Born to Believe

God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs

Andrew Newberg, Mark Robert Waldman

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416571421
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Psychology of Religion

Born to Believe was previously published in hardcover as Why We Believe What We Believe. Prayer...meditation...speaking in tongues. What do these spiritual activities share and how do they differ? Why do some people believe in God, while others embrace atheism? From the ordinary to the extraordinary, beliefs give meaning to the mysteries of life. They motivate us, provide us with our individual uniqueness, and ultimately change the structure and function of our brains. In Born to Believe, Andrew Newberg, MD, and Mark Waldman reveal -- for the very first time -- how our complex views, memories, superstitions, morals, and beliefs are created by the neural activities of the brain. Supported by groundbreaking original research, they explain how our brains construct our deepest convictions and fondest assumptions about reality and the world around us. Using science, psychology, and religion, the authors offer recommendations for exercising your brain in order to develop a more life-affirming, flexible range of attitudes. Knowing how the brain builds meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into your life will change forever the way you look at yourself and the world.

Part I

How

the Brain

Makes

Our

Reality

Chapter 1

The Power of Belief

MR. WRIGHT WASN’T EXPECTED TO LIVE THROUGH THE night. His body was riddled with tumors, his liver and spleen were enlarged, his lungs were filled with fluid, and he needed an oxygen mask to breathe. But when Mr. Wright heard that his doctor was conducting cancer research with a new drug called Krebiozen, which the media were touting as a potential miracle cure, he pleaded to be given treatments. Although it was against protocol, Dr. Klopfer honored Mr. Wright’s request by giving him an injection of the drug, then left the hospital for the weekend, never expecting to see his patient again. But when he returned on Monday morning, he discovered that Mr. Wright’s tumors had shrunk to half their original size, something that even radiation treatments could not have accomplished.

“Good God!” thought Dr. Klopfer. “Have we finally found the silver bullet—a cure for cancer?” Unfortunately, an examination of the other test patients showed no changes at all. Only Mr. Wright had improved. Was this a rare case of spontaneous remission, or was some other unidentified mechanism at work? The doctor continued to give injections to his recovering patient, and after ten days practically all signs of the disease had disappeared. Wright returned home, in perfect health.

Two months later, the Food and Drug Administration reported that the experiments with Krebiozen were proving ineffective. Mr. Wright heard about the reports and immediately became ill. His tumors returned, and he was readmitted to the hospital. Now, Dr. Klopfer was convinced that the patient’s belief in the drug’s effectiveness had originally healed him. To test his theory, he decided to lie, telling Mr. Wright about a “new, super-refined, double-strength product” that was guaranteed to produce better results. Mr. Wright agreed to try this “new” version of what he believed had healed his tumors before, but in reality, Dr. Klopfer gave him injections of sterile water.

Once again, Mr. Wright’s recovery was dramatic. His tumors disappeared, and he resumed his normal life—until the newspapers published an announcement by the American Medical Association under the headline “Nationwide Tests Show Krebiozen to Be a Worthless Drug in Treatment of Cancer.”

After reading this, Mr. Wright fell ill again, returned to the hospital, and died two days later. In a report published in the Journal of Projective Techniques, Dr. Klopfer concluded that when the power of Wright’s optimistic beliefs expired, his resistance to the disease expired as well.1

Each year, thousands of cases of remarkable recoveries are described, and although such “miracles” are often attributed to the power of faith and belief, the majority of scientists are skeptical of such claims. In the medical literature, spontaneous remissions—at least when cancer is involved—are extremely rare. Estimates range from one case in 60,000 to one in 100,000, although a definitive overview of the topic2 argues that perhaps one patient in 3,000 experiences a spontaneous remission. Moreover, the majority of oncologists believe that an unidentified biological mechanism is at work rather than a true miracle3; and current hypotheses favor alterations in the body’s cellular, immunological, hormonal, and genetic functioning over psychological mechanisms.4 But Mr. Wright’s case is unique—and one of the few to be documented during a university research project. The remissions of his cancer have been attributed to the effects of his mind on the biological functioning of his body—in other words, on the biology of belief.

