Why Belief in God Persists: Why We Believe What We Believe. Andrew Newberg, M.D. University of Pennsylvania. David Brooks The New York Times.

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1 Andrew Newberg, M.D. University of Pennsylvania David Brooks The New York Times May 2008 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Andrew Newberg is one of the leading neuroscientists in the country, at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. He has also written several books on why a belief in God persists. Thank you, Doctor, for coming. ANDREW NEWBERG, M.D.: I m going to try to give you an overview of some of the work that s been done, some of the areas we re headed toward, and also try to tie it into the topics of this overall conference. To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this whole area is more philosophical, more theological, and thinking about what does this mean in terms of how we believe in religion, and the religious beliefs that people hold. Does this tell us something about those beliefs and experiences? When somebody has the experience of being in God s presence, and we can get a brain scan of that, what does that mean, what does that say, and how can we interpret that either for religion, against religion, or in some other alternative perspective of simply just trying to understand it better? Now, beliefs themselves have a tremendous power over us, and I look at this all the time in the context of the placebo effect. This is very relevant to the healthcare professions I work with, how people believe things are going to happen, what their beliefs are about their health and the things they need to do it s critical. Unfortunately, I think the healthcare system severely overlooks how beliefs have power over what happens to somebody. We have always noted, at least anecdotally, that when people have that spirit and drive to get better, they seem to have a much higher likelihood of doing that, whereas

2 those who are ready to give up tend not to do that well. That also goes to the importance of how beliefs affect our whole body, not just the brain itself. Certainly all of you are well aware of the importance of beliefs in the context of the media, and how we can be influenced by various forces and stimuli and ideas that come into us, in terms of how they are presented, and visually presented, and what is being said. All of this has an impact on our culture and our political and moral beliefs. Of course, we can also look at religious and spiritual beliefs, which is what I will try to focus my talk on. I always try to come at this from a philosophical perspective. Why do we believe anything at all? [Within] everything that exists, everything out there in reality, then somewhere within that is each one of us, and each one of our brains, floating around, trying to take in a huge amount of information. It is an infinite universe for all intents and purposes. We are able to be subjected to only a very, very small amount of that information. Obviously there is tons of stuff going on in Key West right now, but we are only able to perceive and understand what is going on around us right now in this room. Now, unfortunately, an even smaller amount of that information is ultimately put into your consciousness. So our brain is trying to put together a construction of our reality, a perspective on that reality, which we rely on heavily for our survival, for figuring out how to behave and how to act and how to vote. But again, the brain is filling in a lot of gaps and helping us think certain things that may or may not really be there. So what are beliefs? I am defining beliefs biologically and psychologically as any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that a person consciously or unconsciously assumes to be true. The reasons I define beliefs in this way are several-fold. One is that we can begin to look at the various components that make up our beliefs. We can talk about our perceptions. We can talk about our cognitive processes. We can talk about how our emotions affect our beliefs. And we can also look at how they ultimately affect us. Are we aware of the beliefs we hold? Or are they unconscious? And which ones are unconscious and which ones are conscious? 2

3 Several interesting studies have shown that when you show faces of a person of a different race to people, it activates the amygdala, the area that lights up when something of motivational importance happens to us. But if you show pictures of people of a different race that are people they know, and maybe it is a famous person or a friend, then the amygdala doesn t light up. So they tend to have this ability to culturally, cognitively overcome what might be their initial response. That becomes important because now they go out into the world and respond to things. There may be certain unconscious approaches they take to the world, or certain unconscious beliefs they hold, that may have a deep impact on what they do, and how they behave, and how they think, and how they vote. We can look at all these different forces on our beliefs. We can look at our perceptual processes, our cognitive processes, the emotions we have, the social interactions we have, to see how beliefs are so heavily influenced. One of the take-home points I always hope to get across is that as much as we hold onto our own beliefs very strongly and I think it is appropriate for us to do so we also have to keep in mind they are far more tenuous than we often like to believe. Let me go through some of these processes in a bit more detail. Let s talk about our perceptions. The brain is out there, as I said, trying to interpret all of this information. It is trying to take in a huge amount of information and make some coherent picture of the world for us. But, unfortunately, the brain makes lots of mistakes along the way. The most important problem with that is it doesn t bother to tell us when it does make a mistake. We just go along happily as if we really understand everything going on around us even though the brain is really misperceiving things very drastically. Now we move over to the cognitive functions of the brain. Of course we use cognitive processes to make decisions and help us decide things about the beliefs we should hold. We use various parts of our brain to do that. So when we think about the environment, when we think about the abortion issue, what cognitive processes do we bring to bear on this? Do we bring causal functions? Maybe we think, What is causing global warming to occur? And what is this ultimately going to cause? To some extent, we don t really know that. We don t know how much resiliency there is in the earth s environment. 3

