Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA22233 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 3 May 2001 15:37:47 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745E4D@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Plumbing the mystery of prayer with the instruments of scienc e Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 15:33:55 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hiya,
This is the same research I referred to as being in New Scientist last week.
Thanks Wade.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Wade T.Smith
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Thursday, May 3, 2001 2:37 pm
> To: memetics list; skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
> Subject: Fwd: Plumbing the mystery of prayer with the instruments of
> science
>
> Plumbing the mystery of prayer with the instruments of science
>
> By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff , 5/3/2001
>
> In a quiet laboratory, Andrew Newberg takes photographs of what believers
> call the presence of God.
>
> The young neurologist invites Buddhists and Franciscan nuns to meditate
> and pray in a secluded room. Then, at the peak of their devotions, he
> injects a tracer that travels to the brain and can reveal its activity at
> the moment of transcendence.
>
> A pattern has emerged from Newberg's experiments. There is a small region
> near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person's spatial
> orientation, the sense of where one's body ends and the world begins.
> During intense prayer or meditation, and for reasons that remain utterly
> mysterious, this region becomes a quiet oasis of inactivity - a fact that
> could explain the borderless spiritual communion felt by the faithful for
> millenia.
>
> ''It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship,'' said Newberg,
> an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work
> appears in the April 10 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. ''If
> they go far enough, they have a complete dissolving of the self, a sense
> of union, a sense of infinite spacelessness.''
>
> Newberg and other scientists are finding that man's diverse array of
> devotional traditions has a powerful biological reality. During intense
> meditation and prayer, the brain and body both experience signature
> changes, as yet poorly understood, that could yield insights into the
> religious experience and, one day, even provide clues to living more
> healthy, more fulfilling lives.
>
> Already, scientists say, the young field has provided evidence that these
> meditative states - which rely on shutting down the senses and repeating
> words, phrases, or movements - are a natural part of the brain; that
> humans are, in some sense, inherently spiritual beings.
>
> ''Prayer is the modern brain's means by which we can connect to more
> powerful ancestral states of consciousness,'' said Gregg Jacobs, an
> assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who has
> published several studies of the way brain waves change during meditation.
>
> With meditative states, people seem to turn off what Gregg called ''the
> internal chatter'' of the higher, conscious brain.
>
> During meditation, increases have been observed in the activity of the
> ''theta'' brain wave, a type that moves slowly and is known to inhibit
> other activity in the brain. Based on a preliminary analysis of recent
> data, Gregg said, he has observed inhibitory theta activity coming from
> the same region of the brain, called the parietal lobe, that unveils the
> becalmed oasis during prayer. Eventually, researchers hope that they can
> identify a common biological core in the world's many varieties of
> worship.
>
> As scientists increasingly bring sophisticated technologies to the study
> of religion, though, many caution that these first glimpses of mysterious
> territory should not be over-interpreted.
>
> ''Whatever we can learn about these states is going to be a great
> advantage to us,'' said Lawrence E. Sullivan, the director of the Harvard
> University Center for the Study of World Religions. But there is the
> danger ''that our technologies and our conclusions won't be equal to the
> richness and complexity of religion.''
>
> Even prayer itself is spectacular in its diversity, said Sullivan, citing
> the Taoist tradition of deep meditation in which the practitioners
> re-imagine their own birth, and the chanting, dancing ritual of a people
> who live near Venezuela's Orinoco River in which teenagers achieve an
> ecstatic trance-like state and then metaphorically die.
>
> In the last century, researchers have been rediscovering the power of the
> brain to affect the body. By the 1970s, some scientists had begun to look
> seriously for therapeutic value in religion. Herbert Benson, president of
> the Mind/Body Medical Institute, affiliated with Harvard University,
> coined the term ''relaxation response'' to describe the healthful
> physiological changes in those who followed Eastern meditative practices.
>
> Recently, scientists have begun to consider similarly intense Western
> prayer practices as well. And last year, the National Institutes of
> Health said it was sponsoring a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins
> University to study the effects of lengthy group prayer sessions among
> African-American women with breast cancer - the first such study ever.
>
> One of the most striking findings came in 1997, when a team of
> researchers from the University of California at San Diego found what
> they called the ''God module'' in the brain. They studied patients who
> suffer from a form of epilepsy that affects the brain's temporal lobe.
> These patients experience deep religious feelings during the attacks and
> remain fascinated by mystical questions after the attacks.
>
> The researchers, headed by Vilayanur Ramachandran, said the seizures were
> strengthening a portion of the brain that responds to religious words,
> implying that religious feeling is a part of the brain's architecture.
>
> Pennsylvania's Newberg, who is the author of a book out this month called
> ''Why God Won't Go Away,'' said the mystery of religious experience was
> inherently difficult to solve in the lab, especially with a noisy brain
> scanner clanging away. His strategy has been to use a technique called
> SPECT, which relies on a tracer that fixes on the brain's pattern of
> activity when it is injected, but can be observed later, under a scanner.
>
> Nobody yet knows why the brain has this ability to reach other kinds of
> conscious states merely by turning inward, quieting down, focusing on a
> shimmering image, or repeating a sacred phrase.
>
> Some will interpret the research as evidence that God is a product of the
> brain, while others will say it is evidence that the brain is a product
> of some higher power's hand - that, as Benson put it, ''perhaps God gave
> us the mechanism to understand and experience God in a certain way.''
>
> Gareth Cook can be reached by e-mail at cook@globe.com
>
> This story ran on page A02 of the Boston Globe on 5/3/2001. © Copyright
> 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
>
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