New research suggests that spiritual thoughts and prayers have an enormous effect on a person's ability to heal or stave off disease. Called "psychoneuroimmunology," the idea is that thoughts affect your body.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson says you can change your brain with experience and training.
- "You can sculpt your brain just as you'd sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym," he says. "Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly."
It's called neuroplasticity. For years Davidson, who is at the University of Wisconsin, has scanned the brains of Buddhist monks who have logged years of meditation. When it comes to things like attention and compassion, their brains are as finely tuned as a late-model Porsche. Davidson wondered:
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than a decade. He has found that people who meditate, from Franciscan nuns to Tibetan Buddhists, go dark in the parietal lobe — the area of the brain that is related to sensory information and helps us form our sense of self. ....
...."This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world," he explains. "When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area."
Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.
Read More About This Fascinating Subject
Scientific Research on Prayer for Other People
Scientists -- including those at the National Institutes of Health -- are engaging in research to uncover whether a person's thoughts can affect another person's body. Centers around the world are tackling prayer and healing in a revolutionary way.
Patients admitted to hospital with heart problems suffer fewer complications if someone prays for them, according to scientists in the US.
The study, carried out at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, found that patients who received alternative therapy following angioplasty were 25% to 30% less likely to suffer complications.
And those who received "intercessory prayer" had the greatest success rate.
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OTHER ARTICLES OF INTEREST:
For Prayer Skeptics: Studies that Show the Health Benefits of Prayer
The Science of Prayer: Byrd’s Benchmark Study