4 That raises all kinds of questions. How much should we assume we can understand about the cause and effect of what we are doing today? Can we start to think about the evaluation of opposites? This is something our brain loves to do. We don t really like the gray areas in the world. We like to be Republican or Democrat. We like to be right or wrong, moral or immoral. As I m sure all of you are aware, that isn t the way the world is. But our brain likes us to slot things one way or another. So we tend to construct our beliefs around these different cognitive processes of our brain, and it helps us find proofs for those beliefs. It also helps us to maintain our beliefs. So if we happen to be a Democrat, then when we look at the various issues and information that come down the road, we evaluate them from the perspective of the belief system we start out with, and we start to use our rational, logical processes to argue for the information that is supportive of our beliefs or against the information that might go against our beliefs. All of this comes into play when we talk about our memory and how our memory remembers what we think and feel. Most studies have shown how drastically inadequate our memory is, as much as we like to think it is reminding us exactly about whatever happened to us back then and how it affected us. We certainly see the problems when memory goes wrong. These areas of the brain all seem to be involved in these processes. We talk about the parietal lobe, which is very involved in abstract reasoning and quantization. Parts of the parietal lobe are involved in helping us orient our self in the world and establishing a relationship between our self and the rest of the world. The temporal lobe, which is along the side of the brain; the cortex areas help us to understand language; and the inner parts of the temporal lobe are where our limbic system is that helps us with understanding our emotional responses to whatever stimuli are out there in the world. The frontal lobe helps us with our behaviors and executive functions, the functions of deciding what we need to do: what we re going to do tomorrow, keeping our schedule, keeping our checkbook, and so forth, while also mediating our emotional responses. There is a push-pull between our frontal lobe and limbic system that can get out of whack sometimes. If we get overly emotional, our frontal lobes shut down, and if we become over-logical, our emotional areas shut down. There is a lot of push and pull that goes on in these different parts of the brain. 4

5 Emotions are also important for placing value on beliefs. So it s not just that we feel we should do something for the environment, it s not just that we feel we should be a Republican or a Democrat, but we start to imbue those choices with emotions. We feel strongly about the ways in which we believe, and of course this can help us form beliefs. When you re listening to a speech by somebody you agree with, it probably makes you feel emotionally good. And if you re listening to a speech of somebody you don t like, it makes you feel emotionally bad, and then you re much less likely to remember the bad speech, or you re much more likely to reject that because of the emotional responses it puts into you. The downside of our emotions can be in how they help us defend our beliefs. There has been a lot of research looking at when people start to feel combative and antagonistic toward people who disagree with them. This can be how we start to see religious conflicts occur throughout the world: It is not just that people disagree with each other, but that they get emotional about it. They start to feel hatred. They start to feel anger, and that can foment all kinds of antagonism, and ultimately lead to violence, which is obviously a big problem for how we deal with the differences in our beliefs. The emotional areas of the brain are in part of the brain called the limbic system, which is embedded in the more interior parts of the brain. The amygdala tends to light up whenever something of motivational importance happens to us. The hippocampus, which is right behind that, helps to regulate our beliefs, but also helps to regulate our emotions and write into our memories the ideas that come about from emotionally salient events. That is why we all remember exactly what was happening to us on September 11, 2001, but very few of you probably remember what happened on September 10, unless it had some emotional value to you like a birthday or an anniversary or something important happening in your life. You went through the day, but you don t remember anything that happened that day. You do remember a lot of what happened on September 11. The social milieu we are in becomes very important in influencing our beliefs. We are continuously influenced by those around us. This goes all the way back to when we are a child and the influence of our parents helps us form our initial beliefs, which write into our brain at a very early age the beliefs we carry with us throughout our lives. That is why it is difficult to change your religious beliefs. It is difficult to even change your political beliefs as time goes on. If you look at the large population, very few people ultimately do 5

