Neurotheology

How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality

Andrew Newberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546775
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Psychology of Religion

Religion is often cast in opposition to science. Yet both are deeply rooted in the inner workings of the human brain. With the advent of the modern cognitive neurosciences, the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena has become far more sophisticated and wide-ranging. What might brain scans of people in prayer, in meditation, or under the influence of psychoactive substances teach us about religious and spiritual beliefs? Are religion and spirituality reducible to neurological processes, or might there be aspects that, at least for now, transcend scientific claims?

In this book, Andrew Newberg explores the latest findings of neurotheology, the multidisciplinary field linking neuroscience with religious and spiritual phenomena. He investigates some of the most controversial—and potentially transformative—implications of a neurotheological approach for the truth claims of religion and our understanding of minds and brains. Newberg leads readers on a tour through key intersections of neuroscience and theology, including the potential evolutionary basis of religion; the psychology of religion, including mental health and brain pathology; the neuroscience of myths, rituals, and mystical experiences; how studies of altered states of consciousness shed new light on the mind-brain relationship; and what neurotheology can tell us about free will. When brain science and religious experience are considered together in an integrated approach, Newberg shows, we might come closer to a fuller understanding of the deepest questions.

Chapter One

NEUROTHEOLOGY AND THE HAPPY PRISON OF THE BRAIN

In many ways, neurotheology begins with the human brain. Not just because the word itself starts with “neuro,” but because the brain is that part of ourselves that allows us to have all our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, including those related to our religious and spiritual selves. But there is arguably a great contrast between the reality described by science and the one painted by religion, or even between the reality of conscious experience and its scientific descriptions. Which one represents the true reality is perhaps a question for the ages, especially in the third millennium. So, one of the most fundamental questions is, how far can we go in our understanding of reality if we begin our search for truth from a neuroscientific, or brain-related, perspective? For example, if we say that a certain sensory area of our brain is activated when we eat a piece of chocolate, does that tell us that the chocolate actually exists in the external world? Does it mean that our brain actually created the chocolate itself? Or does it mean that the brain simply created our experience of what chocolate tastes like? But does chocolate actually have taste, or does it have taste only when it interacts with the brain? In a similar way, each of these questions can be posed with regard to religious and spiritual beliefs and experiences and their relationship with the brain—a field we now refer to as neurotheology.

Along these lines, one of my favorite stories relating to my own research came as the result of one of my laboratory’s first studies using brain imaging to explore changes that occur in the brain during practices like meditation and prayer. We were able to bring several Franciscan nuns into our lab to study their brains during the performance of a prayer practice called centering prayer. Centering prayer involves focusing the mind on a specific phrase from the Bible or on a particular prayer. The person does not repeat the phrase or prayer over and over, but rather engages an extensive and contemplative reflection on the prayer or phrase. As this contemplation occurred in our lab, the nuns began to fall into a progressively deeper meditative state. At its peak, centering prayer can help a practitioner feel as if she is deeply connected to God.

When the first nun came into our lab to be studied, we scanned her brain initially at rest and then again while she was doing the centering prayer practice. After her participation in the study was over, I brought her over to the computer and showed her the two scans so that she could understand a little bit more the work that we were doing and what neurotheology was all about. I showed her the two scans side by side on the computer screen using a variety of colors to reflect which areas of the brain had been activated or deactivated during the centering prayer. When I showed her that there were a variety of changes that occurred in her brain during the practice, she was very excited. She told me how meaningful it was to see these changes going on in her brain because these results supported her belief in the importance of this prayer as an essential component of her religious and spiritual life. This prayer, which was deeply meaningful to her, was something that she also felt within her own mind and body. She acknowledged that the scan findings actually supported her religious and spiritual beliefs, including her beliefs about God. The scans showed how her brain was able to connect her to the religious and spiritual ideas that she held so dearly. Of course I was very pleased to have made this nun happy, and when she thanked me for the study and all that I had shown her I merely said, “You’re welcome.”

But the really fascinating interaction occurred several months later when our research paper was finally published. I received a phone call from the head of the local atheist society in Philadelphia. I answered the phone with some trepidation, not knowing exactly how he would have taken this paper, which showed changes in the brain during religious experience. Immediately after greeting him, he said to me, “Dr. Newberg, I want to thank you so much for doing this brain scan study of prayer because it clearly shows that religion is nothing more than a manifestation of the brain’s functions. There is no God. Everything that people think from a religious perspective is merely their brain creating the experience.” At first I was taken aback by his response but then quickly said, “You’re welcome,” and discussed with him a little bit more about the potential that neurotheology might offer the atheist perspective.

Later that night, I reflected on the response of both the atheist and the nun to what essentially was the same information. Both people had looked at the same brain scan data but come away with completely different conclusions. For the nun, the brain scan supported her religious beliefs and validated her belief in God. For the atheist, the findings validated his belief that God does not exist.

