Divining the brain

Andrew Newberg discusses what happens in our brains during prayer, meditation and mystical visions. Yet understanding the brain, argues the neuroscientist, does not close the book on the nature of religious experience.

Editor's note: This is the latest entry in a Salon series of interviews about religion and science with today's leading thinkers.

By Steve Paulson

Read more: Religion, Books, Prayer, Science, Interviews, Authors, Meditation, Books Interviews, Brains, Atoms and Eden, Science and Faith

Sept. 20, 2006 | Can we actually see God in the brain? Well, not exactly. But a few enterprising neuroscientists have found ways to detect and measure the varieties of our religious experience. Using brain scanning technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated during prayer and meditation. While they can't answer the biggest question of all -- does God exist? -- they are probing one of the deepest mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness.

They're also wading into a thorny issue in the science and religion debate: the connection between brain and mind. Most neuroscientists assume the mind is nothing more than electrochemical surges among nerve cells in the brain. But neuroscientists who study spirituality tend to be open to the possibility that the mind could exist independently of the brain. Some even question the materialist paradigm of science -- the idea that the only reality worth studying is what can be tested, quantified and reproduced. They wonder whether current scientific methods will ever be able to explain consciousness. But others are skeptical. Stephen Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience, recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd."

One of the pioneers in the new field of neurotheology is Andrew Newberg, a 40-year-old physician at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, who has just published a book, "Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth," written with his colleague Mark Robert Waldman. Over the last decade, Newberg has conducted a series of brain-imaging studies of various spiritual practitioners, including Franciscan nuns, Buddhists and Pentecostal Christians who speak in tongues. His lab research has brought some surprising -- and curious -- results. For instance, during his study of Pentecostals, Newberg was amazed to see one of his own lab assistants start to sing and speak in tongues. It turned out that she had been doing it as part of her own religious practice for almost 10 years. Newberg himself hasn't joined any organized religion, but he's clearly been influenced by various contemplative traditions.

Newberg uses an imaging technique called single photon emission computed tomography, which measures blood flow in various parts of the brain. More blood flow, of course, means more brain activity. In his studies, Newberg has found that there's no single part of the brain that controls all religious experience. In fact, a specific religious belief will shape a person's spiritual experience -- and what happens in his or her brain. And while his research falls short of proving the presence of God, it does show that engaging our spiritual selves can have profound effects on our biological selves, too.

I spoke with Newberg by phone about his brain-imaging studies, the nature of mystical experiences, and whether scientists will ever crack the mystery of consciousness.

Do you think the human brain is hard-wired for religious belief?

Well, I think the brain is structured in such a way that we can very easily have religious beliefs and spiritual experiences. But the problem with the term "hard-wired" is that it implies that someone or something did the hard-wiring. And I'm not sure that I can say that. When we look at how the brain is set up to help us understand our reality, it's very easy to see how we have different types of spiritual experiences and feelings of transcendence. And ultimately, this spills over into our ability to form religious concepts. So our brain is always asking those questions, which often wind up resulting in a spiritual or religious quest.

In your book, you say God may exist but we can only experience God through our brain. Can brain-imaging technology actually tell us much about the experience of the divine?

It certainly can tell us what happens in our brain when we have a religious or spiritual experience. For example, in our study of Franciscan nuns during prayer, our brain scans show what happens in the brain if they experience being in God's presence. What those scans don't prove is whether or not that experience was real in some sort of objective sense -- that God really was in the room, communicating with them. At this point in our technology, that is something we can't answer. Whether we will ever be able to answer it, I don't know.

You studied Franciscan nuns who had prayed for decades, and you also studied Tibetan Buddhists who'd meditated for many years. What happened when they came into your lab?

We found that the Franciscan nuns activated several important parts of the brain during prayer. One part was the frontal lobe. I've been particularly interested in the frontal lobe because it tends to be activated whenever we focus our mind on something. This can be very mundane, like focusing on a problem we're trying to solve at work. Or it can be focusing on a phrase from the Bible, which was happening with the Franciscan nuns. They would focus their attention on a particular prayer of great meaning, and they'd begin to feel a lot of unusual experiences. They would lose their sense of self. They would feel absorbed into the prayer itself. They'd no longer see a distinction between who they are and the actual prayer process itself. Some people call it a feeling of connectedness or oneness.

Another part of the brain that changes in the prayer state is the parietal lobe. This is located toward the back top part of the head. The parietal lobe normally uses our sensory information to create a sense of our self and relates that self spatially to the rest of the world. So it's that part of our brain that enables us to get up out of our chair and walk out the door. We've hypothesized that when people meditate or pray -- if they block the sensory information that gets into that area -- they no longer get a sense of who they are in relation to the world. They may lose their sense of self, and they feel they become one with something greater -- ultimate reality or God.

Do the Buddhists have that same sense of oneness when they meditate? Was the same thing happening in the brain, even though Buddhists don't believe in God?

We did see similar changes. In both prayer and meditation, we see a decrease of activity in this orientation part of the brain. So when the Buddhist meditators feel a blending in or absorption with the visual object -- in this case, they're doing a visualization technique -- we see a similar change. And it raises some very intriguing issues. How similar are these different practices? Are they associated with similar or different changes in the brain? When these practitioners had the same kind of experience -- a feeling of oneness or an experience of focusing the mind -- we saw very similar changes in the Buddhist meditators and the nuns. But one difference was the nuns actually activated the language areas of the brain. Of course, that made sense because it was a verbal practice. They were focusing on a prayer, whereas the Buddhist meditators activated the visual areas of the brain because they were focusing on a visual image -- a sacred object they would hold in their minds.

Next page: "We may really need to develop a new kind of science ... that has to do with subjective experiences"