http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...879016,00.html
By JEFFREY KLUGER Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
(Edited to fit inside the 10k word limit on Gnet)
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. 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 it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)
Here's what's 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 don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")
It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."
That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind.
It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the 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, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.
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 lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further."
No matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, 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.
How Powerful Is Prayer?
First described 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. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. 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 the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. "The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways," says Newberg. There's no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm — and probably helps — to know that people are praying for you.
Faith and Longevity
If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God and the teachings of religion — which touch devout people at a far more profound level than mere pharmacology — ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. 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. People who fall somewhere between no churchgoing and weekly churchgoing also fall somewhere between in terms of mortality.
A similar analysis by Daniel Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life. To be sure, he also found that exercise accounts for three to five extra years and statin therapy for 2.5 to 3.5. Still, joining a flock and living longer do appear to be linked. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")
Investigators haven't teased out all the variables at work in this phenomenon, but Hummer, for one, says some of the factors are no surprise: "People embedded in religious communities are more likely to rely on one another for friendship, support, rides to doctor's appointments."
But even hard scientists concede that those things aren't the whole story and that there's a constellation of other variables that are far harder to measure. "Religious belief is not just a mind question but involves the commitment of one's body as well," says Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The sensory organs, tastes, smells, sounds, music, the architecture of religious buildings [are involved]." Just as the very act of coming into a hospital exposes a patient to sights and smells that are thought to prime the brain and body for healing, so may the act of walking into a house of worship.
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 1,500 people that he has been conducting since 1997. He has focused particularly on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also 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 has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what's going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And 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 don't.
Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms. It's the result, not the source, that counts the most.
With reporting by Alice Park and Bryan Walsh / New York
