This is Your Brain on Prayer and Meditation

Quotes from “Prayer May Reshape Your Brain ... And Your Reality," by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR (May 20, 2009):

"The more you focus on something — whether that's math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain...What we need to do is study those moments where people feel that they're getting beyond their brain, and understanding what's happening in the brain from a scientific perspective, what's happening in the brain from their spiritual perspective..."

~ Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than a decade.

"It's as if the present moment expands to fill all of eternity, that there has never been anything but this eternal now."

~ Michael Baime, a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Tibetan Buddhist who has meditated at least an hour a day for the past 40 years.

"You can sculpt your brain just as you'd sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym. Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly."

~ Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin

[Thanks Connie! Thanks Pete!]

Choices and Consequences

“We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work. We choose who we will be the next moment, in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves.”

~ Michael Merzenich, Professor Emeritus, University of California at San Francisco; Chief Scientific Officer, Posit Science

“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

"The art of letting thing happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key to opening the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace."

~ Carl Gustav Jung

Train Your Mind

"We have no idea how much plasticity there really is in the human brain until we see what intense mental training, not some weekly meditation session, can accomplish. We've gotten this idea, in Western culture, that we can change our mental status by a once-a-week, forty-five minute intervention, which is completely cockamamy. Athletes and musicians train many hours every day. As a neuroscientist, I have to believe that engaging in compassion meditation every day for an hour each day would change your brain in important ways. To deny that without testing it, to accept the null hypothesis, is simply bad science."

"I believe that neuroplasticity will reshape psychology in the coming years. Much of psychology had accepted the idea of a fixed program unfolding in the brain, one that strongly shapes behavior, personality, and emotional states. That view is just shattered by the discoveries of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity will be the counterweight to the determanistic view (that genes have behavior on a short leash). The message I take from my own work is that I have a choice in how I react, that who I am depends on the choices I make, and that who I am is therefore my responsibility."

Richard Davidson, Ph.D University of Wisconsin-Madison quoted by Sharon Begley in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. [From Kit]