INTERESTING: Do human brains synchronize during empathic connection?

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

<<FROM TWITTER>>
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-05-09>> 

https://x.com/TeeplesCY/status/2052951182025588797?s=20

Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY

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Someone praying for you in another building can change your brain in real time. There is a study that proves it.

Researchers at North Hawaii Community Hospital placed 11 people inside fMRI scanners, fully isolated. In a separate building, spiritual leaders who knew them personally sent focused intentions toward them at random two-minute intervals. The receivers had no way to know when. Their brains lit up at the exact moments the senders focused on them. Specific regions associated with attention and awareness activated on cue. The odds of this happening by chance were less than one in seven thousand.

Most people have never heard of this. Here are three more.

Hand-holding and pain. Researchers placed 22 couples under EEG caps. When the woman was in pain and her partner held her hand, their brain waves synchronized. The more empathy he felt for her, the more their brains coupled. The more their brains coupled, the more her pain decreased. Touch combined with focused care produced a measurable analgesic effect. The lead researcher got the idea while holding his wife’s hand during the birth of their daughter.

Two brains in shielded rooms. A Mexican neuroscientist named Jacobo Grinberg ran a series of experiments at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Two participants meditated together for 20 minutes. Then they were placed in separate electromagnetically shielded rooms more than 14 meters apart. One participant was shown 100 random flashes of light. The other, hooked to an EEG with no sensory contact of any kind, registered matching brain-wave responses one out of every four flashes. Pairs who had not bonded showed nothing.

Group prayer. Andrew Newberg at Thomas Jefferson University has spent more than two decades scanning the brains of praying nuns, meditating monks, and chanting Sikhs. His imaging work shows a consistent pattern. The frontal lobes activate. The parietal lobes quiet. The effect amplifies in groups. Brains in shared prayer entrain to one another the way two pendulums swinging in the same room eventually fall into the same rhythm.

These studies measure what physically happens to the human nervous system when people focus caring attention on each other, in the same room or at a distance. The findings are consistent across labs, methods, and decades.

The basic finding, that human brains synchronize during empathic connection, is now mainstream neuroscience. Newberg alone has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers.

People have been doing this for thousands of years and calling it prayer. Christians alone offer a window into the variety. Latter-day Saints kneel as families. Catholics pray the rosary. Protestants join hands in prayer circles.

What is actually happening when you pray? On the imaging, something measurable. On the EEG, something synchronized. On the pain scale, something diminished.

Prayer works.

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Never heard of this before.

Like most of the “factoids” that cross the inet on XTwitter, Book of Faces, or other social media, I have no first hand knowledge of it’s “truth”.

YMMV

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BIGOTRY: Maybe this is how Catholics should react to Gooferment diktats at every opportunity?

Sunday, January 2, 2022

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/austrian-catholics-launch-public-rosary-in-response-to-lockdowns

DECEMBER 14, 2021Austrian Catholics Launch Public Rosary in Response to Lockdowns
JENNIFER BRYSON

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Amid waves of highly restrictive lockdowns and a proposed universal COVID-19 vaccine mandate to start February 1, tensions in Austria, where I live, are on the rise. But in late November, a new light of hope appeared on the horizon, just in time for Advent. Louis-Pierre Laroche, a wine merchant and father of eleven, issued a call to pray the rosary with others in public, for Austria. Exhausted from the political responses to COVID offering just ever-increasing restrictions, suffering economically, isolated by the lockdowns, frightened and dismayed by the prospect of a universal vaccine mandate, Laroche’s call is resonating with Austrians eager to join in.

Weekly, on Wednesday evenings since the end of November, all over Austria people have started to gather in public to pray the rosary together as part of the Austria Prays initiative. The call is simple while also profound: “Pray for Austria!” every Wednesday night, in public, as a flyer explains, “so that our country, that is currently in one of the most serious crises in its history, will be entrusted to the Mother of God, and to ask for her intercession for all citizens.”

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MLK, echoing Ghandi, gave us the key to resistance to tyranny.  Peace quiet non-cooperation.  (Like 4 years old Daniel has taught me, no one can make ANYONE do what they don’t want to do.  They can only hurt or kill you.  They still won’t do what you want.)

I’d like to see more peaceful resistance to tyranny.

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POLITICAL: “We’re all Catholics now.” — Mitt Romney

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

ere’s some discussion of the issue of the Obama mandate and a quote I hadn’t heard before.

http://intellectualoid.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/breaching-the-wall/

Tipsy Teetotaler
Sensitively dependent on initial conditions.

Posted by: readerjohn | May 26, 2012
Breaching the Wall

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I’m starting to entertain the thought that a litmus test for bad guys versus good guys is that the former want to limit religion by arbitrary state redefinition, the latter to limit government to the terms of the Constitution.

I’ve been concerned with religious freedom pretty keenly since well before I set foot in law school, and I know that this issue is one where, whatever his other defects, Romney stands in stark contrast to Obama and his administration. “We’re all Catholics now.”

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I think that he’s hit the nail on the head.

Limit Gooferments; not people!

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