How Prayer Affects Your Brain, Part 1 (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey Lisa. Hey Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's frontal lobe Friday.

Good morning my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren and I am

excited to be with you today because it's frontal lobe Friday.

We just heard Lisa say it. It's frontal lobe Friday and I'm so grateful that

we got through another week, the first week of 2024 and I'm going to give you

some some big news today.

I'm going to give you some exciting information from neuroscience and a little

bit of information from scripture in just in a few minutes, because this is

one of those tip of the iceberg things.

I've been researching and studying and learning and trying to bring something

to you from brain science and scripture and faith every day so we can smash

them together to help us change our minds and change our lives,

because that's how we become healthier and feel better and become happier.

And we're going to do all that today is I'm going to give you just this tip

of the iceberg of something we're going to be diving headfirst into in season

10 as we go deeper and deeper and deeper into connecting our spirits with our

bodies and our minds and the way that our brains work to make our lives work better.

Because that, my friend, is how you're going to be able to answer the one question I have for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a

place where the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together

with faith and everything starts to make

sense are you ready to change your life well this is

the place self-brain surgery school i'm dr lee warren and this is where we go

deep into how we're wired take control of our thinking and find real hope this

is where we learn to become healthier feel better and be happier this is where

we leave the past behind and transform our minds this is where we start Are

you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Let's get after it. Are you ready? It's Frontal Lobe Friday,

and today we're going to dive right

into a paper from the journal called Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Way back in 2017, May 24th, Sylvia Colber, Matthias Witte, Manuel Nenas,

and others wrote this incredible paper, and here's the title.

It's a long title. Are you ready?

Ability to Gain Control Over One's Own Brain Activity and its relation to spiritual

practice, a multimodal imaging study.

Just check that title out, Ability to Gain Control Over One's Own Brain Activity.

Now, what am I always telling you? The way to a happier, healthier,

more resilient, better life is to get your thinking under control.

And this paper looks using brain science and brain imaging at people's ability

to gain control over their brain activity and how that's related to spiritual

practice, particularly prayer.

I'm going to read you the abstract for this paper. There's some big words in here.

We'll break them down for you in just a minute. And I'm going to give you just

one thought from Jeffrey Schwartz, one thought from Lee Warren,

a couple of scriptures, and a little bit of information from this paper.

We're going to just drop that on you on Front of Lobe Friday as a little teaser

to some of the things we're going to get into in Season 10.

Season 10 we are going to geek out on the

brain science because i think i can show you not just

how god did a lot of things in neuroscience and not just how god did a lot of

things in your brain but maybe why if we can get the why we'll start really

coming alive because we'll see our creator in a whole new light okay it's going

to be amazing here's the abstract to this incredible paper.

I'm going to drop some big words on you. We'll break them down in a minute.

Spiritual practice, such as prayer or meditation, is associated with focusing

attention on internal states and self-awareness processes.

As these cognitive control mechanisms presumably are also important for neurofeedback,

we investigated whether people who pray frequently show a higher ability of

self-control over their own brain activity compared to a group of individuals who rarely pray.

All participants underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging and one session

of sensory motor rhythm neurofeedback training.

Individuals who reported a high frequency of prayer showed improved neurofeedback

performance compared to individuals who reported a low frequency of prayer.

The individual's ability to control one's own brain activity was related to

volumetric aspects of the brain.

In the low frequency of prayer group, gray matter volumes in the right insula

and inferior frontal gyrus were positively associated with neurofeedback performance,

supporting prior findings that more general self-control networks are involved

in successful neurofeedback learning.

In contrast, participants who prayed regularly showed a negative association.

Now, that's a big paragraph. Let me break it down for you. People who pray frequently.

Let me rephrase that. People who don't pray frequently. They call them LF,

or low frequency of prayer.

They have an inverse relationship, inverse relationship with brain activity.

In certain areas. So the individual ability to control one's brain activity

is related to how much volume you have in certain areas of the brain.

Here's this low frequency group. In the low frequency LF prayer group,

gray matter volumes, that's how much structural volume you have in your brain.

In the right insula, we did a whole episode about the insula recently and its

relationship to emotion and all that.

And the inferior frontal gyrus were positively associated with neurofeedback performance.

What does that mean? The more brain you have in that area, the better you're

able to perform in neurofeedback.

