Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Over the course of the night, between stretches of Ron’s meditative music, Waldman dispenses advice: If anyone in the audience wants peace and happiness, they can get it through meditation and prayer. If music is played in the background, it should be pleasant, slow, repetitive and relaxed. And the prayer or meditation itself should be profoundly meaningful to the practitioner and positive in all its connotations.

  This night isn’t a scientific presentation. So Waldman makes only passing references to the neurological findings that support his claims. But he promotes various mystical practices—including meditation and the Christian centering prayer. And in perhaps the most dramatic moment of his performance, he raises his voice like a priest to wring some emotion out of a poem: “I am circling around God,” he says, “around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still do not know if I am a falcon, a storm, or a great song.”

  What I never did hear him tell the audience, however, is pretty remarkable for a man dressed in a kufi and reading mystic poetry in a Christian church: Waldman sees God only as a useful and beautiful metaphor—not a scientific reality. He doesn’t believe in any religion. But he is a nonbeliever with a newfound respect for religion, a respect so deep he can’t always be distinguished from a believer, because he has come to accept the positive power of some religious practice.

  A counselor, teacher, and writer working in Camarillo, California, Waldman was content enough in his own non-belief that he felt religion held little value for psychological or societal health. But when he began to co-write and collaborate with Andrew Newberg, his viewpoints radically changed. And their partnership quickly went much further than either of them expected. A couple of books later, in fact, Waldman is firmly established as Newberg’s sidekick.

  Newberg conducts the lab research. Waldman combs the library stacks, integrating related scientific papers into their books. Working in this manner, they soon found themselves on the fuzzy borderland between science and religion, on ground the two could share. And from that position, they found they weren’t just identifying the neural correlates of religious experience, they were finding that specific spiritual practices work.

  Consider Newberg’s early research on Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns, who Waldman referenced to the church crowd when he mentioned the centering prayer.

  Used by Christian mystics since the fourth century, the centering prayer grew in popularity in the 1970s and differs from standard meditation in one crucial respect. In meditation, the practitioner sits and observes the workings of his or her own mind, no longer reacting to the flurry of thoughts constantly generated by the brain. In this state, all thoughts are allowed to just sail by, without any emotion or judgment. The meditator might choose to remain in this condition, allowing her sense of awareness to blossom; or she could shift focus to her breathing, to a particular ideal, or to a mantra. For the Christian mystic, however, engaged in a centering prayer, the object of focus is specific: communion with God.

  The correlation between the goals of these two mystic practices and the neural processes Newberg observed is total: the Tibetan meditators Newberg studied felt incredible peace; correspondingly, activity in their amygdala and their rational frontal lobes quieted. They also claimed to feel a oneness with all things; and indeed, the areas of the brain governing the position of their bodies in relation to other objects fell silent, too. The nuns experienced all this, plus a sense of communion with a higher power; and upon analysis, their brain scans looked much like those of the Tibetans, with the addition of significant activity in the limbic or emotional center of the brain, reflecting their profound sense of union with God.

  If that was all there is, the skeptic might feel justified in snorting. To them, this would undoubtedly seem like Newberg had simply found the neural correlates of delusion. In retort, I paraphrase a pop song: How can something so wrong, feel so right? Because, scientifically speaking, the experience is right. The sensations these practitioners report aren’t delusion; they are the self-directed workings of the human mind, like a horse put under harness. And even more important, these positive changes in brain function, if practiced enough, transform our baseline mental states in incredibly healthy ways.

  The amount of scientific research into the neurological effects of prayer and meditation is still small, but it is growing quickly. And what we’re finding is that short-term changes in our consciousness, during contemplative practice, produce long-term, positive neurological effects. People tend to think of their personalities and ways of being as somehow fixed. And in science, these traits and flaws alike have been linked to brain function. But as Waldman put it to me, “The whole notion that our brains are hardwired for much of anything is wrong. The name of the game is neuroplasticity.”

  The concept of neuroplasticity is now an accepted fact of neuroscience: our brains literally rewire themselves, creating new connections among neurons based on what we do and think. During the 2010 Winter Olympics, television cameras often captured skiers in mid-reverie: waiting for their next run, poles in hand and eyes closed, twitching and turning their heads side to side as if slaloming downhill. The skiers were meditating on their craft, and with good reason: a brain that carries out a specific set of calculations and functions, again and again, even in our imagination, literally reshapes itself to the task. That’s neuroplasticity. And that is precisely what’s so powerful about a regular meditative practice.

  In the same way these skiers imagine their next downhill runs, everyone can watch their negative thoughts float by without judging them or reacting to them. As a result, the next time anxiety threatens to derail their efforts, they’re more likely to let go of all that fear and stress and keep working toward their goals. Need to have a difficult conversation with the boss or your spouse? Imagine it, repetitively. Notice all the anxiety and fear associated with the conversation, but don’t react to it. Instead, imagine yourself simply saying what you need to say. By the time you’re actually engaged in the conversation, you’ll feel like you’ve pulled it off successfully numerous times before, and you’ll better understand how to function, despite whatever stress you still feel.

