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- The Atlantic
A devotee in a state of trance is calmed by volunteers at a Buddhist temple in Nakhon Pathom Province, Thailand.
Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters
LYNNE BLUMBERG
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Since everyday and spiritual concerns are variations of the same thinking
processes, Newberg thinks its essential to examine how people experience
spirituality in order to fully understand how their brains work. Looking at the
bigger questions has already provided practical applications for improving mental
and physical health.
Since then, hes looked at around 150 brain scans, including those of Buddhists,
nuns, atheists, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, and Brazilian mediums practicing
psychographythe channeling of messages from the dead through handwriting.
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In contrast, when practitioners surrender their will, such as when they speak in
tongues or function as a medium, activity decreases in their frontal lobes and
increases in their thalamus, the tiny brain structure that regulates the ow of
incoming sensory information to many parts of the brain. This suggests that their
speech is being generated from some place other than the normal speech centers.
Believers could say this proves that another entity is speaking through the
practitioner, while nonbelievers would look for a neurological explanation.
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8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - The Atlantic
Newberg believes everyone can benet from some type of meditation practice. If
one practice isnt working for an individual, she should try something else. As a
general rule, these practices lower depression, anxiety, and stress. He adds that at
Thomas Jeerson University in Philadelphia, where he is director of research at the
Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine, researchers have found that
meditation can improve memory and concentration.
Its debatable whether these practices are more eective when founded on religious
or spiritual beliefs. Dr. Dean Hamer, author of the book, The God Gene: How Faith is
Hardwired into our Genes, discovered that research subjects with a particular
variation of a certain gene were more susceptible to self-transcendent, spiritual
experiences.
In a lecture given at Marlboro College titled, Gays, God, and Genes, Hamer
compares the eects of this variation to an enhanced capacity for natural highs.
This spiritual tendency also depends on a persons environment, according to
Hamer, which can direct their innate spirituality to particular religious beliefs,
and/or steer them away from religion altogether. He says that science will never
replace spirituality because a reliance on facts will never have the same emotional
appeal.
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8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - The Atlantic
Newberg agrees that spiritual beliefs are inuenced by a persons genetics and
environment, and that meditation practices are more eective when they reinforce
a practitioners belief system. However, he says researchers are still investigating
whether religious beliefs in general make healthier and happier people. He
considers atheism to be a belief system as well, and says that a possible a mental
health benet of belonging to a religious denomination could be not just belief, but
the built-in social network.
Newberg had always wanted to be a medical doctor, but didnt realize he could
combine that with his interest in searching for answers to metaphysical questions
until he attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and worked with
Dr. Eugene d'Aquili, a psychiatrist whose research focused on religion.
Newberg has studied Eastern and Western thinkers to understand their diering
perspectives on whether or not an objective reality exists outside of human
perception. What fascinates him about mystical experiencesthe goal of many
meditation practicesare the reports of experiencing a higher reality that is more
real than everyday perceptions.
Newberg said its the only description that Ive ever seen where somebody will say
I got beyond my brain, I got beyond my ego self, I got beyond the subjective and
objective nature of the world; and then they see the universe, and they experience
the universe in a very, very dierent kind of way.
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8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - The Atlantic
He added, I think these experiences need to be taken very seriously. I think they
tell us something about the nature of reality and how we perceive that reality.
When Newberg scanned the brains of nuns and Buddhists undergoing mystical
experiences, they reported feelings of timelessness, spacelessness, and self-
transcendence. Newberg believes a cause of these feelings is the reduced activity
he saw in their parietal lobes, the orientation area of the brain responsible for
perceiving three-dimensional objects in space. A meditator may experience a sense
of oneness with all living things or unity because the reduced activity blurs the
perceived lines between the meditator and other objects.
When the parietal lobes are damaged, patients have distorted beliefs about their
own bodies and are sometimes confused about their spatial orientation to outside
objects. In an example from Why We Believe What We Believe, patients think one of
their own legs is not theirs, and have been found trying to throw this other leg out of
their bed. In his new book, Newberg cites a study led by Dr. Brick Johnstone that
found that damage to the right parietal lobe caused patients self-transcendent
experiences to increase.
Newberg suggests in his new book that mystical experiences are described as
blissful or ecstatic because they share many of the same neural pathways in the
parietal and frontal lobes that are involved in sexual arousal.
To take his scans, Newburg uses functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), and
single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) imaging. The book
Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, lists their technological
limitations. The authors, Drs. Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld, write that one
limitation of brain imaging is that researchers cant make a neat map of the brain
centers for dierent activities like phrenologists once did. Even if most people
process language expression in one particular area, this processing is highly
dependent on connections to other brain activities. The brain is also plastic, so if
the usual area for speech is damaged, other areas in the brain may reorganize and
take over the function.
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8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - The Atlantic
While locating the appropriate brain centers, researchers must also break down the
steps involved in a seemingly unied mental task. The authors provide a simple
arithmetic problem as an example. Researchers must consider that one section of
the brain enables a person to visually recognize the numbers, another section
registers the magnitude of the numbers, and a third section computes the sum. If
neuroscientists are trying to understand attitudes or emotions, they have to take
into account more complicated steps. Furthermore, the technology isnt advanced
enough to pick up all the rapid neural changes that occur during a mental process.
Asked about the technological challenges, Newberg said that its not easy doing
this research. However, up until the last 20 years, weve never been able to see
anything. So its certainly a vast improvement over nothing, but its still not nearly
as ideal as what we would like.
Supplementing the scans, Newberg and his team interview meditators about their
subjective experiences in order to get a better understanding of what is happening
to them physically. For this method, a challenge has been guring out precisely
what interviewees mean when they use concepts like God or spirituality. Newberg
has found that everyone denes God a little bit dierently even when they belong
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to the same religion. When describing spiritual experiences, some report that these
experiences enhance their religious beliefs, and others turn away from religion and
engage in individual practices.
Given the challenges of the technology and the multitude of beliefs and practices, I
asked Newberg if he ever gets overwhelmed.
"It's a little overwhelming. You sort of take one thing at a time and just proceed
slowly, and I try very hard not to get too far ahead of myself or too ahead of the
data," he said. "But I guess it's somewhat of a calling for me. I've always felt like
I've got to go down this path, and I'll keep going down it, and maybe someday I'll
gure something out that will really be helpful to everybody."
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