6 change their beliefs in any very dramatic way because those are written very deeply into our brain at very early ages. But ultimately, as we do grow up, we can be influenced, and we can change those beliefs, and that is part of what we have to look at: exactly how and why this happens. So how do these beliefs form physiologically, and what does this tell us about religious and spiritual ideas, and why religion and spirituality are so ingrained in so many individuals and have been in every culture and every time? There are a couple of statements I like to use. One is that neurons that fire together, wire together. There is physiological support for that, that the more you use a particular pathway of neurons, the more strongly they become connected to each other. There are chemical messengers and other support neurons that do that. Think very simplistically back to how you remember that one plus two equals three. When you were a kid in school, you said, one plus two equals three, one plus two equals three, and ultimately that pathway got written down. The pathway one plus two equals four got eliminated from the brain. It did exist at one point, but you got rid of it. We prune back a lot of the neural connections we have as a child, so we ultimately go forward in our lives with a set of parameters through which we look at the world. The other idea about neurons is the old use-it-or-lose-it concept, that when you stop thinking about certain things, when you stop focusing on something, then those connections go away. We all probably took courses in college we remembered a lot of at the time, but if we are not doing it anymore, then we don t remember it anymore. I took a great course in Russian history. It was wonderful, and I learned all kinds of stuff about the history of Russia and all the czars, but I would be lucky if I could name two or three czars for you right now. But if you ask me about the neurotransmitters in the brain and the different receptor subtypes, I could do a pretty good job recalling that because I use that every single day. How do we begin to invoke that? The practices and rituals that exist within both religious and non-religious groups become a strong and powerful way to write these ideas into our brain. Again, go back to the idea that the neurons that fire together, wire together. The more you focus on a particular idea, whether it is political or religious or athletic, the more that gets written down into your brain and the more that becomes your reality. So that is 6

7 why when you go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they repeat the same stories, and you celebrate the same holidays that reinforce that, you do the prayers, and you say these things over and over again, those are the neural connections that get stimulated and strengthened. That is a strong part of why religion and spirituality make use of various practices valuable for writing those beliefs strongly into who you are. Let me present some of the data from the studies we have done. We have looked at a number of different religious and spiritual practices over the last decade or so. I am just going to present a couple of snippets from that. There is a type of scan called a SPECT scan, which stands for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. The SPECT scans look at blood flow in the brain. We capture a picture of a person s brain when they are at rest or when they are in some kind of comparison state, and then when they are engaged in the practice, a practice like meditation, for example. In the part of the brain called the frontal lobes, which I have labeled as an attention area, because it helps focus our attention, we see a lot more activity while the person is actively engaged in meditation than when the person is in the baseline state. In the normal waking state, which was the baseline state, there is still a fair amount of activity in the frontal lobes because you have to be ready to attend to whatever is going on around you. But it is activated that much more when the person does this particular practice. I mentioned earlier the parietal lobe, which often functions as the orienting part of the brain. We have argued in some of our hypotheses that when people engage in these practices in a very deep way, they do two things. First, you are focusing on something, usually it is a sacred object or an image or something like that, but, second, you also screen out irrelevant information. As you do this, more and more information that normally goes to the orienting parts of your brain doesn t go there. So it keeps trying to give you a sense of your self, an orientation of that self in the world, but it no longer has the information upon which to do that. And if you look at the orientation area, it goes dramatically down in its activity during the meditation practice. This area of the brain becomes much less active. We think this is part of what is associated with somebody losing that sense of self. They feel at one with God, 7

8 at one with their spiritual mantra, whatever it is they are looking at. This was a group of Tibetan Buddhist meditators. We also looked Franciscan nuns in prayer. We saw some interesting similarities and differences. The nuns were doing a prayer called centering prayer, which is kind of meditation. They were focusing on a particular phrase or prayer. It is much more verbally based, I guess, than the meditation of the Tibetans. Again, one of the similarities we saw was a fair amount of increase in red activity in the frontal lobes. So they activated their frontal lobes as they were focusing on this particular prayer or phrase from the Bible. They also activated the IPL or parietal lobe area. There is a much bigger glob of red in the prayer scan than what you see in the baseline scan. This is part of that verbal conceptual area in the temporal lobes, in the parietal lobes, that helps us think about abstract ideas and language. We didn t see this in the Buddhist meditators, who had a more visual practice. But we did see a similarity of decreases of activity in this orienting part of the brain. One of the more recent studies we did was a study of Pentecostals speaking in tongues. This was a much more exciting study for me because when you re looking at people who are meditating or in deep prayer, they re just sitting there and all the exciting stuff is going on inside, whereas when people are speaking in tongues all the exciting part is on the outside. We had to come up with a different baseline because obviously if I showed you a person s scan while he or she was simply resting quietly, versus up and about and dancing and singing in tongues, of course you would see all kinds of changes in the brain. So the comparison state here was doing gospel-singing worship. They were up and about, dancing around, singing in English, compared to up and about, dancing around, singing but singing in tongues. There was a lot less activity in the frontal lobes when the person was speaking in tongues. So when they started to speak in tongues, and we saw this in all the people we studied, their frontal lobe activity went down. This actually makes a lot of sense because in contrast to the meditators and nuns, who are focusing on doing something, the way the Pentecostals describe speaking in tongues is they are not focusing on doing it; they let it happen. They just let their own will go away 8

