Boston Globe
 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.
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