Welcome to day nine. This is our third and last day of this deeper dive into these different aspects. And today we're going to explore the some of the neuroscience related to contemplation. So, neuroscience is a relatively new multi disciplinary field of study that uses research in a variety of fields of science to study the brain and its functions. And some of the other disciplines that come together to make up neuroscience or biology, chemistry, anatomy and even the physiology of neurons and neural networks. So neuroscience is, as I said, kind of new and it's it's a hot topic right now.

Some of the things that are coming out of neuroscientific studies are absolutely fascinating and mind boggling. And you hear a lot about it, often, even in the media these days. with good reason, it's exciting research. I want to, with that in mind, say a word of caution, actually two words of caution. The first word is simply to state my own humility that I am not trained as a neuroscientist. What I'm trained is in theology and ethics, and kind of contemplation.

But what I'm going to offer you here is the results of my own curious study into neuroscience and the light that it can shine upon this human phenomenon of contemplation. The second word of caution, I want to say, is with regard to be aware of overdrawing conclusions from neuroscience or any science, scientists and really all good researchers are sort of careful about what claims can be made from the results of their research. And anytime we hear really large maybe seemingly too good to be true claims being made, especially if it's from the results of like one study, we should be extremely wary. And I'll give you an example. I recently heard this story about a longitudinal study that was done on heart patients. And they found in unexpectedly in their data that the people in this study who ate french fries regularly had died at twice the rate of people who didn't in the study.

Now, this led to headlines in the media, such as eating french fries doubles your chances of death. Now, the authors of this research were extremely careful to say that's actually not a good conclusion to draw from this study. And the way scientists talk about this in the you'll hear it a lot is that correlation is not causation. So correlation is two things that happen at the same time and that get picked up in the data of a study. But just because two things are correlated does Doesn't mean that one is causing the other. So correlation is not causation.

And I want to apply that to what we're doing here as well. Okay, so with that definition and caution in place, let's go into this a little bit deeper. So as I've done previously, we'll start with some foundational concepts or principles of neuroscience of contemplation. I want to start with the work of Dan Siegel. And this working definition of mind that he has proposed. He proposes this definition of the mind, and embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy, and information.

It's a simple statement, but it's there's a lot in there an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. So, mind here is distinguished by Siegel and others, and I think this is important. It's distinguished from brain so the brain For seagull and others, is the physical and embodied substrate out of which the mind emerges. The other thing to keep in mind here is that the brain is not limited to the gray matter in your skull. It's a neural network that has the kind of command and control center in your skull, but it is embedded throughout your entire physical body. So the brain is the substrate of the structure out of which the processes of mind emerge.

Another piece that Segal adds it's important is that this exchange of energy and information flow occurs both within and between persons and their environment. So within is an internal process and between persons in their environment. So mind is an open system. It's open to input from things that occur within and things that occur around and between people. And this becomes important Another foundational concept I want to touch upon is this distinction that we've all been familiar with between the left brain and the right brain. So kindergarten, you kind of learn right, the right brain is your creative side and your left brain is your linguistic rational side.

Well, neuroscience has kind of taken us deeper into this truth. So in the left brain, the less left hemisphere is a place of conscious awareness and intentional activity that uses language and reason and analysis and logic and tends to be more linear. And these processes in the left side of the brain, produce what is called an explicit sense of self. And by explicit, I don't mean that it uses dirty language, but rather that it's a consciously aware and available sense of ourself. The right brain includes these non conscious, emotional, symbolic, holistic bodied forms of being aware, that are often more nonlinear. And the right brain yields an implicit sense of self.

And so it's implicit here because it's not available for conscious recall. So Allan schore, who's one of the early researchers into this implicit right brain self, says that despite our culture's fascination with the power of the left brain, when it really comes to the deep understandings, and sources of human thought and emotion and behavior, the right brain implicit self is actually more foundational. This is huge, I think. And if we move this into the realm of contemplation, I want to suggest that silence and the contemplative practice is a way of getting us into the depth of that right brain implicit self. So let's keep peeling the onion here on the break. And mind and sense of self and memory.

So our sense of self, our psyche or our soul emerges from how we integrate our experiences and our memories into a coherent, integrated narrative through time. So that's a fancy way of saying that we are storytelling creatures, we understand both who we are, who others are, who the world is, even who God is, through the stories that we tell. So the Bible is made up of really interesting stories, I think. So let's recall left brain has the explicit memory and conscious awareness right brain implicit memory in the non conscious awareness. neuroscience has illuminated the way in which our memory is impacted in these different parts of our brain. In particular, highly stressful or traumatic events.

Release a whole flood of hormones. One of them that's been most researched is cortisol. It's sometimes called the stress hormone. And we know that these hormones literally change the way memories are stored in the brain and in the body. Because remember, the brain is not just your skull, it's your whole embodied network of neurons, specifically disintegrated chaotic memories that are stored in these non integrated ways through stress or trauma. Can and frequently do intrude upon those more conscious left brain processes like emotion regulation, moral deliberation, and free and rational choice and action.

So I talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I think we're going a bit deeper today. So deep within we can have these processes going on that we're not consciously aware of. And the contemplative silence takes us into those deep sources of memory and self out of which we create that narrative about our world. Now, I want to map Again with contemplation, and suggest that the silence of con contemplative practice and the consent that we offer to the divine indwelling creates a space into what St. JOHN of the cross calls the deep caverns of feelings in the soul jhana the cross here means our intellect or our reason, our will, or our ability to direct our action and our memory. And he says that in our contemplative practice as we let go and consent, those caverns of feeling those deeper parts of our solar emptied of attachments, and then they have an infinite capacity to receive the divine in dwelling.

