Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Chapter 7

  The Open Mind

  How New Science Is Revealing the Power of Meditation and Prayer

  And when we could go no further, and were drowning on a desert, we raised our flag to follow the breath of God? But it was blowing every which way.

  —Joe Henry, “Flag”

  As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

  —Barack Obama, January 12, 2011

  Dr. Andrew Newberg was late for class, as he would be every week. About ten minutes after the scheduled start time, he hustled around the corner, walking fast, a sheepish smile playing out underneath his thick mop of hair. He dressed in well-worn brown shoes, nondescript slacks, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt that hung loosely from his bony figure. “Hi, hiya, hi,” he repeated to the line of students arranged pell-mell, sitting and standing on the floor around the locked door to his classroom.

  These kids must have ranked, statistically, among the brightest in America—freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), many of them in their first semester. They smiled back at their professor. Newberg unlocked the door to the classroom. And everyone piled into the small, theater-like space. The whole room worked by means of electronics, with dials on the walls like the bridge of a movie spaceship. Newberg never did learn how to dim the lights himself. And over time, the class would seem to love him for it, smiling as they might at the eccentricities of a beloved uncle. But on day one, most of them had no real idea who Newberg was. They had enrolled in RELS 102: Science and the Sacred: Neurotheology, without knowing what they were in for at all.

  Dr. Andrew Newberg works, full-time, as a radiologist at Penn, one of the nation’s most prestigious teaching hospitals. But he is best known as the lead author of five books, which renders him an authority to anyone investigating the relationship between science and religion. His field, neurotheology, is, simply, the scientific investigation of the relationship between brain function and spiritual experience. But of course, in the context of our culture, there is nothing simple about that. And so Newberg’s field has caused something of a ruckus among believers and unbelievers alike.

  The foundation of Newberg’s credibility is that there is nothing faith-based about his science. Medical imaging devices allow him to monitor the brain activity of believers as they engage in spiritual practice. What makes his work so controversial is the manner in which people choose to interpret his data: some see God in every grain of sand and every neuron; others see the brain at work and figure that’s all there is. These days, in particular, it’s not overly dramatic to say this is one debate that truly rages. And Newberg is the man in the middle—religious fundamentalists to one side, New Atheists to the other.

  The religious, if they pay attention to such science at all, portray the findings of neurotheology as illuminating the relationship between soul and flesh. The leading New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—mean to put religion to as swift a death as they can manage, or, at least, to mock it into ever-narrower corners. As a result, New Atheists and materialist philosophers tend to see Newberg’s findings as further proof that religious experience is reducible to mere brain function. Newberg, for his part, merely wants to find out what effect religion has on the human brain—to see how God, or the notion of God, occurs in our neurons. And his origin story, which he shares with his class, describes the sudden formation of a brand-new field of science.

  Newberg’s initial research subject was Robert, a Buddhist and an experienced practitioner of Tibetan meditation. The plan Newberg and his co-researcher hatched was novel in scientific terms. Newberg and Robert sat several feet apart, separated by a closed laboratory door yet connected by a single strand of twine. While Newberg sat on one side of the door and waited, Robert sat on the other, meditating. The activity of meditation has always been supremely difficult to study. The experience of meditating is purely subjective—and happening only in the practitioner’s mind. A thought can’t be pinned to a microscope slide, but science had advanced enough by this time, in the mid-1990s, that Newberg could take a picture of Robert’s brain as he meditated. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy. The system they had devised required precise coordination of elements as primitive as a length of twine and as advanced as a massive brain-imaging device. The experiment also depended upon Robert achieving a delicate mental state with distractions all around, including an intravenous line threaded into his arm.

  Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.

  Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.

  Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.

  Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.

  Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”

  In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?

  In most classrooms, with most teachers, the first day of the semester is an easy ride
through the syllabus. But in Newberg’s class, this most fundamental question of man’s existence, asked for millennia—Is there a God?—was first-day stuff. Newberg told his class about Robert and landed them all in this contentious territory. I sat in the back of the room, watching Newberg’s students turn serious with the weight of the subject.

  In a strict scientific sense, Newberg has always been pretty humble about his data. His findings, he cautions, do not comprise evidence that God exists. Then again, his data also do not suggest that God or spiritual experience is simply a delusion. “We have to be careful,” he said, “about how much we reduce spiritual experiences down to brain function, because it can be very complicated. If God or a sense of God is strictly produced by the brain, then all theological questions fall away. If the brain is accessing God, or some higher reality, then theology obviously comes back in.”

  The problem, Newberg told his students, is that “I can’t tell you definitively what the answer is. No one can.”

  He used a brief analogy, versions of which regularly appear, as a kind of neurotheological disclaimer, in all his books and talks: “The brain mediates all our experience,” he said. “Real and imagined. If I took an imaging scan of someone eating apple pie, certain areas of the brain would light up. Does that mean apple pie is just a delusion produced by the brain?”

  In short, Newberg said, “We can’t tell you the origin of the experience. But we can tell you the brain does appear to be built to have these experiences. There are examples of people reaching similar states, spontaneously. But for the most part, it takes work. Meditation and these powerful prayer experiences require dedication and practice. But people have figured out how to do this, and the question is, ‘What is the source of that experience?’ The answer is, ‘We don’t know.’ Science doesn’t really have an answer for you.”

  Newberg’s students shifted uncomfortably in their seats, some with nervous smiles. I would imagine that their brains were accessing the series of complicated questions Newberg had raised: Have the world’s various religions found ways for the human machine to trick itself into experiencing something that feels profound? Or have the world’s religions found ways to access something real? For that matter, is there any meaningful distinction between a truly profound experience and one that only feels that way?

