Spirituality and Brain Health

Spirituality is one of the five pillars of my Brain Health Lifestyle® and the focus of this article. Spiritual health is critically important and is nurtured from both earth-bound activities and from our relationship with God. 

Spiritual health is not a typical course taught in school or medical school. Nonetheless, I realized after 30 years of intensive study of brain and behavior that a “medical approach” will not provide answers necessary to realize complete health. It was this realization that prompted me to turn to the Bible for answers.

Spiritual health achieves internal peace, harmony or balance that helps us to be present without a past or future focus. It is what superior athletes call “being in the zone.” There is a wonderful sense of being grounded with a keen appreciation for our “here and now” without worry and concern about what may have happened or what we imagine will happen. 

Some typical earth-bound therapeutics that help produce inner peace, harmony, and balance include deep breathing exercises where the focus is more on the extended exhalation rather than the inhalation. Americans live in the “inhalation streams of life,” and it is why so many of us are anxious, tense, and worried. Other therapeutics include yoga, meditation, daily prayer, mindfulness practices, exercise, interaction with nature, engaging with rhythms such as listening or watching the waves of the sea, the sound of the wind, or tones of music. 

Despite our knowledge of these earth-bound therapeutics and how they can help us promote health, we tend not to apply them consistently. Even our pharmaceutical agents prescribed to alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression have not yielded results some expected. This does not mean these interventions are not important or useful; it simply means they have not slowed the rise in levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness at all ages and that something is missing! My message is “it will be okay,” because of reasons more powerful than us.

Many of us are not feeling complete or “whole” and are searching. There is a strong relationship between the brain and both spiritual and religious practice. The brain is changed in a positive way when we engage in such practice with internal peace realized. Interestingly, monks or nuns engaged in deep meditation or prayer while lying inside a brain scanner state, “I feel one with the world.” This is precisely what meditation and daily prayer over eight weeks can achieve as the parts of the brain that typically differentiate your outside world from your inside dissolves. 

As my study of this relatively new area, known as “neurotheology” intensified, I began to question what is meant by “mind” and is it different from or simply a product of our brain? Many in the neurosciences over the past several hundred years have accepted a “mechanistic” version of the brain which means every behavior has a specific set of cells responsible for it. I too believed the mind was a byproduct of complex brain function. I now believe, like a growing number of neuroscientists, that the mind is distinct from the brain. 

Research on babies who survive and live without a complete brain, persons who have their corpus collosum (bridge of cells connecting the two hemispheres) severed to treat epilepsy so that their two hemispheres no longer communicate, conjoint twins (born with two heads attached, one brain, but two independent belief systems), severe brain damage including late-stage dementia, and even patients who are in coma, all continue to demonstrate free will and belief. That is, while these conditions limit one’s ability to engage in basic behaviors, the damaged brain does not stop the ability to exercise free will or to process. It is one thing to be able to state what two plus two is-it is something very different to define the role and meaning of arithmetic. The former can be mapped onto the brain, the latter cannot. Neuroscience has not identified the brain region for free will or the “mind.” So where is it?

The mind is distinct from the brain. It is capable of being a witness to oneself and to express free will or decide. As such the mind can be nurtured in a way that promotes self-esteem, internal peace and a belief that no matter the challenge, all will be okay. It remains conscious and processing despite brain damage or even brain death. The mind is what religion calls the “soul” and maybe what others call “spirit” or “energy.” We have learned from research that persons in coma process, and many are hearing and sensing what is going on around them. Indeed, hospitals, where patients in coma are treated, now follow protocols to be vigilant about what staff says as the patient will process it!

Perhaps even more striking and mysterious is the burgeoning research on “near death experiences” (NDEs). Pam Reynolds is the only cited medical case (1991) that involved controlled death. The only way to correct her terminal condition of a discovered aneurysm at the base of her brain was to place her body into hypothermia, stop her heart, and blood flow to her brain for 30 minutes. She also had implants that produced a loud sound placed into her ears to demonstrate any audio processing via EEG-the absence of EEG waves established her brain was not processing sound. She was in simple terms “dead” for 30 minutes which was the maximum time for the surgeon to clip and remove the aneurysm.  All this was performed by over 15 doctors and nurses and was audio and videotaped. Upon recovery after her body and brain were resuscitated, Pam described in detail her surgery. She described the communication of the staff, the tools used, the song (“Hotel California”) that was played during the surgery for which she was not pleased, and she was above looking down at her body, hovering over the lead surgeon’s shoulder. She also described rising quickly into a bright light and out of the surgical suite where she felt peace and met family members who had died years earlier. She detailed being able to see in ways not understood on earth and traveling so fast that she got to distances thousands of miles away in a second. She also noted being told she needed to return to her body, which she did, and described how cold it was upon entering her hypothermic body. 

This case is well documented and controlled in that she did not suffer an acute and unexpected death like the typical NDE. Her death was caused by medical decisions in a controlled way necessary for her aneurysm to be treated. Her ability to describe her experience, including exact details of what occurred inside the surgical suite, cannot be explained. It is clear, however, that despite brain death, she had consciousness, perhaps enabled by our mind or soul that exists beyond the body!

Pam Reynold’s story is nearly identical to the thousands of independent documented NDE cases, only the latter involve unexpected and sudden death such as a motor vehicle accident in which the person is declared dead only to come back to life. The NDEs also involve descriptions that are peaceful and loving with forgiveness and a desire not to return to earth. Indeed, the detailed descriptions tend to correspond to St. John’s writings in Revelation. One other consistent outcome for those who have experienced an NDE is they are changed for the better. That is, many of these persons no longer fear death or have any anxiety. They even make career changes including starting new religious ministries and churches. Their value systems are different from prior to the NDEs, they are described by friends and family as different, and this can cause difficulties with their relationships.

Our spiritual health is important and one that can take us beyond the earth-bound. Our belief in God, religious practice, prayer and the lessons of the Bible that teach love, forgiveness, humility, faith, hope, compassion and kindness are all brain health promoting. Our belief in and our work at nurturing a closer relationship to God is also an effective practice to alleviate anxiety, sadness, and loneliness. It is, after all, relational in nature. It is perhaps why one of the leading messages in the Bible is to “not be anxious and to not fear.” 

We are empowered to nurture our mind using the health promoting ways described in this article as the mind is distinct but related to our brain health. Such daily “mind-work” can promote your brain health and serve to remove or alleviate earthly worries and anxieties. 

As a clinician interested and invested in your brain health, I promote all five pillars of the Brain Health Lifestyle® and spiritual health is always a strong focus.