What Happens To The Brain During Spiritual Experiences - The Atlantic

8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences?
- The Atlantic
What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual

Experiences?
The field of neurotheology uses science to try to understand religion, and vice
versa.
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
JUN 5, 2014 | HEALTH
Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Email SIGN UP
Everyone philosophizes, writes neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg in his latest

book, The Metaphysical Mind: Probing the Biology of Philosophical Thought. We all
speculate about the meaning of all kinds of things, from everyday concerns about
dealing with a co-worker to our ultimate beliefs about the purpose of existence.
Accompanying solutions we nd to these problems, theres a range of satised
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happens-to-brains-during-spiritual-experiences/361882/ 1/9
8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - The Atlantic
feelings, from ah-ha or light-bulb moments upon solving an everyday problem to

ecstatic feelings during mystical experiences.
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.
When practitioners surrender their will, activity decreases

in their frontal lobes, suggesting that speech is being
generated from some place other than the normal speech
centers.
Newberg is a pioneer in the eld of neurotheology, the neurological study of

religious and spiritual experiences. In the 1990s, he began his work in the eld by
scanning what happens in peoples brains when they meditate, because it is a
spiritual practice that is relatively easy to monitor.
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.
As to whats going on in their brains, Newberg says, It depends to some degree on

what the practice is. Practices that involve concentrating on something over and
over again, either through prayer or a mantra-based meditation, tend to activate
the frontal lobes, the areas chiey responsible for directing attention, modulating
behavior, and expressing language.
Dr. Andrew Newberg/The Atlantic
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.
Dr. Andrew Newberg/The Atlantic
Believers could say this proves that another entity is speaking through the
practitioner, while nonbelievers would look for a neurological explanation.
Newberg takes into account both perspectives. When he denes neurotheology in

his book, Principles of Neurotheolog y, he writes, An ardent atheist, who refuses to
accept any aspect of religion as possibly correct or useful, or a devout religious
person, who refuses to accept science as providing any value regarding knowledge
of the world, would most likely not be considered a neurotheologian.
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.
A meditator may experience a sense of oneness with all

living things because of reduced activity in the parietal
lobes, which results in a blurring of the perceived lines
between the meditator and other objects.
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.
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.
If the euphoria a person experiences during a meditation practice cant be

integrated into their preexisting belief system, these feelings may become
disturbing. Newberg gave as an example a meditator who sought out a clergy
member to talk about his practice and felt a bit brushed o by the cleric. When
meditation practices enhance a rigid, authoritarian belief system, Newberg said
they can lead to more intolerance and violence towards those of dierent beliefs. In
the book he co-authored with Mark Robert Waldman, Why We Believe What We
Believe, he writes that due to some overlap between spiritual beliefs and
psychological disorders, patients with obsessive compulsive disorders often
develop rigid religious beliefs.
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.
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.
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.
A challenge has been guring out precisely what

interviewees mean when they use concepts like God or
spirituality. Everyone denes God dierently, even when
they belong to the same religion.
When e-mailed to comment specically on Newbergs work, Satel responded that

todays imaging is enabling researchers to make clinical inroads into dementia and
other major mental illnesses, but shes skeptical that knowing a persons
neurochemical and other physical processes will ever provide a detailed
understanding of someones subjective beliefs. Even with advances in technology,
we cant predict the real world contexts in which perceptions, cognitions, or
emotion will manifest. The interaction of these dimensions with environment is
crucial to understanding behavioral outcomes.
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
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."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LYNNE BLUMBERG is a writer based in Philadelphia.

What Happens To The Brain During Spiritual Experiences - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Happens To The Brain During Spiritual Experiences - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

8/4/2017 What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences?

What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual

JUN 5, 2014 | HEALTH

Everyone philosophizes, writes neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg in his latest

feelings, from ah-ha or light-bulb moments upon solving an everyday problem to

When practitioners surrender their will, activity decreases

Newberg is a pioneer in the eld of neurotheology, the neurological study of

As to whats going on in their brains, Newberg says, It depends to some degree on

Dr. Andrew Newberg/The Atlantic

Dr. Andrew Newberg/The Atlantic

Newberg takes into account both perspectives. When he denes neurotheology in

A meditator may experience a sense of oneness with all

If the euphoria a person experiences during a meditation practice cant be

A challenge has been guring out precisely what

When e-mailed to comment specically on Newbergs work, Satel responded that

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LYNNE BLUMBERG is a writer based in Philadelphia.

You might also like