Sublime

Newberg has quite graphically shown that meditation and other spiritual practices strengthen the anterior cingulate while also calming the primitive amygdala.

Here’s what happens in your brain:

As Dr. Bill Cerbin, professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, says, “Humans are endowed with remarkable cognitive capacities, but one area where we are seriously limited is working memory.”

Our brains are always thinking about something. Because of this, the brain areas that turn off whenever we start to carry out a mental task are the regions that do whatever the brain does when we’re “not doing anything.” Together these regions make up the default mode network (DMN), whose discovery has helped us appreciate just how true it is that

Memory is shown to be not so much a library but more a repository of ready-to-run routines that enable our daily living.

In contrast to the deactivation of Broca’s area, another region, Brodmann’s area 19, lit up in our participants. This is a region in the visual cortex that registers images when they first enter the brain.

University of Virginia professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences Dr. Ed Kelly, and University of California, Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology Dr. David Presti, explain another significant finding: “The intensity of the psychedelic experience was significantly correlated with the magnitude of these decreases.”