In the new field of “neurotheology,” scientists seek the biological
basis of spirituality. Is God all in our heads?
By Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
May 14, 2001
One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for
a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river
Thames. The neurologist—who was spending a sabbatical year in England—saw
nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy
buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly,
about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin
suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever
experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the
physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn.
He saw things “as they really are,” he recalls. The sense of “I, me, mine”
disappeared. “Time was not present,” he says. “I had a sense of eternity.
My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood
vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of
things.”
CALL IT A MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, a spiritual moment, even a religious
epiphany, if you like—but Austin will not. Rather than interpret his
instant of grace as proof of a reality beyond the comprehension of our
senses, much less as proof of a deity, Austin took it as “proof of the
existence of the brain.” He isn’t being smart-alecky. As a neurologist, he
accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is mediated or created by
the brain. Austin’s moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to
explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical
experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have
dissolved, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. Which
ones? Activity in the amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats
and registers fear, must be damped. Parietal-lobe circuits, which orient
you in space and mark the sharp distinction between self and world, must
go quiet. Frontal- and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and
generate self-awareness, must disengage. When that happens, Austin
concludes in a recent paper, “what we think of as our ‘higher’ functions
of selfhood appear briefly to ‘drop out,’ ‘dissolve,’ or be ‘deleted from
consciousness’.” When he spun out his theories in 1998, in the 844-page
“Zen and the Brain,” it was published not by some flaky New Age outfit but
by MIT Press.
Since then, more and more scientists have flocked to “neurotheology,” the
study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality. Last year the
American Psychological Association published “Varieties of Anomalous
Experience,” covering enigmas from near-death experiences to mystical
ones. At Columbia University’s new Center for the Study of Science and
Religion, one program investigates how spiritual experiences reflect
“peculiarly recurrent events in human brains.” In December, the scholarly
Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted its issue to religious moments
ranging from “Christic visions” to “shamanic states of consciousness.” In
May the book “Religion in Mind,” tackling subjects such as how religious
practices act back on the brain’s frontal lobes to inspire optimism and
even creativity, reaches stores. And in “Why God Won’t Go Away,” published
in April, Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania and his
late collaborator, Eugene d’Aquili, use brain-imaging data they collected
from Tibetan Buddhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nuns deep in
prayer to ... well, what they do involves a lot of neuro-jargon about
lobes and fissures. In a nutshell, though, they use the data to identify
what seems to be the brain’s spirituality circuit, and to explain how it
is that religious rituals have the power to move believers and
nonbelievers alike.
OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE
What all the new research shares is a passion for uncovering the
neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences—for
discovering, in short, what happens in our brains when we sense that we
“have encountered a reality different from—and, in some crucial sense,
higher than—the reality of everyday experience,” as psychologist David
Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it. In neurotheology,
psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and
which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and
space. In this way it differs from the rudimentary research of the 1950s
and 1960s that found, yeah, brain waves change when you meditate. But that
research was silent on why brain waves change, or which specific regions
in the brain lie behind the change. Neuroimaging of a living, working
brain simply didn’t exist back then. In contrast, today’s studies try to
identify the brain circuits that surge with activity when we think we have
encountered the divine, and when we feel transported by intense prayer, an
uplifting ritual or sacred music. Although the field is brand new and the
answers only tentative, one thing is clear. Spiritual experiences are so
consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says Wulff,
that it “suggest[s] a common core that is likely a reflection of
structures and processes in the human brain.”
There was a feeling of energy centered within me ... going out to
infinite space and returning ... There was a relaxing of the dualistic
mind, and an intense feeling of love. I felt a profound letting go of
the boundaries around me, and a connection with some kind of energy and
state of being that had a quality of clarity, transparency and joy. I
felt a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing
that there never was a true separation at all
That is how Dr. Michael J. Baime, a colleague of Andrew Newberg’s at
Penn, describes what he feels at the moment of peak transcendence when he
practices Tibetan Buddhist meditation, as he has since he was 14 in 1969.
Baime offered his brain to Newberg, who, since childhood, had wondered
about the mystery of God’s existence. At Penn, Newberg’s specialty is
radiology, so he teamed with Eugene d’Aquili to use imaging techniques to
detect which regions of the brain are active during spiritual experiences.
The scientists recruited Baime and seven other Tibetan Buddhists, all
skilled meditators.