So people who don't pray very much, they found when they imaged them,

have more brain volume in the right insula and inferior frontal gyrus than people

who pray a lot. They have more brain volume.

And they theorize, these researchers, that that's the mechanism of of how these

people are able to perform better on neurofeedback performance with training, okay?

Now, the people who do pray a lot, interestingly, had a negative correlation

between gray matter volume and left medial orbital frontal cortex and their

neurofeedback performance.

In other words, the smaller, the people who pray a lot have smaller left orbital

frontal cortex volumes, and they perform better with neurofeedback than people

who don't pray. Now, why is this this interesting?

Why is this interesting? The orbitofrontal cortex is the area that's highly

involved in anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Jeffrey Schwartz, in his incredible book, The Mind and the Brain,

talks about how in 1992, a researcher named Lou Baxter at UCLA called the circuit

that contains the orbitofrontal cortex and its connections to the basal ganglia, the worry circuit.

They now commonly call it the

OCD circuit. When this circuit is working properly, here's what it does.

It results in a fine-tuned mechanism that can precisely modulate the orbital

frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus.

We've talked about the cingulate a lot. That's the gear shift that can keep

you stuck in grief or worry or fear or shame or anything you're stuck in.

The cingulate gyrus can be involved in that if it's not working properly.

They can fine-tune the circuit between the orbital frontal cortex and the anterior

cingulate gyrus by adjusting the degree to which the thalamus drives these areas.

When that modulation is faulty, as it is when OCD acts up, the error detector

centered in the orbital frontal cortex and anterior cingulate can be overactivated

and thus locked into a pattern of repetitive firing.

This triggers an overpowering feeling that something is wrong,

accompanied by compulsive attempts to somehow make it right.

Listen, here's what he's saying.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder have an extreme problem with the connection

of their orbital frontal gyrus to the thalamus and other areas.

They constantly think that something's wrong. Their brain is giving them a signal

that there's a problem, and they don't know what the problem is,

and they need to solve it. There's a bacteria here.

They forgot to wash their hands. They didn't flush the toilet.

That stove's going to catch a house on fire. There's something wrong.

They can't stop focusing on it. okay so obviously on

a less extreme version when people that don't actually have

obsessive compulsive disorder if you've got a problem with anxiety and compulsive

thoughts or you just can't turn your brain off at night the orbital frontal

cortex is involved in that okay now what these researchers i just read you the

paper the researchers have shown that people who don't pray very often,

have a higher volume in their right orbital frontal area,

their right subfrontal, their insula and inferior frontal gyrus,

and they can actually train themselves with neurofeedback.

These are normal people that don't have obsessive compulsive disorder, okay?

They can train themselves, they can be taught to use neurofeedback to improve

their thinking and perform better with a little bit of training, okay?

So in other words, God gave everybody the circuitry to be able to learn better

ways to use our minds, just like we talked about yesterday on Theology Thursday.

God gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater. He makes the sun shine on the wicked and the just.

He makes the rain fall on the good and the evil. God gives everybody what they

need to seek Him, as Paul said in Acts 17, and perhaps find Him.

God's given people the basic neural circuitry to be able to perform better,

even if they're not calling on his name, even if they're not praying,

even if they're not seeking him, even if they're not looking out for him. Why?

Because maybe if they get their thinking in better control, they'll be able

to hear his voice a little bit more clearly.

Maybe that's how those people find their way to him.

Once you become a praying person, or if you're blessed like I was to be raised

in a home of praying people, then guess what?

Your orbital frontal cortex has a lower volume. You start out with a quieter mind.

You have a better ability to focus and listen and connect and not get into those

freaked out states where you can't turn your brain off.

So this is the tip of the iceberg thing. Obviously, it's very little bit of information.

But we know from studying people who are stuck in obsessive-compulsive disorder

that they've got a problem with their orbital frontal gyrus.

And we know that praying reduces the volume and activity of that area of the brain. It calms it down.

The people who pray have better structural connections in their brain and they're

able to perform better because of that.

Now, Andrew Newberg, who's not a Christian, but he's interested in spiritual

practices. He's done a lot of the groundbreaking research on brain imaging.

He found that people who pray and meditate, even as little as a few minutes

a day, increase the volume of their hippocampus. And what does the hippocampus

do? We talked about it yesterday.

Hippocampus is the center that decides whether something needs to be managed

by the frontal lobe and get back in your control and you need to think about

it and decide how to respond to it calmly and then have a better approach to it.