As the field of neurotheology has continued to grow and develop, we have seen a variety of responses to the data coming out of the early studies. Of course, neurotheology is really in its infancy in terms of what it might be able to do or say about religious and spiritual phenomena. It is remarkable that when our first studies of meditation and prayer were published, there were only a handful of other brain scan studies that looked at similar types of practices. Today, on PubMed, a database of biomedical literature, there are over 150 papers that have looked at the effects of meditation and spiritual practices on the human brain and body. And there has been an exponential increase in the number of studies in the medical literature regarding the relationship among religion, spirituality, and health. With all of this interest in the intersection between science and religion as it pertains to the human body, and particularly the human brain, neurotheology appears to be a field poised for expansion in the rest of the century. Much will depend on how the questions and aims of the research are formulated, however. Neurotheology might even be able to address important mind–body problems in terms of how brain processes are associated with various thoughts, feelings, and experiences, particularly those connected to religion and spirituality. And since these experiences are frequently associated with altered states of consciousness, perhaps neurotheology will even unlock the mysteries of the nature of consciousness.

Neurotheology is a hybrid, multidisciplinary field that brings together the “neuro” piece and the “theology” piece. But the responses from the nun and the atheist pose a particular question that is central to the field of neurotheology, which is actually an epistemological question: How do we know what is really real?

This is the question that began my own quest to explore neurotheology. Although I didn’t call it neurotheology at the time, when I was very young, I wanted to understand why people looked at the world so differently. How could people look at the same world but come away with such different perspectives—religious versus atheist, Republican versus Democrat? I initially thought the answer would lie within science, since science helps us to see the world in an objective way. But science is performed by scientists, and every scientific understanding of the world still arises within the brains of those scientists. Furthermore, science seems to assume that reality is the way we can measure it. But what if that is not the case? Does science ever provide a way to get outside the prison of our brain? The epistemological question of the nature of reality seemed to me to also require a philosophical analysis. As I pursued these questions through my own philosophical contemplations, I realized that the answers were far more elusive if I proceeded by only using science, philosophy, or religion alone. It seemed that only an integrated and multidisciplinary approach, such as neurotheology, could provide even the possibility of answering such questions.

Thus, the question of what is really real is a question central to neurotheology. But the question of reality is of particular interest to neurotheology because one of the critical distinctions between science and religion is related to the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural or nonmaterial entity such as God. For the religious person, there is no doubt that God exists, and for the atheist, there is no doubt that God does not exist. How do people come to radically different conclusions, especially, as in the case of my prayer study, when they are looking at exactly the same information—the universe? For me, this issue comes back to the question of how our brain helps us to perceive reality, which is the question that brought me into this field in the first place. After all, when we explore the nature of reality, we confront two primary interpretations: the religious and the scientific. Trying to understand how these interpretations relate to each other and to the world is what drove me to pursue neurotheology.

Consider the relationship between the brain and the mind. Is the mind, consciousness, identical with its brain states, a byproduct of them, or completely independent? This massive philosophical and scientific conundrum, known as the mind–body problem, has plagued humanity for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers including Plato believed that there was an ultimate domain of thoughts and ideas separate from the physical roots of our own existence. Descartes’s dualism also considered the mind and brain to be distinct entities. Modern cognitive neuroscience, in some sense, brings the two together in the reductionist approach that the brain creates the mind. Other thinkers have proposed different approaches to the mind—that is, our experiences, emotions, and thoughts—as a way of interpreting and making sense of our world.¹ In this book, we are more specifically looking at the brain’s representation of our thoughts and experiences of reality. However, it is important to remember that there are many complex interactions between the mind and the brain that remain a mystery in spite of many attempts to clarify them. Hopefully, neurotheology will encourage additional investigation into the relationship between the mind and brain, whether they are separate, equal, or co-related, and how they help us experience reality, especially religious and spiritual experiences.

The field of cognitive neuroscience has exploded over the last two decades with the advent and development of many advanced brain imaging techniques. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) have led the way in showing us how the human brain works. Cognitive neuroscience helped us to see how the brain performs simple tasks like moving a finger or feeling the brush of a person’s hand on our wrist. And it helped us understand complex processes related to love, morality, attention, and ultimately religion.

It seems that no matter which study one considers, something is going on in the brain no matter what we do. In fact, one of the most recent areas of research has been the default mode network, which is active particularly when the brain is doing nothing at all.² As a neuroscientist reviewing all of these data, I have realized that there is never a time that the brain is not active. Whether we are awake or in various stages of sleep or dreaming, whatever we are doing, our brain is always on. Even people who are comatose have brain activity, albeit markedly diminished in capacity. What this ultimately tells us is that everything that happens to us, everything we do, think, and experience, affects the brain. Every facet of reality has an impact on our brain in one form or another, which in turn helps us to interpret what that reality actually is. The problem lies in whether what we perceive internally is related in any way, shape, or form to what is going on externally. This question is relevant particularly to religious and spiritual beliefs, which are so often at the crux of arguments about the ultimate nature of reality.

