Divining the brain

This is fascinating. You're saying once you get past a few specific differences, the same kind of thing seems to be going on in the brains of the Buddhists and the nuns. Both have a sense of oneness and that oceanic feeling that the mystics have talked about for centuries, even though their metaphysical systems are quite different.

Exactly. And part of why I've been doing this research for the last 10 years is to see where the similarities are. I think one of the great equalizers, in many respects, is the human brain. If you go anywhere in the world and take a person's brain and slice it up and look at it -- as a lot of medical people do -- you will see a lot of the same basic structures and connections and functions.

Clearly one thing you've done is to show there's nothing delusional about spiritual or religious experience. This is a normal thing happening in the brain. But I'm wondering if there's anything especially spiritual about these experiences. Could an intensely pleasurable experience -- say, sex or great music -- produce similar brain activity?

To a certain extent, I think it can. When we look at how the brain works, it has a limited set of functions. So if one has a feeling of euphoria -- whether one gets that through sex or religion or watching your team win the championship -- it's probably going to activate similar areas of the brain. There's a continuum of these experiences. People can describe a religious experience as being anything from a mild sense of awe to a profound mystical experience, where the person changes fundamentally how they understand the whole world. Now, religious or spiritual experiences do seem to be among the more complex sets of experiences. When somebody meditates, it involves a lot of different parts of the brain. There's not just a religious part of the brain. And that makes sense when you look at the richness and diversity of these experiences.

But I think you're also asking one of the most important questions: Are we really capturing something that's inherently spiritual? This is a big philosophical question. If the soul or the spirit is really non-material, how does it interact with us? Of course, the human brain has to have some way of thinking about it. Perhaps the most interesting finding I could have would be to see nothing change on the brain scan when one of the nuns has an incredible experience of transcendence and connectedness with God. Maybe then we really would capture something that's spiritual rather than just cognitive and biological.

You also did a study of some Pentecostal Christians who speak in tongues. What happened when you hooked them up to your brain-imaging technology?

Well, this was a fascinating study for me personally. One of the problems I have with the meditation studies and the nun studies is that what they're doing is all internal. So you see them sitting in a room, but you're missing the big fireworks. It's a much more fascinating experience to watch people who speak in tongues. They're moving and dancing and making vocalizations that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. And we found some very unique differences from all the meditation states that we'd seen. We saw an actual decrease of activity in the frontal lobes. They are not really focusing their attention on the practice of speaking in tongues. They actually lose their attention. They feel they are no longer in control of what's happening to them. And we think that may be associated with this drop of activity in the frontal lobes.

When the Franciscan nuns prayed, they activated the language part of the brain. Was that true with the people who spoke in tongues?

We did not observe that. That also is intriguing. Speaking in tongues is a very unusual kind of vocalization. It sounds like the person is speaking a language, but it's not comprehensible. And when people have done linguistic analyses of speaking in tongues, it does not correspond to any clear linguistic structure. So it seems to be distinct from language itself. That's interesting because we did not see activity in the language areas of the brain. Of course, if somebody is a deep believer in speaking in tongues, the source of the vocalizations is very clear. It's coming from outside the person. It's coming through the spirit of God.

So what did you find most significant about that study?

The most fascinating result was that it represented a very different type of spiritual and religious state than what we saw during prayer or meditation. We saw very different changes in the brain. Different types of religious practices and beliefs seem to be associated with different changes in the brain.

I have to ask, do you meditate?

I don't do a formal type of meditation. A lot of why I got into this research area in the first place was because of my own exploration of how we understand reality. I was very intrigued by what our brain, what our mind could find out about our world. It started out as a very Western-based, scientific approach. But as I proceeded down this path, my own thinking became much more contemplative and, in many ways, became a meditation type of practice. So while I personally don't do a formal Tibetan Buddhist or Zen meditation, I do look at contemplative practices. And it's given me a better understanding of what people are actually doing when they engage in these practices.

We have to recognize the limitations of science. It's great for understanding that a certain medication is helpful for patients with a certain disease, but it may not be helpful for trying to crack the nut of human consciousness. And we may really need to develop a new kind of science -- or at least a new approach to science -- that would keep the strengths that science already has, but add a new layer to it that has to do with subjective experiences and contemplative approaches.

One thing that's difficult about this whole subject is the language we use. We've used words like "transcendent" and "mystical" and "spiritual." Do they all mean the same thing?

Well, throughout this discussion we've been talking about spiritual and religious experiences in the same way. And that may or may not be accurate. I've come to realize that everyone defines those experiences a little bit differently. So if I asked 15 people, what does spirituality or God mean to you, I would probably get a different answer from each person. But a lot of people will describe spirituality as having something to do with a sense of the self connected to some greater reality. Whether they ultimately call that a spiritual realm or some deeper interconnectedness of all things in the universe, there's that kind of similarity.

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