from Drudge:

Scientists find biological reality behind religious experience

Indonesian Buddhist monks meditate in front of an statue of the Lord Buddha during a ceremony at Borobudur temple in Central Java. Photo: AFP

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 reveals its activity at the moment of transcendence.

A pattern has emerged from Professor 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 unknown reasons, this region becomes a quiet oasis of inactivity.

"It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship," said Professor Newberg, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work appears in 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."

Professor Newberg and other scientists are finding that people's diverse devotional traditions have a powerful biological reality. During intense meditation and prayer, the brain and body experience signature changes, as yet poorly understood, that could yield new insights into the religious experience.

An example is a National Institutes of Health-sponsored clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that will study the effects of group prayer sessions among black women with breast cancer - the first such study.

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.

With meditative states, people seem to turn off what Professor Jacobs called "the internal chatter" of the higher, conscious brain. During meditation, researchers have observed increases in the activity of the "theta" brain wave, a type known to inhibit other activity in the brain.

Following a preliminary analysis of recent data, Professor Jacobs said he had observed inhibitory theta activity coming from the same area of the brain that contains the becalmed oasis during prayer.

Eventually, researchers hope to identify a common biological core in the world's many varieties of worship.

The Boston Globe

-- (@ .), May 09, 2001

Answers

A related and more in-depth article from Newsweek (found and posted on another thread by Debra)...

Is God all in our heads?

-- CD (costavike@hotmail.com), May 09, 2001.

Isn't there some part of some religion's ceremonies where the customers munch on stale bread and drink grape juice and pretend they're cannibals?

If Newburg is on to something, surely we can develop a drug that excites the appropriate part of the brain, and use *that* instead of cheap food? Man! Some good loud heavy metal in the background, we're talking out of this world! Get me to the church on time!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 09, 2001.

More religious bigotry, Flint? It seems you share the moral high ground of gay bashers, race baiters and sponsors of the Holocaust. Stand tall, Flint, and take your proud place in the halls of hatred.

-- The shadow (knows@gain.com), May 10, 2001.

Why, Hi there shadow, you interpid defender of religious dogma you. Heard any good prayers lately? Surely you can find some more interesting reaction to this brain article than to haul out and prop up the same tired empty personal attacks? There must be a better way to excite the old spirituality receptors than that, don't you think? DO you think?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 10, 2001.

I am completely comfortable with the biological and the mystical coexisting within all of us - that there is a neurological correlation for religious belief, spirituality, and paranormal phenomena.

Fascinating stuff, let's go full speed ahead with it, but...

If anything worries me it's wondering what are we going to be doing with this information?

All I hope is that the reductionist hotshots who work out the details better be informed by a broad range of minds from diverse disciplines.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), May 10, 2001.