Hundreds of mind-body experiments have been conducted—including placebo studies and research on the power of meditation and prayer—but few scientists have attempted to explain the underlying biology of belief. We have volumes of comprehensive statistics about the kinds of beliefs we hold, but our understanding of how and why belief “works” is still in its infancy, and most conclusions are still controversial.

Fortunately, recent discoveries about the ways the brain creates memories, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions can provide a new template with which to examine the how and why of belief. What I will propose in this book is a practical model of how the brain works that will help you understand your own beliefs and the nature of reality. It will also help you see how all beliefs emerge from the perceptual processes of the brain, and how they are shaped by personal relationships, societal influences, and educational and spiritual pursuits. This understanding can then help us to discern the difference between destructive and constructive beliefs, skills that are essential if we are to adequately address important individual, interpersonal, and global problems.

Beliefs govern nearly every aspect of our lives. They tell us how to pray and how to vote, whom to trust and whom to avoid; and they shape our personal behaviors and spiritual ethics throughout life. But once our beliefs are established, we rarely challenge their validity, even when faced with contradictory evidence. Thus, when we encounter others who appear to hold differing beliefs, we tend to dismiss or disparage them. Furthermore, we have a knee-jerk tendency to reject others who are not members of our own group. Even when their belief systems are fundamentally similar to ours, we still feel that they are significantly different. For example, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all embrace similar notions of God,5 yet according to one poll nearly one-third of Americans believe that each of these religious groups worships a different deity.6 Even though a close investigation of the world’s religions will show that the majority of human beings share similar ethical values, we tend to ignore the similarities and focus on the discrepancies. Ignorance is only partly to blame. A more significant reason is that our brains are instinctually prone to reject information that does not conform to our prior experience and knowledge. Simply put, old beliefs, like habits, die hard.

This book is also about our biological quest for meaning, spirituality, and truth. If we understand the neuropsychology of the brain, our beliefs will be able to grow and change as we interact with others who have different views of the world. It is my hope that as we become better believers, we will exercise greater compassion in our search for meaning and truth.

The study of human beliefs often raises unsettling issues, since most people are not aware that many of our beliefs are based on incomplete assumptions about the world. How, then, can beliefs be so powerful that they can heal us, or so destructive that they can cause us to suffer and die? This question has haunted philosophers, theologians, and politicians for a long time, and I myself have struggled to answer it for most of my medical career. For me, it all began with my own questions about the nature of reality and God.

Reality, Dreams, and Beliefs

As a teenager, I often wondered why people believed certain things. Some of my friends believed in God while others did not, but no one could give a strong enough argument to change anyone else’s mind. Similar stalemates occurred when our conversations touched on issues of evolution, the origin of the universe, or more captivating topics such as basketball and girls. For the most part, our opinions (except for those about girls) never changed. In our debates, it didn’t even matter what the facts were; if they didn’t support our beliefs, we dismissed them. Nonetheless, I was never certain about what I should or shouldn’t believe, because both sides seemed to have valid points. I knew that there was always some study, tucked away in a forgotten crevice at the library, that could support even the most outrageous claim.

By the time I finished high school, I began to think that I would never be able to know what was true or false. I even used to wonder, as teenagers are prone to do, if the world itself was real. Maybe everything was nothing more than a dream. In college, I came across the following poem paying homage to a Chinese sage born 300 years before Jesus:

Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly.

What joy, floating on the breeze

Without a thought of who he was.

When Chuang Tzu awoke, he found himself confused.

“Am I a man who dreamed I was a butterfly?

Or am I a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man?

Perhaps my whole life is but a moment in a butterfly’s dream!”7

So I was not alone in my ruminations about reality. When I discovered that many physicists also doubt that we will ever know the true nature of the universe, I began to wonder how anyone could trust his or her beliefs. For that matter, why did people believe in anything at all? What is this impulse to believe?