  Meditation and prayer have for too long, culturally speaking, been relegated to the margins. But opportunities for meditation are all around us. We may engage in them without realizing it. In the bestselling book Born to Run, in fact, longtime men’s magazine writer and running enthusiast Christopher McDougall slowly relates the practice of jogging to meditation. Think of a disciplined runner maintaining focus on the ground as it moves beneath her feet. The runner does not gaze out toward the horizon or allow thoughts of the remaining distance to hinder her. This runner is meditating. And today’s ultramarathoners, who run distances of a hundred miles, are essentially engaging in what the Buddhists called “running meditations.”

  A scientist we met earlier in this book, Dean Radin, meditates during his workday by staying strictly focused on the task at hand. While most people think about the next, most dreaded items on the to-do list, Radin stays in the present, practicing a classic mindfulness meditation. Do this sort of thing often, do this every day, according to Newberg and Waldman’s findings, and the benefits will change your brain function—and by extension, the quality of your life.

  Remember the meditators Newberg began his career studying? Their brains appear to be shaped over many years and long practice into an enviable configuration—a state of relaxed concentration and lower anxiety. In short, those dudes in the saffron robes seem so peaceful because their brains are more peaceful—their experience of life is more peaceful.

  But don’t let their expertise intimidate: we can get great benefits from meditation or prayerful practice almost immediately, in a variety of areas—from skiing, to creativity, to spirituality, to compassion, to our faulty memories.

  Newberg conducted an experiment in which subjects improved their memories by meditating just twelve minutes a day, for only a few weeks. And as Waldma
n told me, to increase your own sense of well-being, “You don’t have to believe in God. You can just think about what you most value in life—compassion, reason, love, peace—and you’ll literally strengthen the neural connections that enable you to carry those values into the rest of your life.”

  Yet this promising practice also bears a threat: because if we quite literally are what we think, we are better off focusing on positive ideas. In short, if you choose to worship a God, science is now capable of telling you what kind of God is most worthy of that worship—what kind of God will bring you the greatest sense of peace and best enable you to relate to your fellow man. In this vein, Newberg and Waldman’s research suggests that people who focus on a judgmental, vengeful God probably have less healthy brains—brains filled with fear and anxiety. Better not to take your marching orders from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell or, less famously, the eight-hundred-plus-member Rabbinical Alliance of America, who link terrorist attacks or natural disasters to God’s wrath at homosexuality; better to focus on ideas like love, unity, and peace.

  Atheists, too, should consider: The more evil they attribute to religion, the more that view will become their reality, and the less able they will be to rationally consider contrary evidence.

  Waldman has become something of an evangelist for the power of meditation. He sees his stumping for contemplative practice as promoting science and, at least, a broadly defined spirituality with a body of research that is growing quickly. Scientists working at hospitals and universities in Massachusetts and Minnesota, associated with Harvard and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have demonstrated that meditators practicing relaxation techniques don’t just change their brain function. They even undergo genetic changes. In both experienced and novice practitioners, the genes affected were related to a pronounced lack or reduction of stress. The gene expression of beginning meditators, in fact, changed in just eight weeks of regular meditative practice.

  This is not so crazy as it sounds. Our genetics, after all, represent only potentials. Genes that are activated by environment, or our actions, are said to be “switched on” or “expressed.” As an example, research published in 2007 in the online journal BMC Genomics showed that smoking leads to permanent changes in gene expression. Genes that are irreversibly changed may help to explain why former smokers remain more likely to develop lung cancer. The Benson-Lieberman study on meditation, however, is particularly dramatic, demonstrating that positive molecular shifts can occur in as little as two months, suggesting even beginning meditation practitioners are less likely to incur the health problems associated with stress.

  With findings like these, momentum is building: some may balk at Eckhart Tolle’s particular brand of mysticism, but his sales figures speak to a possible shift in the culture, away from being indoctrinated into a religion or lectured to about spirituality and toward experiencing it firsthand.

  Most profitably, from a scientific perspective, Dr. Susan Smalley, a psychiatrist and behavior geneticist, took up meditation after a cancer diagnosis and founded the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. She is documenting meditation’s ability to lower blood pressure and boost the immune system; increase attention and focus, even for those suffering from ADHD; help with difficult mental states, such as anxiety and depression; increase a personal sense of well-being and make practitioners less emotionally reactive; and strengthen the neural networks responsible for decision making, emotional flexibility, and empathy.

  So, if meditation is so great, why aren’t we all already doing it?

  One reason is that contemplative practices require work.

  Newberg is in fact concerned that too few religious believers engage in the dedicated prayer and meditation he advocates. The time and effort necessary can appear too much for busy people with busy lives. Further, meditation is associated with Eastern religion, and not all Christian faiths have an equivalent practice, like centering prayer. Worse, persuading strict materialists, atheists, and agnostics to sit down on a prayer mat might be even harder. Because anything associated with religious faith is something they are likely to reject, out of hand.

  A rational person, acting purely on reason, might figure that Tibetan Buddhists have practiced meditation for millennia because it works. But among the New Atheists, only Sam Harris has been a proponent of meditation and contemplative practice.

