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The Biology Of Belief

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Ashish Vachhani
Ashish Vachhani

The document discusses how spirituality and religious practices can positively impact brain function and health. It describes how meditation and prayer activate regions of the brain like the frontal lobes and parietal lobe. Studies have shown religious people have lower risks of death and better health outcomes for illnesses like HIV. Fasting can induce feelings of clarity and euphoria due to chemical changes in the body. Prayer has also been shown to help heart patients recover better. The placebo effect demonstrates how beliefs and expectations can influence health. Overall, regular religious service attendance, social support from faith communities, gratitude, and finding meaning in life are associated with reduced risks of depression and longer lifespans.

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The Biology of Belief
Science and religion argue all the time, but they increasingly agree on one thing: a little spirituality may be very good for your health.
Which part of the brain particularly concerning matter of faith? If youve ever prayed so hard that youve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, thats your parietal lobe at work . If youve ever meditated so deeply that youd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, thats your parietal too .
Spiritual Amusement park There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: Your thalamus plays a role As do your frontal lobes But its your parietal lobe a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input that may have the most transporting effect.
Heres what Surprising A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who dont attend. People who believe in a loving God far better after a diagnosis of illness than people who dont believe in god.
Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief says, spirituality predicts for better disease control. Your viral loads goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol a stress hormone go down first.
Its All in Your Head Newbergs work of past 15 years, the author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain , he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people.
When people engage in prayer, its the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During the very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings.
Experimental evidences Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators those with 15 years of practice or more appear to have thicker frontal lodes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit as asymmetry in the thalamus- a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills.
Better functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one stud, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.
Take Fasting Why do we fast? One of staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. This fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria.
This in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, its being achieved. May be it is, but theres also chemical legerdemain at work. There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting, says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Childrens Hospital in Boston.
How powerful is Prayer? For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. In 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not.
Wonder Drug First describe in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared that drug ineffective, and the patient died.
Faith and Longevity One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week.
A similar analysis by Danial Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the university of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life.
Neal Krause, a sociologist and public health expert at the university of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1500 people that has been conducting since, 1997. He found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for whats going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which itself a predictor of health.
In another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who dont.

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The Biology Of Belief

  • 1. The Biology of Belief
  • 2. Science and religion argue all the time, but they increasingly agree on one thing: a little spirituality may be very good for your health.
  • 3. Which part of the brain particularly concerning matter of faith? If youve ever prayed so hard that youve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, thats your parietal lobe at work . If youve ever meditated so deeply that youd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, thats your parietal too .
  • 4. Spiritual Amusement park There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: Your thalamus plays a role As do your frontal lobes But its your parietal lobe a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input that may have the most transporting effect.
  • 5. Heres what Surprising A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who dont attend. People who believe in a loving God far better after a diagnosis of illness than people who dont believe in god.
  • 6. Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief says, spirituality predicts for better disease control. Your viral loads goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol a stress hormone go down first.
  • 7. Its All in Your Head Newbergs work of past 15 years, the author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain , he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people.
  • 8. When people engage in prayer, its the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During the very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings.
  • 9. Experimental evidences Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators those with 15 years of practice or more appear to have thicker frontal lodes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit as asymmetry in the thalamus- a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills.
  • 10. Better functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one stud, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.
  • 11. Take Fasting Why do we fast? One of staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. This fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria.
  • 12. This in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, its being achieved. May be it is, but theres also chemical legerdemain at work. There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting, says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Childrens Hospital in Boston.
  • 13. How powerful is Prayer? For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. In 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not.
  • 14. Wonder Drug First describe in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared that drug ineffective, and the patient died.
  • 15. Faith and Longevity One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week.
  • 16. A similar analysis by Danial Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the university of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life.
  • 17. Neal Krause, a sociologist and public health expert at the university of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1500 people that has been conducting since, 1997. He found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for whats going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which itself a predictor of health.
  • 18. In another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who dont.