TESTING FOR THE TIMELESS AND INFINITE
In a typical run, Baime settled onto the floor of a small darkened
room, lit only by a few candles and filled with jasmine incense. A string
of twine lay beside him. Concentrating on a mental image, he focused and
focused, quieting his conscious mind (he told the scientists afterward)
until something he identifies as his true inner self emerged. It felt
“timeless and infinite,” Baime said afterward, “a part of everyone and
everything in existence.” When he reached the “peak” of spiritual
intensity, he tugged on the twine. Newberg, huddled outside the room and
holding the other end, felt the pull and quickly injected a radioactive
tracer into an IV line that ran into Baime’s left arm. After a few
moments, he whisked Baime off to a SPECT (single photon emission computed
tomography) machine. By detecting the tracer, it tracks blood flow in the
brain. Blood flow correlates with neuronal activity.
The SPECT images are as close as scientists have come to snapping a photo
of a transcendent experience. As expected, the prefrontal cortex, seat of
attention, lit up: Baime, after all, was focusing deeply. But it was a
quieting of activity that stood out. A bundle of neurons in the superior
parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain, had gone dark. This
region, nicknamed the “orientation association area,” processes
information about space and time, and the orientation of the body in
space. It determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins.
Specifically, the left orientation area creates the sensation of a
physically delimited body; the right orientation area creates the sense of
the physical space in which the body exists. (An injury to this area can
so cripple your ability to maneuver in physical space that you cannot
figure the distance and angles needed to navigate the route to a chair
across the room.)
SELF AND NOT-SELF
The orientation area requires sensory input to do its calculus. “If you
block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense
concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the
distinction between self and not-self,” says Newberg. With no information
from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any
boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to
have no choice but “to perceive the self as endless and intimately
interwoven with everyone and everything,” Newberg and d’Aquili write in
“Why God Won’t Go Away.” The right orientation area, equally bereft of
sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel
that they have touched infinity.
I felt communion, peace, openness to experience ... [There was] an
awareness and responsiveness to God’s presence around me, and a feeling
of centering, quieting, nothingness, [as well as] moments of fullness of
the presence of God. [God was] permeating my being.
This is how her 45-minute prayer made Sister Celeste, a Franciscan nun,
feel, just before Newberg SPECT-scanned her. During her most intensely
religious moments, when she felt a palpable sense of God’s presence and an
absorption of her self into his being, her brain displayed changes like
those in the Tibetan Buddhist meditators: her orientation area went dark.
What Sister Celeste and the other nuns in the study felt, and what the
meditators experienced, Newberg emphasizes, “were neither mistakes nor
wishful thinking. They reflect real, biologically based events in the
brain.” The fact that spiritual contemplation affects brain activity gives
the experience a reality that psychologists and neuroscientists had long
denied it, and explains why people experience ineffable, transcendent
events as equally real as seeing a wondrous sunset or stubbing their toes.
PINPOINTING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
That a religious experience is reflected in brain activity is not too
surprising, actually. Everything we experience—from the sound of thunder
to the sight of a poodle, the feeling of fear and the thought of a
polka-dot castle—leaves a trace on the brain. Neurotheology is stalking
bigger game than simply affirming that spiritual feelings leave neural
footprints, too. By pinpointing the brain areas involved in spiritual
experiences and tracing how such experiences arise, the scientists hope to
learn whether anyone can have such experiences, and why spiritual
experiences have the qualities they do.
I could hear the singing of the planets, and wave after wave of light
washed over me. But ... I was the light as well ... I no longer existed
as a separate ‘I’ ... I saw into the structure of the universe. I had
the impression of knowing beyond knowledge and being given glimpses into
ALL.
That was how author Sophy Burnham described her experience at Machu
Picchu, in her 1997 book “The Ecstatic Journey.” Although there was no
scientist around to whisk her into a SPECT machine and confirm that her
orientation area was AWOL, it was almost certainly quiescent. That said,
just because an experience has a neural correlate does not mean that the
experience exists “only” in the brain, or that it is a figment of brain
activity with no independent reality. Think of what happens when you dig
into an apple pie. The brain’s olfactory region registers the aroma of the
cinnamon and fruit. The somatosensory cortex processes the feel of the
flaky crust on the tongue and lips. The visual cortex registers the sight
of the pie. Remembrances of pies past (Grandma’s kitchen, the corner bake
shop ...) activate association cortices. A neuroscientist with too much
time on his hands could undoubtedly produce a PET scan of “your brain on
apple pie.” But that does not negate the reality of the pie. “The fact
that spiritual experiences can be associated with distinct neural activity
does not necessarily mean that such experiences are mere neurological
illusions,” Newberg insists. “It’s no safer to say that spiritual urges
and sensations are caused by brain activity than it is to say that the
neurological changes through which we experience the pleasure of eating an
apple cause the apple to exist.” The bottom line, he says, is that “there
is no way to determine whether the neurological changes associated with
spiritual experience mean that the brain is causing those experiences ...
or is instead perceiving a spiritual reality.”
