Healing Prayer and the Brain: Not a Match Made in Heaven

Activity of the medial prefrontal cortex after psycho-spiritual healing (Baldwin et al., 2016).Everything we do and feel and experiencechanges the brain. Psychotherapy, juggling, taxi driving, poverty, reading, drugs, art, music, anger, love. If it didn ' t we ' d bedead. Why should prayer be any different? The trick is to accurately determine the structural or physiological changes that are unique to a specific activity. And when assessing the effectiveness of clinical interventions, how the changes compare to an adequately matched control intervention. Plenty of high profile studies have failed to do that, including a recent one onemotionally focused therapy.1 I feel bad about criticizing a study on theneural correlates of healing prayers. I ' m not one of thosesmug atheists who lord their intellectual superiority over the unwashed religious masses. Certain atheist organizationsclaim they ' re all about promoting scientific literacy and a secular worldview. But I think theseNew Atheists are detrimental to science literacy, since they alienate the vast majority of the population.So why am I blogging about a prayer intervention for depression? It ' s not to sneer at the authors. And it ' sespecially not to sneer at the participants, who were recruited from Houston-area churches. My interest is the unholy alliance between brain imaging and a psychological intervention with no control condition. As I ' vesaid before......neuroimaging studies of psychotherapy that have abso...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs