A Book Review
by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
This well-documented research shows that nearly any meditation technique can be removed from its theological background to provide beneficial neurological and psychological changes. The authors also provide convincing evidence that only a few minutes of meditation, throughout the day, improves the functioning of the brain.
So why am I so excited?
This book was featured in Time magazine while covering research on spirituality and the brain.
Then it was featured in Oprah magazine,
Would you like to know why? Read on!
Based on:
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Brain-scan studies on memory patients and meditators,
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Web-based survey of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, and
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Analyses of adult drawings of God.
Authors Newberg and Waldman concluded that intense meditation alters our gray matter, strengthening regions that focus the mind and foster compassion while calming those linked to fear and anger. And you don’t have to believe in God to reap the benefits.
Most important, this evidenced based book is written in an accessible style with illustrations highlighting how spiritual experiences affect the mind. The authors “talk” neuroscience in terms anyone can grasp.
How God Changes Your Brain offers breakthrough discoveries.
The authors:
- Include eight ways to keep your brain physically and mentally tuned-up.
- Conclude with a large assortment of simple, well-tested meditation techniques to help any reader, of any religious or nonreligious persuasion, to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression while enhancing cognition,memory, and greater sensitivity and empathy toward one’s self and others.
- Provide an original meditation exercise that can be used when dialoging with others. It takes fifteen minutes to learn, and their research shows that it improves compassion and social intimacy by 11%. They also include nearly a dozen ways to quickly resolve interpersonal conflicts.
In addition, they:
- Refer to a “war” between beliefs and disbeliefs, and assert that any religious concept generates both anger and compassion in virtually everyone’s brain.
- Describe a new study showing how a 12 minute chanting meditation practice improved memory in older people with mild cognitive impairment (a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease)in less than 8 weeks. They also show you how to create your own “brain enhancement” exercise program.
- Show how different parts of the brain create different perceptions of God. They also discuss how different neurochemicals and drugs alter spiritual beliefs and realities.
- Display that, for most people, God is more of a feeling than an idea, that everyone’s spiritual experiences are unique, and that mystical experiences often generate long-lasting states of unity, peacefulness, and love.
- Collected adult drawings of God and compared them with pictures drawn by children. Their findings: the most sophisticated drawings are made by liberal believers, atheists, and agnostic college students.
- Show that a previously unrecognized and large segment of Americans maintain a mystical and loving vision of nature, God, and people.
- Point out the neurological dangers of hostility, fear, authoritarianism, and idealism, and they suggest that we all have a fundamentalistic and an atheistic mentality hardwired in the brain.