9 and allow this whole thing to take place. They don t feel like they re in control of this process. And the findings on the scan at least support the phenomenological experience they have. What is the reality here? Obviously, for the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they say this is God or the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them. What one might argue in that context is, your brain shuts down so you can allow the Holy Spirit to speak through you; this is how it works. On the other hand, if you don t believe speaking in tongues is really a spiritual event, then you might say, perhaps there s some other part of the brain that is taking over, that is causing this thing to happen. It s not the normal parts of the brain doing it, but it s some other part of the brain. At this point we don t have that answer and this is, again, the big epistemological question about how we understand what reality is, how we begin to think about our beliefs about reality and what we can say, ultimately, about what these scans mean in the context of what s really going on. But I think there s still some very valuable information in at least understanding what s going on inside the person who is having this particular experience. The other thing we have found in almost all our subjects is the thalamus becomes much more active; you can see it s much brighter during speaking in tongues. It was also much brighter in activity during prayer and meditation. The thalamus is a big relay in the brain; it allows all of our sensory information to come up to our brain. Because of that, I think, it makes sense that these are very active states for people, and, therefore, we see the thalamus reflecting that. In fact, the only practice where we saw a decrease in the thalamus, which I m not going to present here today, was transcendental meditation, but that s really much more of a relaxation process, at least for the individuals who were doing it for us. So I think that may explain why that was a little different. All of us have beliefs. Everything we think or feel, whether it s political, spiritual or scientific, is a belief; it s a way in which our brain is helping us make some sense out of the world, and it is doing the best it can. So if we re talking about religion as affecting our brain and our beliefs, we have to acknowledge that it must have some pretty profound effect on our brain if it is going to be something that has such a profound effect on us as people. 9

10 I have argued in the past that the brain s role in our overall life is to help us make some sense out of the world, and in so doing, to help maintain us. That s how it helps us to survive. We have to know not to cross the street when there s a red light, and what s okay to eat, and what s not okay to eat. It helps to make sure we do all the right things in the world. It also helps us transcend ourselves, and by that I don t necessarily mean a religious transcendence, although that may be the ultimate expression of this, but we always grow and develop over time. There is this continual struggle, if you will, between wanting to maintain the status quo within ourselves and also knowing that we need to adapt and change as we go through our life, and our brain is capable of doing both. It holds onto beliefs very strongly to helps us figure out what we need to do in our world, but it can also change over time. All of us are still the same person we were when we were three years old, but we ve learned a lot, and we ve changed a lot over time. As we ve gone through our lives, our brain has changed with us to adapt and help us survive. Let me ask what we talk about when we re talking about people who are not religious. What is it about atheists that is different? Are they different, or are they the same? There is some evidence to suggest there are differences. Some of you may have read a book called The God Gene. It was an interesting study that showed there was a significant, although relatively mild, correlation between a gene that coded for what s called the VMAT-2 receptor, which has to do with serotonin and dopamine, two very important neurotransmitters in the brain, and feelings of self-transcendence. The fact that there s a correlation between the neurotransmitters and some feeling that s related to spirituality is interesting. Maybe there is something physiologically to this. In our studies, we found going back to the thalamus that we talked about earlier that people who were long-term practitioners and meditators tended to have a lot more asymmetry. One side of their thalamus was much more active than the other, compared to the normal population of people who are not long-term meditators. I don t know what that means per se, but it seems to suggest that the ways in which we process information about the world might be fundamentally different. One of the questions we have to ask is, if you are a non-believer or an atheist, is that the result of a lack of having such experiences, or are you having these experiences and then 10

11 ultimately rejecting them? One of the examples we talked about in our last book was a woman who had a near-death experience. She described it as the full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, that was my brain dying. That was her interpretation of it, whereas other people have that experience, and they say, that was me transcending into the next realm; that was my spiritual experience, and it was transformative; it changed who I was. So how does this work? Why is it that God doesn t go away? I think religion and spirituality, when we look at these in very broad terms, help us in the same ways that the brain tries to help us, in terms of maintaining ourselves and transcending ourselves. When you look at the vast amount of literature and data that has been collected, we find religion often is extremely supportive of our behaviors. It helps us in terms of our mental health, our ability to cope with various issues and problems, and therefore it tends to be pretty good at helping us maintain ourselves. It also happens to be pretty good at providing a system by which we transcend ourselves. When you look at most religions, there are a number of points along the way, as you go from birth to adolescence and marriage and ultimately old age, there are approaches and processes in place that enable you to transcend yourself from one moment to the next. The ultimate expression of this self-transcendence may be that we all can achieve some greater being. We can do something a little bit better; we can become better than we are, and transcend ourselves in that way. So my argument has been that both science and religion become very important in this whole dialogue and that we need to understand the perspectives of what both contribute to this discussion to try to better understand the totality of our universe and the ways in which we make sense of that universe through our belief systems. Where do we go from here? We have a lot of new data we are working on, and one of the thoughts I ve come up with recently is can we create something similar to the human genome perhaps we can call it the religionome with which we can begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological and social and cultural perspectives as well. This could be an 11