  In short, dedication to a worldview can cause even scientists to behave irrationally. As recently as 2005, in fact, a coalition of neuroscientists protested a planned speech by the Dalai Lama at a neurological conference. The online petition collected roughly a thousand signatures. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to have a prominent religious leader at a scientific event,” one of the petition’s organizers told Britain’s Guardian newspaper at the time.

  In many respects, this little scientific tempest mirrors our current culture war. Consider what happened even more recently to Dr. Francis Collins, a world-class geneticist and administrative head of the human genome project, which mapped the structure of human DNA. Collins also happens to be an evangelical Christian. And evidently, that was his mistake. I contacted Collins in his capacity as founder of the BioLogos Foundation, a group devoted to demonstrating how faith is compatible with evolution. But after he was selected by the Obama administration to serve as director of the National Institute of Health, a spokesperson at his foundation told me he couldn’t talk. The controversy over his faith was too great for him to stick his poor religious head above ground. Some particularly adamant New Atheists were publicly claiming his beliefs undermine his ability to practice science.

  The objection of some to Collins’s appointment, or an appearance by the Dalai Lama, strikes me as particularly telling. Collins’s book, The Language of God, calls on Christians to embrace evolution. And the Dalai Lama openly encourages his followers to embrace scientific findings: “As in science,” he said, “so in Buddhism.” But for some, the perceived threat that Collins or the Dalai Lama presents is just too great: Science and religion, compatible, collaborative, or even civil? No. They just can’t be!

  But what Newberg and Waldman are demonstrating is that the practice of science and the pursuit of spiritual life are compatible. Newberg and Waldman are pointing us toward an area of life—prayer and meditation—in which the scientific method validates spiritual practice. And this should have ramifications on how we all view the debate between atheists and believers.

  Human progress is marked by shifts in our thinking and philosophy. Purely magical thinking, for instance, in which causal effects are not understood at all, is slowly replaced by scientific reasoning. And as one system of thought displaces another, many people tend to reject all that came before. No doubt, in American intellectual life, we’re struggling with that stage right now. The rise of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens represents just that kind of dogmatic adherence to a particular way of looking at the world. But over time, as described in the writings of the philosophers Jean Gebser and more recently Ken Wilber, an enlightened society begins readmitting the truths revealed by earlier methods. And I think, in Newberg and Waldman’s books, we’re seeing just that kind of inclusiveness. We’re seeing the foundation for a worldview in which science and spirituality serve each other.

  This is one story, in fact, in which all the narratives and subnarratives end well. Collins has taken his post. And the leadership of the Society for Neuroscience, which invited the Dalai Lama to speak, did not back down. In his address, the Dalai Lama echoed the findings Waldman shared with his audience in California—that there are ideas we each carry in our heads and hearts, ideas of compassion, tolerance, caring, and consideration, that “transcend the barriers between religious believers and nonbelievers, and followers of this religion or that religion.”

  It has now been scientifically demonstrated that if we focus on these kinds of ideals, we have the power to change ourselves at a genetic level. We have the power to change our brain structures and our ways of being—pea
ceful or angry, compassionate or nasty, fearful or confident, stressed or relaxed—from the inside out. And the lesson for us here, that we can take firmer control of our own minds, is something mystics have known and carried out for millennia, long before science had the means to investigate it.

  For those who think science is the only way of knowing, who think that until something is validated by science it might as well not exist, this long time lag between the mystics’ discovery and the ability of science to corroborate it, might be a bit humbling. And of course, for anyone who believes that anything arising from religion is necessarily tainted, there must surely be some urge now to argue the efficacy of prayer and meditation away. But for people who are willing to look at both science and religion for whatever truth we might find there, for whatever treasure might be ours, the findings of Andrew Newberg are a stepping stone to a better, happier, more fulfilled life. And to see that in action, we need look no further than Newberg’s research partner, Mark Robert Waldman, the nonbeliever who found himself spending a shocking amount of time in churches, synagogues, and temples.

  “I never saw this coming,” Waldman told me. “I thought I had things pretty well figured out. But my work with Andy has changed my life, and much for the better. Because of my meditative practice, I’m more patient and compassionate and enjoy my relationships and my work more. I enjoy the time I spend in these different places of worship immensely. And I plan on continuing this work and spreading the word.”

  NEWBERG HAD ONE LAST trick up his sleeve—a lecture in which he promised his freshman class he would try to “tie all this material together.”

  He had a lot of ground to cover.

  In more than ten years as a neurotheologist, just what had he learned? And where had he taken his class?

  Well, he said, we now know that all our experience takes place inside our heads, and so all experience is subjective. The power of science is that we can use it to corroborate subjective experience, to demonstrate the validity of our perceptions. But measuring instruments change, and science changes, and reality seems to shift with our ability to know it. The idea that microscopic creatures caused illness seemed absolute lunacy—until the microscope was invented. Post-Newton, it seemed we live in a universe that looked a lot like a billiard table, in which everything moved according to how it got smacked. