.

A lot of the new research that we've been doing shows that when people engage in religious or spiritual activities and practices, or they have religious experiences, by and large they tend to have a positive impact on a person's mental health and wellbeing. That helps them accomplish their goals, to set a path for themselves, and therefore helps them survive. At the same time, religion and spiritual pursuits help us change and grow over time by giving us a model for transforming ourselves. Ultimately, they're our way of asking ourselves to follow the ideals of what we think a good human being should be.

You measured the effects of doing a practice like meditation or prayer on the brains of long-term practitioners in different spiritual traditions. What did you notice about the brain of a meditator that's different from someone who is not meditating?
When we compare the baseline brain scans -- meaning when the person is at rest -- of long-term practitioners to those of non-practitioners, we see substantial changes in many parts of the brain.

For example, long-term meditators have higher activity in their frontal lobes, the part of the brain that helps us focus our attention and will on whatever behaviors we need to do. Another interesting finding we have noticed occurs in the thalamus, the central structure that helps different parts of the brain communicate with each other and is very involved in processing all of our sensory information. We find there is a difference in how the thalamus is acting in long-term meditators compared to non-meditators. We think this may have something to do with, on the one hand, enabling the brain to function in a heightened way, but it also suggests that it really does alter our way of looking at reality when one engages in these practices. It changes how the brain works.


When you talk about the effects of religious beliefs or activities on the brain, that's a very broad spectrum of possibilities to consider. Does it matter what you believe or what sort of practices you're doing?

The particular beliefs and practices are very important. One major point is the difference between having a loving and compassionate view of God versus a God that is vengeful, angry, and exclusive. We know from other research that if you focus your mind on positive emotions, and if you have an optimistic outlook, then that is going to activate the areas of your brain that help you lower stress, which helps you to function better and ultimately to be healthier physically and mentally. And if you focus on a God that's angry and vengeful, that activates the anger centers of your brain, the strong emotional centers, which creates stress and anxiety. When that happens, your body releases hormones that can actually damage the way your brain functions which fosters more negative emotions and negative behaviors outwardly. That can be destructive both for the individual as well as on society as a whole.

There was a statistic cited in your book showing that Americans mostly view God as authoritarian, critical, or distant -- only 23 percent of believers see God as gentle and forgiving ...

That's one of the things that we really want to advocate for, that people have to be cautious about the beliefs they hold in terms of whether they focus on God and religion as something that's a positive influence in their lives and provides forgiveness and compassion or whether they're going to look at God and religion as exclusive and negative, because that really does have a detrimental effect.

The good news is that the brain does have the ability to continually change and adapt, and therefore, even if you have gone down a fairly long path of negative emotions, you do have an opportunity, if you start to focus anew on the other side, so to speak, to bring about changes that are more positive. I don't mean to make it sound simplistic -- it's not like you are just going to flip a switch, most likely, and change your whole way of being. It does take effort.


You're studying religion in a laboratory. Do you see a limit as to what you can learn about faith through science?

Well, I don't want it to be construed that, because we can do this kind of research, we are explaining away what religion is. You know, when we get a brain scan of somebody describing their vision of God, for example, that tells us what the brain is doing in the midst of that experience, but it doesn't prove to us whether God was really in the room with them, or that one person's religious or spiritual beliefs are right and somebody else's is wrong. What it shows is how these experiences affect us, and I think ultimately it can contribute to our knowledge, not only of the brain, but also to our perspective on spiritual and theological ideas.


How did you become interested in this field of study?

As a child I was always asking questions like, why are there different religions? Why do some people believe one thing over something else? As I got older, I had a deep desire to learn about science, which seemed to provide answers to these questions. But I began to explore other philosophical and spiritual traditions in college that made me realize that what we can know by science is just one part of the discussion, and that we need to think very hard about what religious and spiritual perspectives bring to the table in helping us understand reality. When I went into medical school, I had the good fortune of meeting a mentor who was interested in these same questions, and how it ultimately came about, in terms of my own journey, is that I wanted, somehow, to find a way of integrating these two perspectives.


Science and religion, you mean?

Yes. I don't know how much integration there needs to be, but... there are certain fundamental paradoxes that science will never help us transcend. The big one, which always creates a problem in my own mind, is how do you get outside of your own brain so that you can look at what is happening inside and figure out whether or not they match? The interesting thing is that religious and spiritual traditions are the only places in human experience that I know of where people at least describe that they have gone beyond their minds, their brains. And, if that's the case, we need to look at what those experiences are because that may be our only way of actually getting to what absolute reality is all about.


Are you a spiritual person yourself?

I would say that this whole process is my spiritual journey. I guess to some degree I'm not totally sure what we mean by spiritual or religious -- in fact, in my classes, I always start out by saying: How do you define these terms? Everybody defines them a little bit differently. I guess the reason why I'm comfortable saying that this work I do is spiritual is that it's my way of trying to connect with the universe, with all the things that are.


Are you a member of an organized religion?

I identify culturally with being Jewish, which is my upbringing, but I don't think I've ever come across one specific viewpoint that seems to answer all of the questions. I really do struggle with where the truth is. I also think that if I want to do this kind of research, I have to keep as neutral a stance as I can. I'm sure people are going to say, "He's biased towards religion," or, "He's biased against it." But I really try to maintain, to the best of my ability, a healthy respect both for what religion and science can do.


Have you ever had a mystical experience?

I think I have had experiences that helped me realize what people are talking about when they describe their own mystical and spiritual experiences. Of course, one of the problems in trying to answer the question of "have you had a mystical experience" is that to some degree, they are by definition indescribable. So I'm not sure that I could definitively answer the question. But I think that studying other people's experience is getting me closer to an understanding. Maybe in 10 or 15 years I'll have a different answer for you.
David Ian Miller www.sfgate.com April 27, 2009


The first thing to do is to acquire a thirst for Spirituality, then Live the Life! Live the Life! Live the Life! The way to acquire this thirst is to meditate upon the future life. Study the Holy Words, read your Bible, read the Holy Books, especially study the Holy Utterances of Bahá'u'lláh; Prayer and Meditation, take much time for these two. Then will you know this Great Thirst, and then only can you begin to Live the Life!
("Star of the West" Vol. 19, No. 3, p. 69)

Knowledge is love. Study, listen to exhortations, think, try to understand the wisdom and greatness of God. The soil must be fertilized before the seed can be sown.
("Star of the West" Vol. 20, No. 10, p. 314)

~ Abdul-Baha, The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 204