12 important thing to do now; I don t think we ve ever been able to do it before because we just didn t have the methodologies. Part of that, I think, is to do longitudinal studies. At the moment, we re doing a lot of cross-sectional analyses, where we just take people today and study them. But we re trying now to look at the effects of doing these practices over the long haul. What happens if I started all of you today on a meditation program? Where would your brain be in two weeks, in eight weeks, in six months, a year, 10 years; what would happen? Would all of you be transformed? Would some of you be transformed, and if so, would you be transformed in the same way or different ways? We can look at whether or not this ultimately has health benefits as well as more global, societal benefits. We ve also done some very interesting work with an online survey of people s spiritual experiences, where we re getting both demographic information about who they are, their gender, age, ethnic background, religious background, and information about the spiritual experiences they have had. So we get narratives, and we also get evaluations about how open they are to other people s beliefs, how they respond to other people s beliefs, and I think there s going to be a tremendous amount of data. A lot of this is going to come out in some of our next work. But I just want to point out how many different ways we can try to better understand how God, ultimately, and how religion changes your brain in the long haul. Sometimes people are very literal about how they think about God, and sometimes it becomes a very abstract concept. One of the things we re doing now is culling through about 200 or 300 different pictures of God to see what people are drawing and how it relates to their religious and spiritual ideas. A lot of times people think fundamentalists are very concrete in their ways of thinking about God, and that they tend to think of the old man in the clouds and all that. But as it turns out, that s not always the case, and people get very, very abstract in the ways they think about this concept. We can also talk about, what does God feel like to you? If you experience God s presence, what is it like? Is it an emotional thing, is it a sensory thing? What is God s personality? We certainly know a lot about God s personality from the Bible; there is the wrathful, vengeful God, but there s also a forgiving God, and there are many different attributes we give to God. I think it is particularly interesting, then, to see how that relates to who 12

13 we are, what are our personalities, what are our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world, and how do we then imbue that in our ideas about God? Are there certain limitations our brain puts on us, in terms of our ability to think about what God is all about? I would argue the brain ultimately is a believing machine; it has to be. It s trying to make some sense out of the world, and it puts together a perspective on our world, fills in a lot of gaps, doesn t bother to let us know about it, and yet somehow we use that information to go through our lives as if we know what s going on. So beliefs ultimately affect everything we do, they affect every part of our lives. And as we go through our lives, everything that happens, every person we talk to, affects the way we ultimately believe. So beliefs are the essence of our being, and in a continuing effort to understand our world we will always have spiritual and religious ideas. We will have ideas about the ultimacy of the universe and the ultimacy of who we are and how we relate to that universe. I think as long as that continues to happen, as long as our brain continues to function in the ways that it does, that these ideas of religion and spirituality and God are not going to go away. Here are a couple of websites if any of you are interested. We have a Center for Spirituality and the Mind that we ve started at Penn, which is helping us consolidate a lot of the research. If any of you are interested in that survey I was mentioning you can go to the website neurotheology.net. MR. CROMARTIE: You all know David well, not only through his columns but his books, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive. David has a new book coming out called How Success Happens. Part of the research on that book, and I ll let David tell us how much, is rooted in brain chemistry and brain research. DAVID BROOKS: One of the best ways that s been used to explain how complicated the brain is, is to imagine taking the Rose Bowl, filling it to the brim with spaghetti, and then shrinking it down to three pounds, and that s roughly the complexity of this thing. I always think about that when I see those brain scan pictures. There is this incredible revolution going on in brain research. To me, it s a bit like the revolution of psychology or psychiatry that Freud started, except for this time I think it s 13

