How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation

The bestselling authors of How God Changes Your Brain reveal the neurological underpinnings of enlightenment, offering unique strategies to help readers experience its many benefits.
 
In this original and groundbreaking book, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman turn their attention to the pinnacle of the human experience: enlightenment. Through his brain- scan studies on Brazilian psychic mediums, Sufi mystics, Buddhist meditators, Franciscan nuns, Pentecostals, and participants in secular spirituality rituals, Newberg has discovered the specific neurological mechanisms associated with the enlightenment experience--and how we might activate those circuits in our own brains.
 
In his survey of more than one thousand people who have experienced enlightenment, Newberg has also discovered that in the aftermath they have had profound, positive life changes. Enlightenment offers us the possibility to become permanently less stress-prone, to break bad habits, to improve our collaboration and creativity skills, and to lead happier, more satisfying lives. Relaying the story of his own transformational experience as well as including the stories of others who try to describe an event that is truly indescribable, Newberg brings us a new paradigm for deep and lasting change.

Andrew Newberg, M.D., is the director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Why God Won’t Go Away, and his research has been featured in Time, Newsweek, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and on the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the BBC, and NPR.

Mark Robert Waldman is executive MBA faculty at Loyola Marymount University, where he teaches the NeuroLeadership program. He is a business and personal development coach and the author of twelve books, including Words Can Change Your Brain, coauthored with Newberg.