Eventually, I realized that if I was to have any hope of understanding why people believe what they do, I would have to study the part of us that actually does the believing—the human mind—for no matter what we see, feel, think, or do, it must all be processed through the brain. After years of study, I have come to see that a profound chasm exists between the world “out there” and our internal consciousness, and that this fundamental disconnection prevents us from ever truly “knowing” reality. Still, we seem to have little choice but to trust our neural perceptions.

We are born to believe because we have no other alternative. Because we can never get outside ourselves, we must make assumptions—usually lots of them—to make sense of the world “out there.” The spiritual beliefs we adhere to and the spiritual experiences we can have are also influenced by our neural circuitry and its limitations. God may exist, but we could experience God—or anything else, for that matter—only through the functioning of our brains.

In my previous book, Why God Won’t Go Away, I began to address our perception of God and other spiritual beliefs by studying the brain processes that occur during meditation, prayer, and spiritual experiences. My research, conducted with my late colleague Eugene d’Aquili at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that we are naturally calibrated to have and embrace spiritual perceptions by the neurological architecture of our minds.8 But every individual also seems to have an abiding need to construct moral, spiritual, and scientific beliefs that explain the workings of the universe. So a belief itself is a fundamental, essential component of the human brain. As we evolved, beliefs, even superstitious ones, allowed our ancestors to make sense out of an incomprehensible, dangerous world. Their assumptions may not have been accurate, but their beliefs reduced their fears and imparted values that would facilitate group cohesiveness.

Prejudice, Skepticism, and Doubt

The propensity to believe that other people’s values are misguided has fostered centuries of animosity throughout the world. When the early Christian missionaries first observed shamanic rituals practiced by indigenous tribes outside Europe, they usually thought of these rites as the devil’s work. They believed that punishment and conversion were essential for the salvation of the natives’ souls. The French Franciscan priest André Thevet, when visiting Brazil in 1557, noted in his diary:

I cannot cease to wonder how it is that in a land of law and police, one allows to proliferate like filth a bunch of old witches who put herbs on their arms [and] hang written words around their necks . . . to cure fevers and other things, which are only true idolatry, and worthy of great punishment.9

How would such priests react today if they were to wander down the aisles of an American health-food store filled with exotic tinctures and herbal preparations? The sheer numbers of Protestants alive would no doubt make them long for another Inquisition.

Neurologically, such prejudice seems rooted in human nature, for the human brain has a propensity to reject any belief that is not in accord with one’s own view. However, each person also has the biological power to interrupt detrimental, derogatory beliefs and generate new ideas. These new ideas, in turn, can alter the neural circuitry that governs how we behave and what we believe. Our beliefs may be static, but they aren’t necessarily static. They can change; we can change them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the workings of a child’s mind, which is constantly struggling to develop and maintain a stable worldview. Furthermore, children’s and adults’ belief systems are continually being altered by other people’s beliefs.

The adult human brain is childlike in another way: we automatically assume that what other people tell us is true, particularly if the idea appeals to our deep-seated fantasies and desires. Advertisers often take advantage of this neural tendency, and even though consumer advocates and some laws have helped to level the playing field, the general rule “Buyer beware” still prevails. Magazine covers and full-page ads promise instant beauty, fabulous sex, and intimate communication in five easy steps, and we believe them, often ignoring obvious deceit. One ad I recently saw—in a popular science magazine, no less—promised the reader a complete aerobic workout “in exactly four minutes”: a medical impossibility, at least from the standpoint of cardiovascular health. So how does the advertiser get away with this? Through a definitional loophole. Technically, “aerobic” simply means that a certain activity provides oxygen to the system, so any movement—even rolling around in bed—would bring oxygen to any muscle that moves. There is little health benefit to this, but the ad tricks you into thinking that you get the same benefits as if you had exercised vigorously for twenty minutes or longer. Furthermore, the advertisers like this one are preying on many people’s propensity t...