14 correct. What interests me is that when Freud happened, it had this tremendous effect on the culture at large, on the way people thought about human nature and politics. Freudianism literally had that effect, and I m convinced and I think it s already happening that this tremendous revolution in neuroscience and related fields is going to have the same effect on culture and the way we think about human nature and religion and everything else. That s what I m going to talk about; not so much the science, but what I think are some of the themes driving the science that will spill out and are spilling out into the general culture. The bottom line of it all is we are now discovering the tremendous power of the unconscious, of the levels of cognition we re not consciously aware of, that shape our thoughts. If you look at behavioral economics, if you look at neuroscience, if you look at psychology, if you look at field after field, in theology, in literary criticism, people are taking this template of unconscious cognitive processes and applying it to how we think. I m going to tell this story vis-à-vis religion. In 2000 Tom Wolfe published an essay called Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, which criticized some of the hyper-materialism at the core of some of this. This was the argument that there is no place for the human soul; we re all just a bunch of material parts that determine who we are. There are diseases or brain conditions, I think there s one called TLE, which leads to the spiritual hallucinations. There s a guy who developed a magnetic helmet that he puts around people s heads, and it s supposed to lead to more spiritual states. There are neuropeptides, chemicals in the brain that can utterly transform who you are and how you think. One of the most famous is oxytocin, which is this little thing that, if you inject it into prairie voles, you get adulterous prairie voles who suddenly become monogamous. Oxytocin is released after sex, it s released while mothers are nursing, and it changes the way people behave. One of the most famous people in the annals of brain research is Phineas Gage do you guys know who Phineas Gage was? He was this guy who was working on a railroad, and a rail spike went up through his brain. Before the accident he was a nice, normal, responsible guy; after the accident, he was a jerk and selfdestructive. And so in some sense the material act of the spike going through his head changed what some would say was his soul and his moral nature. 14

15 The second thing that has eroded the sense that we re religious or spiritual creatures is the sector of this community that doesn t believe in free will. I was at UCLA a couple weeks ago, and I asked a scientist what he did research on. He said, I do research on why we think we possess free will. And I said, Is there any doubt about whether we actually maybe do possess free will? He said, No, nobody believes that; it s why we confabulate the illusion of free will, and that s what he was studying. He s part of a section of neuroscientists but not a small section who have dismissed the idea of free will. But I think there s no question this research, taken as a whole, diminishes free will because so much of what happens below the level of awareness. Third is the reaction against the idea of the blank slate and the idea that we had no genetic programming. There was, especially years ago, and among some people, this hardcore belief that we re all genetic programming, or we re largely genetic programming, and that we re just bigger versions of ants, and that a lot of what s happening has been driven by our genes and that the relationship between a mother and a child has no effect on how that child grows up. This was the hardcore materialist impulse, which is an element of this research. But my perception again, I m telling this chronologically is that over the last some number of years, this hardcore materialism has eroded, and the field is getting wetter, if you want to put it that way. It s getting mushier. It s getting more open to spirituality. I think there are a whole series of things that have happened, ideas that come out of the field that are permeating the culture, which leave room for spirituality and also explain it. One is the plasticity of the brain, the incredible adaptiveness, the fire-together, wiretogether idea that we re not hardcore driven by material things, that we re wired to adapt to environment and that the nature-nurture distinction is a bogus one, and that therefore, this plasticity makes it a less material, less predetermined organ. Second, again, is the power of the unconscious, the power of things that happen below reason and rational awareness. Timothy Wilson who wrote a book called Strangers to 15

16 Ourselves. He has a statistic in that book that every moment, the human mind can take in roughly 11 million pieces of information, of which we can be consciously aware of only about 40. All the rest is coming in there and being processed, but we re just not consciously aware of it. Jonathan Haidt, who s his colleague at Virginia, says think of the brain as a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious part of the mind, the elephant is everything else. The boy is not stronger than the elephant, and if the boy can t control the elephant, the creature in total is going to have a screwed-up life, but if they work together through a series of habits, then they can lead a successful life. But it is the relative strength between the little boy on top of the elephant and all the cognitive processes below the level of awareness that is the elephant. The third thing that has wetted up the field is the forced-on modesty. People in this field, like the rest of us, do not come by modesty naturally, but as the field has developed, so many unconscious biases have been exposed, so much of the tenuousness Andrew talked about has been revealed, there is so much we get wrong; we are misled so easily that it s hard to think the brain is a simple mechanical thing or that thinking is a mechanical thing. It s tenuous, and it grows out of this mystery of emergence rather than being mechanical, and so that s another thing I think has wetted up the field. The fourth thing is the power of emotion. The Doctor Spock idea from Star Trek, that reason and emotion are two different things, is completely wrong. Emotion is what we use to assign value to things, and without emotion you can t make decisions. Antonio Damasio is a researcher at the University of Southern California who had a patient named Elliott. Elliott was like Gage, although Elliott s still alive: he was living a perfectly normal life, he suffered a stroke, and it robbed him of the ability to feel or process emotion. He could look at photos of the most horrific things and know he was supposed to feel something, but was incapable of feeling those things. His life deteriorated similarly to Gage s; he could not focus his attention enough to get any piece of work done. He divorced his wife, he married someone who was completely inappropriate, he invested horribly, he then divorced the second woman, and his life was utterly destroyed because 16