PRODUCING VISIONS
In fact, some of the same brain regions involved in the pie experience
create religious experiences, too. When the image of a cross, or a Torah
crowned in silver, triggers a sense of religious awe, it is because the
brain’s visual-association area, which interprets what the eyes see and
connects images to emotions and memories, has learned to link those images
to that feeling. Visions that arise during prayer or ritual are also
generated in the association area: electrical stimulation of the temporal
lobes (which nestle along the sides of the head and house the circuits
responsible for language, conceptual thinking and associations) produces
visions.
Temporal-lobe epilepsy—abnormal bursts of electrical activity in these
regions—takes this to extremes. Although some studies have cast doubt on
the connection between temporal-lobe epilepsy and religiosity, others find
that the condition seems to trigger vivid, Joan of Arc-type religious
visions and voices. In his recent book “Lying Awake,” novelist Mark
Salzman conjures up the story of a cloistered nun who, after years of
being unable to truly feel the presence of God, begins having visions. The
cause is temporal-lobe epilepsy. Sister John of the Cross must wrestle
with whether to have surgery, which would probably cure her—but would also
end her visions. Dostoevsky, Saint Paul, Saint Teresa of Avila, Proust and
others are thought to have had temporal-lobe epilepsy, leaving them
obsessed with matters of the spirit.
Although temporal-lobe epilepsy is rare, researchers suspect that
focused bursts of electrical activity called “temporal-lobe transients”
may yield mystical experiences. To test this idea, Michael Persinger of
Laurentian University in Canada fits a helmet jury-rigged with
electromagnets onto a volunteer’s head. The helmet creates a weak magnetic
field, no stronger than that produced by a computer monitor. The field
triggers bursts of electrical activity in the temporal lobes, Persinger
finds, producing sensations that volunteers describe as supernatural or
spiritual: an out-of-body experience, a sense of the divine. He suspects
that religious experiences are evoked by mini electrical storms in the
temporal lobes, and that such storms can be triggered by anxiety, personal
crisis, lack of oxygen, low blood sugar and simple fatigue—suggesting a
reason that some people “find God” in such moments. Why the temporal
lobes? Persinger speculates that our left temporal lobe maintains our
sense of self. When that region is stimulated but the right stays
quiescent, the left interprets this as a sensed presence, as the self
departing the body, or of God.
I was alone upon the seashore ... I felt that I ... return[ed] from the
solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is
... Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world encircling
harmony ... I felt myself one with them.
Is an experience like this one, described by the German philosopher
Malwida von Meysenburg in 1900, within the reach of anyone? “Not everyone
who meditates encounters these sorts of unitive experiences,” says Robert
K.C. Forman, a scholar of comparative religion at Hunter College in New
York City. “This suggests that some people may be genetically or
temperamentally predisposed to mystical ability.” Those most open to
mystical experience tend also to be open to new experiences generally.
They are usually creative and innovative, with a breadth of interests and
a tolerance for ambiguity (as determined by questionnaire). They also tend
toward fantasy, notes David Wulff, “suggesting a capacity to suspend the
judging process that distinguishes imaginings and real events.” Since “we
all have the brain circuits that mediate spiritual experiences, probably
most people have the capacity for having such experiences,” says Wulff.
“But it’s possible to foreclose that possibility. If you are rational,
controlled, not prone to fantasy, you will probably resist the
experience.”
MEASURING SPIRITUAL FORCE
In survey after survey since the 1960s, between 30 and 40 percent or so
of those asked say they have, at least once or twice, felt “very close to
a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself.”
Gallup polls in the 1990s found that 53 percent of American adults said
they had had “a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight.” Reports
of mystical experience increase with education, income and age (people in
their 40s and 50s are most likely to have them).
Yet many people seem no more able to have such an experience than to
fly to Venus. One explanation came in 1999, when Australian researchers
found that people who report mystical and spiritual experiences tend to
have unusually easy access to subliminal consciousness. “In people whose
unconscious thoughts tend to break through into consciousness more
readily, we find some correlation with spiritual experiences,” says
psychologist Michael Thalbourne of the University of Adelaide.
