 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | God is great–for your mental, physical, and spiritual health. That’s the finding of this startling, authoritative, and controversial book by the bestselling authors of Born to Believe.
Based on new evidence culled from their brain-scan studies on memory patients and meditators, their Web-based survey of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, and their analyses of adult drawings of God, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, therapist Mark Robert Waldman, and their research team have concluded that active and positive spiritual belief changes the human brain for the better. What’s more, actual faith isn’t always necessary: atheists who meditate on positive imagery can obtain similar neurological benefits. Written in an accessible style–with illustrations highlighting how spiritual experiences affect the mind–How God Changes Your Brain offers the following breakthrough discoveries:
• Not only do prayer and spiritual practice reduce stress and anxiety, but just twelve minutes of meditation per day may slow down the aging process.
• Contemplating a loving God rather than a punitive God reduces anxiety, depression, and stress and increases feelings of security, compassion, and love.
• Fundamentalism, in and of itself, is benign and can be personally beneficial, but the anger and prejudice generated by extreme beliefs can permanently damage your brain.
• Intense prayer and meditation permanently change numerous structures and functions in the brain–altering your values and the way you perceive reality.
How God Changes Your Brain is both a revelatory work of modern science and a practical guide for readers to enhance their physical and emotional health and to avoid mental decline. Newberg and Waldman explain the eight best ways to “exercise” your brain and guide readers through specific routines derived from a wide variety of Eastern and Western spiritual practices that improve personal awareness and empathy. They explain why yawning heightens consciousness and relaxation, and they teach “Compassionate Communication,” a new mediation technique that builds intimacy with family and friends in less than fifteen minutes of practice.
Unique in its conclusions and innovative in its methods, How God Changes Your Brain is a first-of-a-kind book about faith that is as credible as it is inspiring. |
Average Customer Rating:   Deeper meaning than I expected I recently heard part of a radio interview with the author and his words made the book sound interesting. I ordered the book and began to read page by page beginning at the beginning. Since I found it interesting but deep, I began to flip around. I found other parts of the book quite profound such as a chapter entitled "Eight Ways to enhance Your Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Health." This chapter was one that I read and re-read and found it to be quite mind-opening. I will continue to flip, but would recommend this book for purchase. Great ideas, yet social dangers unseen. I've only read the first few chapters of this book. The title is a bit off. The idea the book really seems to promote is that certain exercises like meditation promote healthy mental activity, even if you don't believe in G-d.
Such spiritual activities as prayer, meditation, gentle stretching and breathing exercises--even when applied with a secular bent--do have benefits. Everyone should incorporate some of these exercises into their lives.
But believeing that feelings of sympathy, empathy and a sense of peace are somehow enough to solve a large portion of our social problems is in my opinion, a dangerous conclusion.
The trend to leave conventional religious practice, with it's restrictive rules and guidlines, is indicative of a lack of discipline in modern society. People are less interested in objective truth, and more concerned about feeling or experiencing something sensual, something that helps them deal with day to day problems.
The idea that spirituality is merely an experience to be interpreted as opposed to a series of absolute truths that can be depended on,come what may, eats away at the Judeo-Christian ideas that America was founded on.
If it continues, and such "experientialists" find their way into social sciences, the discipline of logic may be compromised. This isn't good for science or religion.
If religion or science are argued only in terms of experiences, something is lost. The proverbial frog in the warm water begins to boil, but to him, it feels great. Truth, absolute truth, can lead to conflict. Truth is offensive at times, because it causes us to see things about ourselves we don't want to see. But there is a freedom that comes in knowing that what you've based your life on is correct, based not on experience, but on evidence, and deductive reasoning.
Meditation and like or similar exercises may help someone handle daily experiences, and treat their fellow man with a little more humanity, and I'm all for that, and I'm sure that's why these practices are found in holy books. But there is no substitute for sound reason.
WOW!! This is the best thing since Freud - for all people - Muslims, Christians, atheists, Jews. Try the 12 minute meditation for a week. It works. How God Changes Your Brain This book is a real eye-opener into the world of neuroscience and its search for God in the brain. I enjoyed the writer's style and couldn't wait to finish it. I like it so much that it started out as a library book and I ended up buying my own copy! Measuring the Brain in a Meditative State It is informative and interesting to know what areas of the brain are stimulated by meditative activity defined as "God's action" but the book seems to loose its focus toward the end. However, I would recommend this book to anyone who will be reading the results of this type of research for the first time. |  |
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