17 he lost the ability to process emotion. And when you lose that ability, you lose the ability to value, to ask, what do I want, what don t I want? And so his life became chaotic. Another of Damasio s patients was a guy who had also suffered the inability to process emotion, and they had a meeting one time. At the end, Damasio said to him, When do you want to come back? And the guy said, I could come back Monday or Tuesday. Damasio said, Well, which day would you prefer? And the guy spent the next 25 minutes describing the pluses and minuses of Monday and the pluses and minuses of Tuesday. He could describe the pluses and minuses, but he was incapable of reaching a decision because he couldn t assign value. Because he had lost the ability to process emotion, he couldn t process decisions. Fifth, the incredible power of love and attachment. Andrew mentioned the importance of emotion and memory, the incredible power of love and attachment in forming memories, in forming how neurons wire together. It is the dominant thing that affects our lives, which is never appreciated when we talk about education, especially in Washington. I always say if you went into a congressional committee and talked about love, they would look at you like you were Oprah. But the fact is if you are going to be serious about education and all sorts of mental processes, you are not talking about the real stuff if you are not talking about the emotional engagement. The sixth process that has wetted up the field and made it more open to spirituality is the evidence of these elevated states, which Andrew has described. The seventh is the documented evidence of moral judgment. Haidt, the guy from the University of Virginia, has done some research on that. He argues moral judgment has grown out of the very primordial emotions of disgust, starting with food and then elevating up, and that disgust is something you can actually see and look at in the brain. The eighth are these moments of self-transcendence. One of the things that surprised me as I started reading about the field is that people in the field really take meditation seriously. I always thought, That is a bunch of New Age stuff. Who takes that seriously? But people in the field actually do. So what you have had over these years is hardcore scientific research, guys in labs taking the process of spirituality and religion quite seriously and seeing actual physical evidence of it. That said, if you read the literature, 17

18 there is, as in much of the scientific community, in some quarters, a fanatically militant atheism, the idea that anybody who believes in God must be completely stupid. That is in the field, especially among the geneticists, in my experience. What I have tried to describe is the hardcore materialism Tom Wolfe worried about, then all these findings, which lead you to think in more spiritual ways, and then finally the question is, does that mean the science is going to support people who are religious? Is it going to lead to a much more religious society as the ideas permeate? The answer here is not that simple, in part because the people who do the work still work within a Darwinian framework, that things survive because they succeed in Darwinian terms, and religions that succeed must serve some evolutionary purpose. That Darwinian framework keeps it different from religious thinking. Second, there still is a mundane mindset in this research. There is not much room for the majesty of art. They are analyzing people who are stuck in little machines in labs, and it doesn t inspire you. So there is a whole inspiring level of human existence that doesn t exist in the research. Third, and this is a challenge for a lot of religious people, there is a firm conviction and I think with tons of evidence that there is no distinction between the spiritual aspect of life and the physical body. If you have some dualistic notion that the soul is separate from the body, this research destroys that. Finally, and I think this is where the whole field of research will lead us as a society, it recognizes the power and reality of spiritual processes. But I would say in general, the literature treats any specific belief system as completely arbitrary. It knows that we have these beliefs. It knows that the mind is really good at making up stories. Some people in Jerusalem a few thousand years ago made up one story, another guy made up another story, there are still other stories. But it treats all of these stories as completely the same and arbitrary. I think if you read the research, you will see there is no reason to think one religion is any different or any better than the other. Where the research winds up ultimately is, frankly, at Buddhism, the idea that the self is this dynamic process. There is some generic spirituality that may or may not be tethered to a higher being, and importantly, to the 18

