I'm currently in a class on human spirituality and we recently watched a video aired on National Geographic, hosted by Morgan Freeman entitled The Story of God. In the episode that I watched for class, he jumped around to several different cultures and talked to a certain person in each area about their religion and culture. At the end of the episode, the idea of Neurotheology was touched on and an experiment was conducted on Morgan Freeman to show the viewer the gist of what the research entails. The episode didn't go into much detail but I wanted to learn a little bit more...
I researched Neurotheology and came across this article:
Essentially, Andrew Newberg - the leading researcher in Neurotheology, has "studied the brain activity of experienced Tibetan Buddhists before and during meditation," and the image shows the results. There is increased activity in the frontal lobes, which is "responsible for focusing attention and concentration, during meditation". I think this is fascinating and I'm curious to know if all kinds of meditation - not just religious thought based meditation - would create this kind of spur of activity in the brain; for example, would meditation or thought on my work or on a piece I was in the process of creating have a similar effect on my brain?
I don't consider myself to be a religious person, but I personally find religion to be something that I'm fascinated with. I've come to realize that understanding religion and how it ties in to the different cultures that ultimately make up our world is one of the many pieces of the puzzle to ultimately understanding people and the way they think and understanding the actions they make.
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