Or it short-circuits and goes down to the amygdala and limbic system and freaks

you out and puts you into fight-flight-freeze.

The hippocampus gets bigger, more robust, more agile, and more resilient when you pray.

I can't think of a better thing to talk about on Frontal Lobe Friday than this.

Learning how to be in constant communication, to keep your Wi-Fi network turned

on, to connect it to your spirit.

That's how you get to this place. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing.

Give thanks in everything.

Don't quench the spirit. That's how you keep your brain turned on, my friend.

And now we've got neuroimaging to show that the involvement of Brabant's area

10, orbital frontal cortex, in the low frequency of prayer group,

they've got more volume on the right side.

They got a bigger structural area over there and they can train it and they

can learn how to calm their minds down. They can access that 10% happier.

They can access that significantly happier by just training their brains.

God gave them seed for the sower and bread for the eater. He gave people a way

to calm their minds and put themselves in a position where they can start learning

how to put some space in between stimulus and response.

He did that because he's a loving father. He cares about everyone.

He gave us all the basic neural circuitry to have a better life.

But he did it, Acts 17 says clearly, so that they would seek him and perhaps find him.

But when you actually try to get to the infinite level,

when you connect your frontal lobe and your orbital frontal gyrus and your thalamus

and your hypothalamus and your amygdala and your hippocampus,

when you connect all that to its creator and plug it into the network, guess what happens?

The parts that hurt you get smaller and the parts that help you get bigger.

Your orbital frontal cortex calms down.

Your hippocampus gets bigger and more resilient and more robust.

The synaptic connections between your hippocampus and your frontal lobes get stronger.

What you're doing, you're getting better at, you're learning how to pray without ceasing.

And friend, you're gonna start turning that volume knob down on all that beta

activity that's keeping you so frustrated and fired up.

And you're gonna start hearing a voice that says, hey, turn this way and not that way.

Hey, maybe you should pray about that. Hey, maybe you should forgive her. Hey, maybe you should.

Stop looking at that website. Maybe you'll start hearing that voice a little

more clearly. And this is the tip of the iceberg, okay?

There's so much more. There's so much more. We're understanding the how.

Neuroimaging is giving us the how much more clearly.

We're starting to understand that our brain is not a Newtonian physics thing.

It's not just about watching the apple fall out of the tree.

Our brain is a quantum creation, a quantum computer of immense power.

And we're just now starting to understand the beginnings of how it all works.

And it's starting to point to the idea that there's an unbelievable design here.

The physicists and the evolutionary biologists and the cosmologists are all

starting to have to shake their heads and acknowledge that there is way more

to this story than they thought.

See that Darwin and all those naturalists, they all thought that eventually

they would be able to say, okay, here it is.

Here's the entire package of how humans came to be and here's exactly what happens

because it's very simple.

We just came out of the sludge and we evolved over time with slow incremental

change and survival of the fittest and evolutionary advantages were passed on

and that's how it happened.

Well, guess what? In the 20th century, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger and

Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein and all those guys came along and said,

wait a minute, not so fast.

Quantum physics is something spooky and we're learning.

Time isn't as fixed as we thought and things don't happen unless they're observed,

and the more you observe a phenomenon, the more likely it is to occur,

and electrons can be entangled with one another across vast distances,

and they can communicate, and things can change faster than the speed of light,

and friend, the whole story is much more complex than we thought,

and that's why this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here on Frontal Lobe Friday, we're learning that if you pray,

your brain gets healthier.

If you pray, if you communicate with your spirit, if you keep yourself,

your Wi-Fi network turned on, get yourself out of airplane mode and stop thinking

that you have to do it all on your own.

And my friend, you're going to come alive. And as we wrap up this season of

the podcast in the next few days,

I'm just beside myself with excitement about where we're going to go.

You're going to become a master self-brain surgeon, and I'm going to teach you

the tools to change your mind and change your life.

I'm going to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

But self-help is not something you do by yourself.

Philippians 2.13 says, God works in you to will and to act according to His good pleasure.

He's doing it. The only part of self-brain surgery that you do yourself is to

admit to yourself that you can't fix yourself.

And that's why it's so exciting because we have a great physician.

He's going to help us change our minds.

He's going to help us change our lives as long as we're willing to start today.

Hey,

thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my brand

new book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon.

Remember, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today.

Music.