19 idea that we are social creatures. There is no such thing as one individual brain. Our brains are all merged together in a series of ultimate feedback loops. So I think when you look at this research, which is going to have this effect on society as everybody else pigeons off it, it won t lead to what Tom Wolfe feared. It won t lead to the idea that we are just material creatures and atheism is the answer. It will lead to soft-core Buddhists. KATHLEEN PARKER, Washington Post Writers Group: You were talking about how much comfort we find in people who share our beliefs, and then how threatened we are when we meet people who believe otherwise. But at the same time, we are fairly contemptuous of people when their beliefs become fluid, when they become, in the political world, flipfloppers. So I am wondering if your scans show any evidence to suggest why that is. It would seem counterintuitive. It seems like we should admire people who are willing to reconsider things and adjust and adapt their beliefs to our own. But instead, we don t like that much. And is that tied to trust? Is that something that has manifestations within one of those lobes? DR. NEWBERG: It is a great question. I ll probably speculate more than I will be able to refer to hard science. On one hand, I think all of our brains are in this constant battle, whether it is between conscious and unconscious or a definitive answer versus vagueness and uncertainty or selfishness versus unselfishness. Our brains like both to some degree, but ultimately, I think we probably lean a little bit more strongly toward something we can grasp and that is clear to us. Whenever we have things that are uncertain I think the problem with flip-flopping is not so much that we don t respect the possibilities, I think we are okay when people say, I am really thinking hard about this, and I m not sure. I think what happens, whether you want to phrase it in terms of trust or lack of certainty, is that when you don t know exactly where somebody stands, that is very problematic for us because we don t know which way they really think and which way they really feel, and do they really agree with us? Then we get into the whole issue of when people start to go against our ways of thinking. One of the problems is, when somebody disagrees with you, your brain has two options. 19

20 One is that you are wrong and that the other person is right. And that is typically a position the brain doesn t want to be in because that means we don t understand the world as well as we had thought we did. So the far easier option is to think, they are wrong, and we are right. And if they are wrong, and they keep trying to convince us that they are right, then they are being duplicitous and insincere and maybe just plain evil. If we see somebody go away from us, and then we see them start to come back now we really aren t sure. Are they deceiving us? Or are they really being honest? That triggers those alarms because we like the consistency of a particular approach. It is very hard on our brain when we lose consistency. The only data I have that may address your particular question is that in this last book, we talk about the scan results we did. We had atheists come in to our lab, and we asked them to meditate on God. Their frontal lobes in different directions. It was almost like you were seeing cognitive dissonance, like they were trying to focus on something they really didn t want to focus on. That creates problems for us. The parts of our brain that want to help us to focus on something and grab something have trouble with it. That sets off the emotional alarms, and then we start to reject it. MS. HAGERTY: Did you say that the science shows there is no distinction between soul and body? Is it your understanding that pretty much all mainstream scientists believe that? Also, would it be true to say that pretty much all scientists believe there is nothing more than this material world? DR. NEWBERG: I think there is a fair amount of disagreement. I have seen a few polls of scientists at various times. Certainly relative to the general public, there are a lot more scientists who look at the world from a pretty materialistic perspective. That being said, I think there are still a lot of scientists who are struggling with this. Francis Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project. He has pretty much gone completely to the religious perspective, understanding the genome as a way of proving God s existence. Now, he has probably gone a little bit more extreme than most others, but there are a lot of people, I think, who the more we investigate and whether it is through biology, or physics, especially as you get up across some of these boundary questions about consciousness and the origins of the universe and all that, it becomes a much more philosophical issue. While they may not necessarily go over to a religious understanding, I think they tend to 20

21 feel they can t exclude the possibility that there is this other dimension. The point is well taken that there are a lot of scientists and a lot of non-scientists who believe, almost, in what we talk about, like scientism, that it is just the material world, and science is going to answer everything that we need to know about it. But there also are, I think, a growing number of people who are acutely aware of the problems with that. While they may not necessarily be willing to go over to the religious side, they are at least somewhat open to the possible perspective of the mystery and to exploring it. I think that it is growing. If you go back 15 or 20 years, then I think a huge number. One other aspect I think has led to this is the healthcare side, because when you interview cancer patients and hospice patients, and you find out how important religion is in their lives. All of these biomedical scientists who can t do anything else for the patient have realized how important that spiritual side is for helping them at least heal or cope with themselves in the face of this end-of-life catastrophe. So it is very important. MR. BROOKS: Scientists have no clue how to explain how the mind emerges from matter. There are gigantic conferences, thousands of books, and it is humbling. Some of them think, oh, we will get there eventually. But I think it has been a humbling process because people have no clue. And for some of the militant atheists, the people who believe in God have the straightforward narrative of how mind emerges from matter God did this; it s a very simple story and they have no story. So I think it has been a humbling experience, which, again, has opened more room for spirituality. DR. NEWBERG: We are talking about beliefs. We are saying the brain is processing all this information. So that means whatever we think about the world is basically an interpretation. Given that, how do we know if what we think in here is commensurate with what is out there? If you think about it, the only way to prove that from a scientific or philosophical perspective is to somehow get outside of your brain and look and say, This is what I think inside, this is what is out there. This is what matches up or doesn t match up. Again, when you look to the consciousness debate, the big problem is there is no way to do that, or at least that we can tell from a scientific perspective. But what is fascinating is that when people enter into these mystical states, they say they are outside of 21