Pretty interesting. So neuroscience can help us understand a little bit what's happening in those deeper caverns of feeling. Okay, so if memory is more of the internal aspect of what neuroscience sheds a light onto, it also has some interesting things to say. About the relational context of contemplation. And some of this work goes back to attachment theory in psychology that started in 1960s by john Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and others, and they discovered that what they call healthy, secure, autonomous attachment relationships, or what Dan Siegel calls attuned relationships where people feel felt and understood and respected and loved and cared for are relationships that promote integration and health. And this is interesting because the great mystics of the Christian tradition and other traditions describe this state of being in tune with an abiding awareness of union with all of reality, with the Divine Presence, with creation with others, with a spirit that sustains and infuses and connects all things.

And so I would suggest that the healthy attachment relationship with God also promotes this integration and health. And here's another place where some of our old images of God in the contemplative practice process sometimes have to be examined and even let go of, especially if those images do not foster a kind of healthy attachment if it's a overly judgmental or punishing image of God that we carry. And it's important to be patient, I think, with allowing that image to heal and transform and for a new and more compassionate, merciful, loving and correct understanding of who God is to emerge. I want to mention just a few correlations here between what happens in a contemplative practice and what neuro biological research has indicated. And I want to remind Every one of what I said at the beginning that correlation is not causation. I don't think that science can prove that God is sort of changing the soul.

But I think we can see some interesting correlations happening. So there's two different ways we can approach this. The first is what's sometimes called the gray matter. This is like the physical matter of the structures of the brain. Now just a mindfulness practice. So not yet contemplative prayer has been shown to create an increase in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is where we process our awareness of the external environment.

Similarly, it has shown to increase the size the physical structure of the insula, which is where we cultivate self awareness or what scientists would call proprioception literally means self self perception or awareness. They also note a decrease in the size of the amygdala, which is a sign region of the brain that triggers our panic or our fight or flight response. So it it decreases our panic button so to speak. Now specifically with contemplative prayer, Andrew Newberg has found an increase in the size of the brain that controls or processes, relationships, and language processing, and a decrease in the parietal lobe, which is the part of where we have kind of self conscious awareness. So that sense of losing oneself and the Divine Love can be perhaps imaged or seen in that decrease in the parietal lobe lobe. Now, there's also what neuroscientists would refer to the white matter.

And this is the density of the neuro pathways that connects different regions of the brain. Again, remember, the brain is not just in your head, it's throughout the entire body. So here's one really interesting one. Again, this was with just a mindfulness study. They found an increase in the neural pathway density between the left prefrontal cortex. So this is the part of the brain where we do our emotion regulation and rational thought, in the amygdala, which I mentioned before that flight or fight response.

So literally what they found happening in the brain with a mindfulness practice is you were strengthening that part of the brain that controls and tells the amygdala to say, hey, settle down, it's okay. You don't need to panic right now. Nobody freaked out. Interesting stuff. So as we wrap up these three days of a deeper dive into the theology and psychology and neuroscience of contemplation, I want to think holistically here for a minute about this. And I've heard some teachers say that we're not human beings having a spiritual experience.

When we Engage in this practices but rather we're spiritual beings having a human experience. And if I apply that here, I look at it this way. There's this basic human phenomenon in practice of contemplation that has developed in distinctive ways in the Christian tradition and another traditions. And we can learn about that process through shining, the methods and, and forms of research and inquiry, from theology and psychology and neuroscience onto these practices. So at the end of the day, these are offered really as maybe tools to help you understand what's going on to go a little bit deeper, but ultimately, really to support your practice because that's the it's the experience itself of the practice of the encounter with the divine of consenting. Over and over again, that is the important part from my perspective.

And I also want to keep in mind the bigger picture that contemplative practices can form one part of cultivating a healthy relationship with God, with others with one's environment and with oneself. It's not a magic bullet. In fact, if we discover in the process that there really is some deeper trauma or memories that come up, it would actually be I think, foolish to try to think that just sitting and contemplating is going to heal this all on its own. I think it can be a real boon to it. But we also need to keep in mind that we are social creatures and we need the help of others. And we may even need professional help from a therapist or a psychologist, a spiritual director, things like that.

Make up that part of this process as well. And so for these last few days, I want to explore a little bit more deeply that relationship between solitude and community that ultimately can lead towards finding a more healing narrative. But that's done, I think through both solitude of practice, and the way we engage with others in our community. And the cross is a symbol in the Christian tradition, obviously, of deep meaning. And one way we might think about it, is that the cross itself is integrating, right? It's integrating between that vertical line between the human and the divine, but it's also integrating on that horizontal plane of the human to human contact and the human and environmental contact with all of creation.

So a quick look ahead. I apologize going a little bit long today. But for tomorrow, I want to explore solitude and community. Look at the role of worship and liturgy in the contemplative journey. focus a little bit on The practices of love and justice that our contemplation and action, talk a little bit about inter spirituality and world religions, what's the relationship in Christian contemplation to other spiritual practices and religions. So that's a little bit of a look ahead.

Thanks again for being here. I am enjoying this and I hope that you are and I encourage you to continue with your practice and whatever form that is emerging.