Researchers from the University of Utah designed an experiment to see what happens when people think spiritual thoughts.

Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuro-radiologist at the University of Utah says religious neuroscience is a young field. Very few studies have been undertaken.

The researchers found experiences believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent link to the brain's reward centre.

This part of the brain's medical name is nucleus accumbens.

The frontal attentional, associated with focused attention, and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, also engage when believers face spiritual stimulants.

The experiment involved scanning the brains of 19 devout young Mormons as they thought about God.

Each of them had to complete four tasks designed to evoke spiritual feelings, while their brains were monitored by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The study participants watched a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial statements and prayed for six minutes.

They also read scripture for eight minutes, read religious quotes for eight minutes and watched videos of "Mormon Messages" produced by the Latter Day Saints Church.

During the tests, the participants had to either rate their spiritual feelings on a scale of one to four, or press a button when they had feelings of spirituality.

"When our study participants were instructed to think about a saviour, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded," the study's lead author Michael Ferguson said.

Ferguson is a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Utah.

The research report noted: "based on fMRI scans, the researchers found that powerful spiritual feelings were associated with activity in the area of the brain associated with processing reward. "

The researchers say this section of the brain is also stimulated by love, sex, drugs and gambling.

About 5.8 billion people world wide claim affiliation to a religion.

Source

• Miami Herald
• Metro
• Daily Mail Australia
• Image: www.open.edu

A worker at the Kaiser Aluminum plant, the patient had slipped and fallen into a vat of 950-degree molten aluminum up to his knees.

Ewin did something that most would consider strange at best or the work of a charlatan at worst: He hypnotized the burned man.

Without a swinging pocket watch or any other theatrical antics, the surgeon did what's now known in the field of medical hypnosis as an "induction," instructing the man to relax, breathe deeply, and close his eyes.

He told him to imagine that his legs—scorched to the knees and now packed in ice—did not feel hot or painful but "cool and comfortable." Ewin had found that doing this—in addition to standard treatments—improved his patients' outcomes.

And that's what happened with the Kaiser Aluminum worker.

While such severe burns would normally require months to heal, multiple skin grafts, and maybe even lead to amputation if excessive swelling cut off the blood supply, the man healed in just eighteen days—without a single skin graft.

As Ewin continued using hypnosis to expedite his burn patients' recoveries, he added another unorthodox practice to his regimen: He talked to his patients about anger and forgiveness.

He noticed that people coming into the ER with burns were often very angry, and not without reason. They were, as he put it, "all burned up," both literally and figuratively.

Hurt and in severe pain due to their own reckless mistake or someone else's, as they described the accident that left them burned, their words were tinged with angry guilt or blame.

He concluded that their anger may have been interfering with their ability to heal by preventing them from relaxing and focusing on getting better.

"I was listening to my patients and feeling what they were feeling," Ewin told me. "It became obvious that this had to be dealt with.

"Their attitude affected the healing of their burns, and this was particularly true of skin grafts. With someone who's real angry, we'd put three or four skin grafts on, but his body would reject them."

Whenever a patient seemed angry, Ewin would help them forgive themselves or the person who hurt them, either through a simple conversation or through hypnosis. Continue reading

Sources

• Megan Feldman Bettencourt, from her book Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World, in Salon.
• Image: Michael Hyatt

The $50 billion includes not only the lost productivity and income of those with the problems, but the indirect costs to families of caring for affected people as well as the drain on the legal, health and policing systems.

Addiction is defined as compulsive seeking and using that has behavioural consequences. It is not about choice. Many people attempting to end an addiction suffer chronic relapses.

While the problem is evidently enormous, there is cause for optimism. Advances during the past 20 years in neuroscience - the study of the brain and nervous system - provide reason to believe the treatment of addiction might be poised for a breakthrough.

"Addiction is a brain disorder, a brain disease. Addiction is about it not being a choice. Addiction is about compulsive use, or a compulsive behaviour, even knowing the negative health and social consequences. So the concept of 'just say no' does not really apply here.

"It is this compulsion to do it even if you have been told and you know and can even enunciate the risks and problem." People can be addicted to alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, prescribed pain or sedative medication, and also to behaviours, including gambling and excessive food intake. Currie says Australia has focused on psychological and other counselling to support addicts, and been slow to the point of sclerotic in understanding, let alone embracing, medical treatments". Continue reading

Sources

• Michael Short in The Age
• Image: Facebook
  

Michael Short is editor of The Zone. He also writes editorials and columns.