How Muslim Prayer may Increase Alpha Waves in the Brain?

In this era of technology, different researches are carried on that how prayers and religious beliefs soothe the human brain and psyche. By keeping this thing in mind, a team of researchers from Malaysia did work on it that how alpha waves affect human brain while offering prayer and they found out a good connection between mind and body.

By keeping this thing in mind, Neuroscientists developed the brain scanning technology like magnetic-resonance imaging and electroencephalograms (EEG), to observe that how the brain reacts to religious or spiritual practice. But till now, this research is only limited to the diversity of religion. Christian’s piousness leads in the research regarding religion and mental health. Buddhism also conducted research while studying mediation and the brain. After Christians and Buddhism, Muslim started their research that how prayers affect human brain or increase Alpha waves in the human Brain.

Fortunately, a research team formed led by the Hazem Doufesh of the University of Malaya’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. Recently, Dr. Doufesh and his team members published a paer in the journal of Applied Psychophysiology and Feedback detailing their EEG study of a small group of Muslim volunteers in the act of praying.

During offering prayer, Muslim requires certain moves of bodily postures and reciting specific supplications. In Muslim prayers, there are fixed and repeated numbers of body postures for every prayer. Worshipers start out standing, bow at the waist unless their upper bodies are parallel with the floor, with their hands pressed against the knees. Then they return to a standing position (still reciting supplications) before kneeling down to the fully prostrate position – foreheads completely touching the ground. After prostration, worshipers sit up on their knees for a short time before returning to a final prostrating. The cycle then starts again. Every stage in this cycle of prayer lasts a few seconds, and the whole cycle lasts between 30 seconds and a full minute.

To study how these different postures might affect brain waves, the researchers fitted the volunteers with EEG monitors around the frontal, central, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions and asked them to complete a series of complete prayer cycles. The volunteers completed one full set of prayers (comprising several cycles) that included both body postures and verbal prayers, or supplications. Then they completed another set with all the postures, but no verbal prayers.

Doufesh and colleagues suggest that part of the reason for the increased alpha waves during prostrations is the fact that volunteers’ eyes were only inches from the ground, reducing the visual field. Alpha waves have often been associated with closed eyes or reduced visual input, so being forced to stare at only one small region of the floor may explain the prostration-alpha wave connection.

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