Given everything we know from cognitive neuroscience, we can never escape the processing of the brain. It seems that we are forever trapped within our own brain looking out at the world and trying to make some sense out of it. No matter how one tries to understand this perception from a scientific perspective, our brain and our consciousness seem to be a prison that we can never escape from.

Fortunately, the brain functions in a way that helps us deal with this imprisonment. Although we face the potentially terrifying problem of never really knowing anything for certain, we somehow generally feel at ease within our own prison. Our brain generally does not constantly activate its stress areas to inform us that we should be worried or fear the world all the time. Generally, our emotions remain calm and even positive in the face of a very scary universe. Thus, in many ways, it is a happy prison because the brain works in a way that makes us feel comfortable with what we don’t know.

There are many examples that we can turn to that show just how problematic the prison of the brain is and yet just how comfortable we seem to be with it. Let’s explore a little more the issues that arise from this happy prison of the brain. When interpreting our sensory experiences, our brain makes many mistakes. Unfortunately, it never tells us when it has made a mistake, which is one way the brain keeps us happy. The most readily apparent examples of sensory mistakes are the tricks performed by magicians who find all kinds of ways of confusing our senses and making us believe something is happening one way when it really is happening another way. In fact, we seem to delight in the occasions when we misperceive the world and then finally come to realize that misperception.

Cognitive neuroscience has demonstrated many ways in which various visual and auditory illusions can fool the brain. It also shows how difficult it is for the brain to perceive the world accurately. Illusions can work even when we know what the illusion is. An image that appears to show curved instead of straight lines continues to look that way to us even when we have taken out a ruler and proven to ourselves that the lines are actually straight (figure 1.1). How many problems have arisen because someone thought that he heard someone say something that was never said? And yet, we continue to think that we have a full grasp of the universe, a foolish mistake given the fact that the universe is essentially infinite and we have a very finite brain (figure 1.2). Right now, each of us is only aware of what’s going on in our immediate surroundings. We feel the book we are holding and perceive the letters and words we are reading. We might hear a siren outside. But, we are never aware of what’s happening on the other side of the country, on the other side of the planet, or on the other side of the galaxy. Things are happening in all of these different places, but our brain has no knowledge or sensory experience of any of them. And yet again, the brain seems quite content in its belief that it knows everything that we need to know in order to survive. This in part explains certain phenomena, such as why people think that they are not impaired while driving under the influence of alcohol or while texting. The brain keeps telling the person they are doing a very good job managing reality, when in fact the data show just the opposite.

FIGURE 1.1. In this visual illusion the lines appear curved even though they are all parallel or perpendicular and completely straight.

FIGURE 1.2. A representation of how our brain exists within an essentially infinite universe. Only a limited amount of information (< 0.00000001%) from the external world (large arrow) comes into the brain. The brain then filters out much of that information so that an even smaller amount reaches our consciousness represented by the*. This serves to show how we are trapped within our brain and the difficulty our brain faces in trying to make sense of the universe.

One of the more amazing aspects of the human brain is its ability to think far beyond what we experience. We can contemplate what it is like on the other side of the planet or in another part of the galaxy and somehow relate that back to our own personal experiences. We can envision time on a scale of billions of years into the past or future.³ We may even contemplate things unseen, such as consciousness, the afterlife, or God. Given that we have enough trouble figuring out what is happening in our everyday reality, it is fascinating that the human brain has gone out of its way to consider supernatural and divine concepts.

On the other hand, there have been some very interesting studies documenting how our brain can completely exclude certain pieces of information even when they are in full range of our sensory experiences. In a study called “Gorillas in Our Midst,” researchers showed a video to test subjects and asked them to count the number of times that a group of people threw a ball back and forth.⁴ At one point in the video, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks in, waves his arms, and then walks out. The researchers found that at least half the people watching the video never saw the gorilla. When the brain is completely concentrated on one thing, it has a great tendency to completely ignore many other aspects of our sensory experience. So if we can’t trust our brain’s processing of even the raw data from the world, how do we ever know if what we are thinking on the inside is accurate?

And what perceptions help us to accept or reject God’s existence? I was once interviewed about comments made by the noted atheist Richard Dawkins about religious people. I was asked my opinion of his statement that he did not understand how people could believe in something, God, for which there was absolutely no evidence. I said that the problem with his statement had to do with how Dawkins used the word “evidence.” If you were to ask people in a church or mosque if they have evidence that God exists, they will all tell you about the many pieces of evidence that they have. These people have experienced God at the birth of a child, watching a sunset, or resolving a presumably impossible personal situation. These are perceptions, often sensory, that people have about God. Dawkins is correct that such evidence may not meet cert...