" alt="Featured 468x60 Ad" />
Science Seeking The Soul
September 22, 2008 by Ray Baskerville
Science and Spirituality are finding more and more relinquishing of past distrust and antipathy. There are Universities around the world that have departments of consciousness study, and individual scientists exploring different aspects of spiritual experience.
Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania is among a small group of doctors and scientists on a purposeful pursuit of our relationship with the Divine or ‘God’. They like many of their colleagues around the world do not find science and faith incompatible. They are using sophisticated medical technology to hunt down and map the soul.
Newberg has searched for spirituality in the brain for almost 20 years. He has probed
the brains of praying nuns, meditating Buddhist monks, and Pentecostals as they speak in tongues. He has written three books: "Why God Won’t Go Away," "The Mystical Mind," and his most recent, "Why We Believe What We Believe." He has another book coming out next year.
In the early ’90s, Newberg had fallen under the mentorship of psychiatrist Eugene d’Aquili, an early leader in the study of the effects of religious and mystical experiences in the brain. Newberg proposed to d’Aquili to photograph
brains during religious experiences using the injection of a radioactive tracer scanned using a process called single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT. They found willing volunteers among three disparate groups: Tibetan Buddhist monks, cloistered nuns and Pentecostals who speak in tongues.
As Newberg studied the results of the brain scans of nuns and monks, some bright spots were obvious. The frontal lobes got especially busy. They’re the part of the brain he calls the "attention area." The meditators had clear strong activity in their frontal lobes possibly from focusing on their task. He also saw the thalamus kick in. It’s a pea-sized
piece of the brain atop the brain stem that, among other things, sends sensory information to the frontal cortex, where much of our heavy thinking happens. Whatever was happening in meditation, the thalamus was creating a strong sense of it being real.
There were surprises elsewhere, in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that helps us orient ourselves in relation to things around us. Newberg discovered that the nuns and Buddhists had actually shut down that part of the brain, suspending their senses of space and time. It was then that they entered the peak of their transcendent experiences.
Has he found the soul? Newberg is still looking.
He concluded "Why We Believe" by saying we may never know all of why we believe. "It is the questions that give us meaning, that drive us forward and fill us with transcendent awe."
“Living Liberation - Meditation Training, and so much more" "It changed my life"Find out more
Welcome back! Keep updated - Subscribe to my RSS feed & Scroll Down to leave a Comment
Related posts:
- Meditate For A Bigger Brain A group of researchers at UCLA using high-resolution magnetic...
- Tibetan Buddhist Meditation – Treatment For Memory Loss? Normally when we see something, it is kept in...
- How God Changes Your Brain Mark Robert Waldman is an associate fellow at the...
- Acceptance Of Meditation Widens Meditation is becoming increasingly mainstream. A 2007 survey by...
I’ve always wondered the same thing. Why we believe what we believe? And does science even consider this question as relevant? After all, science is mainly the facts established with proofs. I wonder if “faith” would ever find a place in science.