  After allowing this heavy silence to persist for a few seconds, Newberg went on: “Here’s what I can tell you,” he said. “I can tell you, when people are having a particular spiritual experience, which parts of the brain light up. That’s it. That’s all I can tell you.”

  I followed Newberg’s class throughout the semester, and as the weeks wore on Newberg’s students told me they admired their professor for avoiding big pronouncements, for avoiding the kinds of statements that fuel opposition and debate. But the irony is that, in his unrelenting humility, Andrew Newberg might be making the biggest statement of all. And his pictures of the human brain, engaged in a spiritual quest, might be just what we need to quiet this cultural war.

  THE SPEECH OF RELIGIOUS fundamentalists is filled with judgment and fantasy. Just consider Pat Robertson’s take on Haiti, in the direct aftermath of an earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people in 2010. “They were under the heel of the French,” he said. “They got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal… . Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

  The actions of religious fundamentalists are often as profane as their speech, and for evidence we need look no further than the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover up of child sexual abuse perpetrated by some of its priests.

  In response to such bad behavior, which has accumulated with the centuries, a movement has risen up—with great vengeance and furious anger.

  “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry,” writes Christopher Hitchens, in his bestselling rant, God Is Not Great, “invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience… . With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it ‘looks forward’ in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur.”

  Daniel Dennett writes, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in.”

  Perhaps most famously, the Pope of the Godless, Richard Dawkins, sounded a call to arms with an editorial he wrote after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense,” he observes. “Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness.”

  Newberg might seem a physically and temperamentally slight figure to hold the center of a cultural maelstrom. He is an apologetic believer who has admitted he suspects there is some higher truth in religion but further admits he cannot prove his position. He is physically unimposing. He wears a perpetual smile. He is gentle and mild. And he altogether lacks the capacity, in my experience of him, to reach the verbal extremes that excite debate. He won’t wound a man, like Hitchens will, with a wit sharpened by many long years of use in fiercely opinionated journalism. And neither will he commend another man to the fire, like Pat Robertson. But the details of his biography do reveal the contours of a strong spine.

  By the time Newberg was readying to start his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in 1993, he wanted to study his own holy trinity: consciousness, the brain, and spiritual experience. But like many people with a scientific interest in spiritual matters, he appeared headed for disappointment. There wasn’t much, if any, existing research for him to use as a foundation. But there was one man he had become aware of, the since-deceased Dr. Eugene d’Aquili, who had conducted some research on ritual practices and the brain. Newberg asked d’Aquili for a meeting, and a lunch was arranged.

  Newberg was in his mid-twenties, just starting his career. D’Aquili, a doctor at Penn, was roughly twice his age and entirely disinterested. “It was obvious he had taken this lunch with me to politely brush me off,” said Newberg. “He didn’t have any interest in working with me. And why would he? I had just shown up out of nowhere.”

  But Newberg didn’t accept this polite no—and d’Aquili, seemingly just to get up and get away from the kid at the table, asked that Newberg look over some papers he had written. “Read those,” he said. “Then tell me if you’re still interested.”

  The papers were tough, tangled thickets. Newberg read every word. D’Aquili struck him as a creative researcher and a formidable thinker; and when d’Aquili found out that this kid got through the papers and absorbed them, he felt similarly predisposed toward his new protégé. The pair worked together till d’Aquili’s death in 1998, and d’Aquili helped design and conduct Newberg’s early studies on Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns.

  For Newberg, the game was on.

  “The connection between religious faith and mental disorder is, from the viewpoint of the tolerant and the ‘multicultural’ both very obvious and highly unmentionable,” writes Christopher Hitchens.

  Newberg’s whole career was first animated by putting this long-voiced atheistic idea to the test: Would some sort of malfunction show up that explained the spiritual experience? Or would he somehow get a glimpse of God as a kind of ghost in the machine? In his pursuit of an answer, Newberg has become a curato
r of human spiritual life—taking snapshots of various transcendent states and hanging them on the walls.

  For his class, he played some video from one of his most controversial studies, in which he conducted brain scans of a woman awash in the ecstasy of speaking in tongues. Known more formally as glossolalia, speaking in tongues is one of the world’s most heavily derided mystical practices: skeptics snort at it, and even most religious groups find the act of speaking in tongues aberrant at best, abhorrent at worst.

  Among believers, the speaker is said to give himself over to the Holy Spirit, which takes control of his voice. Practitioners shout and whoop till sputtering flumes of syllables finally come pouring from their mouths. And this noise, they say, is the tongue of angels. Most famously, the R&B singer Al Green is a Pentecostal minister, where tongues remain a staple of spiritual life. When a filmmaker produced a documentary about Green’s religious conversion, he withheld all images of Green speaking in tongues until the very end. But the film reaches its emotional climax with a clip of the singer, eyes closed, spouting a torrent of random syllables into the air.

  Newberg’s video is even more intimate than that. The woman stands before a home video camera, rocking back and forth, her words coming slowly at first, as no doubt she chooses them, until she starts hitting on multisyllabic riffs that sound more spontaneous. Then, finally, she reaches a vibrant, stunning peak—the syllables gushing out of her like water from a hydrant, forceful and uncontainable, moans and shouts. An ecstasy of sound. The kids in Newberg’s class settled and resettled in their seats, some visibly wincing as this lady on the screen exulted. I felt a bit uncomfortable myself, in mixed company amid the youth of America, because it felt a bit like watching religious pornography—the sight of a fully clothed woman bringing herself to a spiritual orgasm. Perhaps sensing this, Newberg cut the video short, while the woman still wailed.