Unfortunately, scientists are pretty clueless about what allows
subconscious thoughts to pop into the consciousness of some people and not
others. The single strongest predictor of such experiences, however, is
something called “dissociation.” In this state, different regions of the
brain disengage from others. “This theory, which explains hypnotizability
so well, might explain mystical states, too,” says Michael Shermer,
director of the Skeptics Society, which debunks paranormal phenomena.
“Something really seems to be going on in the brain, with some module
dissociating from the rest of the cortex.”
THE NEURAL BASIS FOR RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
That dissociation may reflect unusual electrical crackling in one or
more brain regions. In 1997, neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran told the
annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience that there is “a neural
basis for religious experience.” His preliminary results suggested that
depth of religious feeling, or religiosity, might depend on natural—not
helmet-induced—enhancements in the electrical activity of the temporal
lobes. Interestingly, this region of the brain also seems important for
speech perception. One experience common to many spiritual states is
hearing the voice of God. It seems to arise when you misattribute inner
speech (the “little voice” in your head that you know you generate
yourself) to something outside yourself. During such experiences, the
brain’s Broca’s area (responsible for speech production) switches on. Most
of us can tell this is our inner voice speaking. But when sensory
information is restricted, as happens during meditation or prayer, people
are “more likely to misattribute internally generated thoughts to an
external source,” suggests psychologist Richard Bentall of the University
of Manchester in England in the book “Varieties of Anomalous Experience.”
Stress and emotional arousal can also interfere with the brain’s
ability to find the source of a voice, Bentall adds. In a 1998 study,
researchers found that one particular brain region, called the right
anterior cingulate, turned on when people heard something in the
environment—a voice or a sound—and also when they hallucinated hearing
something. But it stayed quiet when they imagined hearing something and
thus were sure it came from their own brain. This region, says Bentall,
“may contain the neural circuits responsible for tagging events as
originating from the external world.” When it is inappropriately switched
on, we are fooled into thinking the voice we hear comes from outside us.
Even people who describe themselves as nonspiritual can be moved by
religious ceremonies and liturgy. Hence the power of ritual. Drumming,
dancing, incantations—all rivet attention on a single, intense source of
sensory stimulation, including the body’s own movements. They also evoke
powerful emotional responses. That combination—focused attention that
excludes other sensory stimuli, plus heightened emotion—is key. Together,
they seem to send the brain’s arousal system into hyperdrive, much as
intense fear does. When this happens, explains Newberg, one of the brain
structures responsible for maintaining equilibrium—the hippocampus—puts on
the brakes. It inhibits the flow of signals between neurons, like a
traffic cop preventing any more cars from entering the on-ramp to a
tied-up highway.
‘SOFTENING OF THE BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF’
The result is that certain regions of the brain are deprived of
neuronal input. One such deprived region seems to be the orientation area,
the same spot that goes quiet during meditation and prayer. As in those
states, without sensory input the orientation area cannot do its job of
maintaining a sense of where the self leaves off and the world begins.
That’s why ritual and liturgy can bring on what Newberg calls a “softening
of the boundaries of the self”—and the sense of oneness and spiritual
unity. Slow chanting, elegiac liturgical melodies and whispered
ritualistic prayer all seem to work their magic in much the same way: they
turn on the hippocampus directly and block neuronal traffic to some brain
regions. The result again is “blurring the edges of the brain’s sense of
self, opening the door to the unitary states that are the primary goal of
religious ritual,” says Newberg.
Researchers’ newfound interest in neurotheology reflects more than the
availability of cool new toys to peer inside the working brain. Psychology
and neuroscience have long neglected religion. Despite its centrality to
the mental lives of so many people, religion has been met by what David
Wulff calls “indifference or even apathy” on the part of science. When one
psychologist, a practicing Christian, tried to discuss in his introductory
psych book the role of faith in people’s lives, his publisher edited out
most of it—for fear of offending readers. The rise of neurotheology
represents a radical shift in that attitude. And whatever light science is
shedding on spirituality, spirituality is returning the favor: mystical
experiences, says Forman, may tell us something about consciousness,
arguably the greatest mystery in neuroscience. “In mystical experiences,
the content of the mind fades, sensory awareness drops out, so you are
left only with pure consciousness,” says Forman.
“This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and is not a
mere byproduct of sensory action.”
For all the tentative successes that scientists are scoring in their
search for the biological bases of religious, spiritual and mystical
experience, one mystery will surely lie forever beyond their grasp. They
may trace a sense of transcendence to this bulge in our gray matter. And
they may trace a feeling of the divine to that one. But it is likely that
they will never resolve the greatest question of all—namely, whether our
brain wiring creates God, or whether God created our brain wiring. Which
you believe is, in the end, a matter of faith.
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