Scott lay down with his head in the machine. It was chilly in the room; the nurse tucked him in with a little blanket. For the next forty-five minutes, Scott rested with his head secured in place by pillows while the machine rotated around his head, taking images of his brain. The brain scanner then developed a color-coded photo of his brain: the active parts were hot red and screaming for attention; the ho-hum areas were yellow; the sleeping areas were a cool blue.
Scott went through the routine twice. The first time, Newberg told Scott
not
to pray but to allow his thoughts to wander, to remember a movie he saw, or chores he had to do. He could think about anything but God. This scan would produce a “baseline,” or resting-state, image. In the second session, Scott prayed intensely for a particular person in what is called intercessory prayer. Like those weight-loss advertisements, Newberg would analyze the before and after, comparing the baseline image with the image of the brain in active prayer.
3
After Scott emerged from the second brain scan, Newberg and Scott and I gathered in the examination room.
“Did you have any visual or auditory sensations?” I asked, thinking of his vision of running from Jericho to Jerusalem.
“Yes, I did have some of that.”
“What sort of things?” I asked.
“I’m not sure you want this on tape,” Scott said, laughing. It turned out he had been praying for
me.
He had a vision that God wanted to shatter the molds that I had put myself in (the wife mold, the reporter mold, and so on)—that God had a special mold for me.
“And I saw God handing you this mold of who you are. How He’s made you. And He says, ‘
This
is how I want you to be.’ It was intense, Barb. I would have screamed if I could have. It was that intense.”
Newberg nodded thoughtfully. “We did a study recently of people speaking in tongues, and the whole concept is hearing what God has to say, and feeling the Spirit of God going through them.” That sensation was caught on the brain scans.
“So, given your research,” I asked, “what are some of the things you might expect to see on Scott’s scan?”
Newberg was uncertain. Scott’s prayer life seemed to straddle the two types of states that Newberg had studied. One type involved meditative practice, a state of mind a little like a champion dressage horse under perfect control. The other involved ecstatic Pentecostal prayer, which bucked and snorted like a rodeo bull.Which sort of brain Scott possessed would remain a mystery for several weeks.
Looking Under the Hood
So far, Newberg has identified two types of virtuoso brains: contemplative brains and rowdy ones. Let’s examine the contemplatives first. For this study, Newberg put Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhist monks (separately, of course) into the brain scanner at the University of Pennsylvania. The “theologies” underpinning these two practices have nothing in common. During their centering prayer—a meditative prayer that emphasizes interior silence—the nuns focused intently on God, and usually on Jesus. During their meditation, the monks nestled into a state of intense awareness, connecting with the underlying reality of life; their belief system excludes a supernatural, external “God.” Yet each group’s descriptions of those transcendent moments bore an uncanny resemblance.
“I felt communion, peace, openness to experience,” Sister Celeste, a charming seventy-year-old Franciscan nun, recalled after emerging from the imaging machine.
4
She felt “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.”
Now listen to Michael Baine’s words. Baine is a Tibetan Buddhist and a scientist who works with Andy Newberg and became one of the subjects in the study. Baine described his meditation experience as “timeless and infinite.”
“There was an intense feeling of love,” Baine told Newberg. “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.”
It sounded to me like two different road trips. One group drives a Lexus through the Redwood Forest, the other takes an Escalade through the Swiss Alps. The vehicles look entirely dissimilar, as does the scenery. But gazing at the giant trees and towering mountains may stir up a similar sense of exhilaration or awe. For Andy Newberg, the question was this: What is going on under the hood? Are the brain mechanics the same for Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks as they experience the transcendent, just as two different cars in two different countries operate along the same mechanical principles?
That is precisely what Newberg discovered when he peered at their brain scans. With both the monks and the nuns, the front part of their brains “lit up” as they focused on the task at hand. Think of the frontal lobes as the chief operating officer of the brain, one with accountant-like tendencies: it handles the details, helps plan and execute tasks, keeps you awake and alert and, above all, focused. It also processes memory and language and other complicated social tasks, such as figuring out how to behave at a cocktail party or how to respond to your spouse or friend or rival at work.
As the Christian nuns focused on God—on a word like
Jesus
or
Elohim
that helped them connect to the divine—their frontal lobes shifted into overdrive. Similarly, as the Buddhist monks meditated on an image that allowed them to connect with the ground of being, their scans showed their frontal lobes as a red glow of activity.
Newberg found another peculiar similarity.With both the nuns and the monks, the parietal lobes went dark during deep prayer and meditation. Newberg calls this the “orientation area” because it orients you in space and time: those lobes tell you where your body ends and the rest of the world begins. That is why Sister Celeste (and countless other mystics) described a unity with God, or as she put it, God “permeating my being.” It was the neurological reason that Michael Baine felt “a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.” And, I might add, it was what those who enjoyed psychedelic drugs and natural mystical experiences reported.
Newberg theorizes that when the nuns and monks focused on their mantra or image, their brain simply screened out other information. You’re watching
Casablanca
and the oven timer goes off, or you’re gazing rapturously at your beloved and the phone rings—you don’t notice. Increase that a hundredfold and you would lose your sense of time and space. It is not that the orientation area of the brain is not working. Rather, the frontal lobes are physically blocking all the information going to the orientation area—the sounds, the sights, the dog at the door or the timer in the kitchen, the things that would normally create a picture of the world around you.
And yet the orientation area, conscientious beaver that it is, is still trying to do its job. “It’s still trying to create for you a sense of yourself and a spatial relation between you and the rest of the world,” Newberg says, “but it has been deprived of the information that it normally has to do that, so you wind up with this sense of no self, no space, no time.”
