Still Thinking – This is your Brain of Prayer

Dr Andrew Newberg has worked for many years developing a field of research called Neurotheology. This field of enquiry takes seriously contemporary studies on the human brain and the history of Christian and religious theology, particularly the mystical approach and tries to understand why human beings as so predisposed to ideas and experiences of “God”.

Attempting to bring a coherent approach to this discipline, Newberg produced a book in 2001 titled, Why God Won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief and more recently in 2009, How God Changes your Brain.   Both are fascinating reads, albeit a bit technical at times.  Simply put over a period of years, Newberg studied the brains of people in the act of meditation, prayer and visualizing religious experiences.  Using an Electroencephalography, (EEG) machine, he gathered data on the changes in particular areas of the brain when the subjects engaged in “spiritual” activities. He found that the parts of the brain that “lit up” during these experiments were associated with the limbic system.  

The limbic system is the part of the brain that contains the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus and limbic cortex. It is found on top of the brainstem. This system as a whole is responsible for our feelings of love, fear, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, pride and elation and the emotions needed to ensure survival including sexual pleasure and memory. The cerebral cortex lies above these structures. That’s the technical part, what is important is that this area is the oldest structure in the brain and it is the location of our religious and spiritual feelings.

When a person prayers or meditations the limbic system in the brain is activated and with sustained practice the individual can have two competing experiences, either a depth sense of calm and peace or a strong sense of union or oneness with God.  Newberg is quick to remind his audience that he is measuring only the human physiological response to an encounter or experience of the “holy”. This neither proves nor disproves the existence of God in the same way that he can measure a person’s response to eating a sandwich which neither proves nor disproves the existence of the sandwich.  But what it does do, perhaps for the first time, is to show that humans are predisposed to religious and spiritual experiences, beliefs and rituals and that our brains are in fact “designed” by evolution to be open to the holy, sacred and divine.

Dick Gross picked this up in the weekly article in the National Times some months ago. Gross, an atheist refers to the recent publication of the Oxford University project, Explaining Religion. He says:

Belief in the supernatural seems to have evolved to rule humanities heart and inhabit our breast… Rituals, conscience, notions of justice may have been introduced to the species through supernatural belief systems.  Thus faith might be an ever present part of the psychological landscape…

Of course this adds little to the life of the believer and in fact many, even in the Christian tradition, have moved beyond the craving for an interventionist/supernatural being of the type the atheists are fond of debunking.  The interest for me lies more in the ways in which Christian and religious practices can be bring about a meaningful life and encounter with what we call God.  It does seem that it is important that we should pay attention to several insights gain through studying the human brain.  They are:

1.        We all need rituals that connect us with our world and the “ground of our being.”  The practices that we do together, communion, worship, prayer, singing and general attendance at church gatherings do find a receptive place in our minds, “hearts” and lives.

2.        We should think about our faith.  Most studies suggest that religious thought and experience is not static, but rather evolving.  Our cognitive process and our emotional limbic system work together to produce healthy religion.

3.        The quest of the human mind and the processes of the brain developed over millions of years is progressing toward what theologians call the mystical rather than just rule based religiously which is more often the product of religious institutions and not of religious experience.  

~      Christopher