How God Changes Your Brain

Mark Robert Waldman is an associate fellow at the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is called "How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist." The book was recently featured in a major "Time" magazine cover story. If his interview on PBS is anything to go by this book is a must buy.

Personally I really love the sciences exploring spirituality. Walderman and his co author on the book Andrew Newberg go deep into the kind of territory that could potentially begin to unify our understanding of some of the aspects of religion and spirituality from a non dogmatic or ideolagized view. That is of course from the perspective of their own scientific ideology. Within it though there is a clear intent to explore and explain within the parameters of psychology and neuroscience.

So how can these scientists help in the ways I’ve suggested?

"What we’re finding is that, if you engage in contemplative spiritual practice or meditation or prayer or even focusing intently on a positive thought and a positive affirmation, you can begin to make permanent changes in both the structure and the function of your brain in ways that enhance memory, cognition, awareness, consciousness, compassion, and it simultaneously suppresses the neuromechanisms in your brain that cause anxiety, depression, fear, anger and rage."

Sounds good doesn’t it, and here’s where the ‘unify our understanding of some of the aspects of religion and spirituality’ part comes in.

"what we’ve done is that we’ve distilled from all of the world’s religious traditions a set of 12 basic exercises that we have in Chapter 9, I believe, that anyone can do. And if you do these exercises for 12 minutes a day for eight weeks and we put you into a brain scan machine, we can show you that changes are being made in your brain that make all of the improvements that I just talked about."

So what he’s saying is that they have identified the aspects of religious and spiritual practices that have the greatest physiological and psychological benefits and….

"Thirty years of research shows that this is the most effective way to eliminate serious forms of depression and anxiety, and when you apply these types of spiritual techniques, you can take the theology out of them and use them in a secular form and, if you want to, you can take the theology from a different religion and put them back in. You still get the same neurological benefits."

Going further Waldman and Newberg asked thousands of people how they would describe God and their spiritual experiences and virtually nothing was held in common. The meaning they came to from this is that "God or spirituality is a profoundly unique experience."

So by distilling what works from the perspective of their own understanding of the human brain/mind/experience they have come up with things like exercises in compassionate communication that will be relevant and acceptable and more importantly effective for people of any religious, non-religious or spiritual persuasion.

Then instead of getting hung up on the differences that divide we can realize our common humanity. How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist get yours now.

You can read an interview with the authors here

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