5
Newberg’s description reminded me of the way psychedelic drugs may behave in a brain to create hallucinations. Some pharmacologists believe that drugs like psilocybin block out external sensory information, allowing you to create your own, transcendent, reality. Chemicals are quicker, but it may be that prayer and meditation accomplish the same high—without the potential for a bad trip or ending up in handcuffs.
For me personally, Newberg’s brain scans are theological dynamite. They boil down to this: a mystical state is a mystical state. The closer one draws to a transcendent state—or, as Newberg calls it, “absolute unitary being”—the more the descriptions merge. Christian mystics sound like Sufi mystics, who sound like Jewish mystics, who sound like Buddhists. And from the brain’s point of view, this makes perfect sense.
“Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Jews who have had mystical states tend to describe the states as ‘everything becomes one.’The same terms keep cropping up over and over again,” Newberg told me. “When we look at the physiology of the brains, the most unitary state is one in which we completely deprive the orientation parts of the brain of information. So,
physiologically
it should be very similar. And
philosophically
it should also be similar. If you have a totally undifferentiated experience, it’s undifferentiated. It really has to be the same regardless of where you’re coming from.”
It doesn’t matter if you scale the spiritual peak using Christian centering prayer, Buddhist meditation, or Sikh chanting. The destination is the same. Or as Sophy Burnham might tell you: You must choose a spoke to get to the center of the wheel, but any spoke will do.
Newberg’s research throws a gauntlet at the foot of my faith. If disparate religions drive the same neural routes to transcendence, can one religion claim that it is true and all others false (or at least deficient)? I had noticed in my reporting that the people who experienced mystical states tended to drop religious labels: if they had been Christian before, they often became “spiritual but not religious” afterward, or they might incorporate other traditions into their practice of Christianity. One thing they often rejected, however, was an exclusive claim to Truth. This forced me to reconsider Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Perhaps, I reflected, Jesus’ words were more nuanced than a literal reading of the text suggests.
Of course, I was not ready to throw my faith overboard just because of a few brain scans. Even if two things appear identical physiologically, they can play out in distinct ways. Identical twins share the same DNA, but they are not identical people. Can one routinely score 100 on math tests and the other flunk? Can one become a car salesman and the other an English teacher? Of course. Biology does not determine everything—and it certainly cannot determine the nature of “Truth.” In the same way, it is too facile to say that brain states can determine the veracity of spiritual claims. And yet, I wondered, if there is a God who maps out the neural routes to communicate with Him, He could be making an explicit point: maybe the distinctions between religions are more artificial than believers want to admit.
Prayer Without Thinking
Andrew Newberg is an equal opportunity scientist. He is intrigued by brains in meditative states
and
in excited ones, which brings us to Pentecostal Christians. Anyone who has stood in a charismatic church and listened to the trilling of tongues could have told Newberg that these brains are nothing like those of contemplative nuns or Buddhist monks. The question is, how are they different?
What differentiates one type of spirituality from another is not doctrine—witness the scans of monks and nuns. What distinguishes one type of spirituality from another is style. And here we come to a very strange style indeed.
Since people started speaking unfamiliar languages at Los Angeles’ Azusa Street Mission in 1905, Pentecostal Christianity has swept the world like a tornado, carving its way across the United States, turning south to Latin America, and most recently, carving a broad swath through Africa. It is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. It knocks people down,“slaying them in the Spirit.” It sparks laughter and apparent healing, and most of all, it confers upon people their own “prayer language.” For the hallmark of a charismatic or Pentecostal Christian (the words are often used interchangeably) is glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues.”
In his “terrifying” study, as Newberg put it, the scientist recruited five women who had spoken in tongues for several years. The protocol mirrored the one for Scott McDermott and the nuns and monks—with one major difference. Since Newberg wanted to detect changes specific to speaking in tongues, he asked each Pentecostal subject to sing gospel songs as the “baseline” state, and then to speak in her unknown prayer language as the “target” spiritual state. As in the other studies, a radioactive tracer was injected into the subject’s bloodstream at the (presumed) height of her singing and glossolalia, capturing her brain in musical and then spiritual ecstasy.
Donna Morgan, one of the hospital’s nuclear medicine technologists, told Newberg she had a deep interest in observing someone speak in tongues, and volunteered to help.
6
As they prepared the first subject, Newberg confessed to Morgan he was nervous, as he had never seen this phenomenon before.What if nothing happened? he asked her.
“Don’t worry, it will,” she reassured him.
Two minutes into the second session, the subject began uttering incomprehensible words, like a foreign language. She returned to English, then back to tongues. Newberg suddenly noticed Donna Morgan singing and moving around the room, and a few seconds later, she broke into her own prayer language.
“This is incredible,” Newberg whispered to another assistant, and they stared in astonishment as the two women gaily babbled away for the next fifteen minutes. Morgan eventually became a subject and co-author of the journal article describing brain activity while a person speaks in tongues.
7
The brain scans suggest why glossolalia is rarely heard at Harvard or Oxford. From a cognitive-processing standpoint, it is rather lowbrow. For when Newberg developed the brain scans and peered at the frontal lobes—the executive part of the brain, which manages the higher thought processes—he stared at the images in disbelief.
“The frontal lobes actually shut down,” Newberg told me. “This actually made a lot of sense to us on reflection.When you’re meditating, you kind of control the process.You focus on something, you attend to something, and you’re willfully doing that. In speaking in tongues, the experience is that your will is not in charge of this whole process. These people have
surrendered
, and whatever happens just happens through them, there’s nothing specific that they are in control of.”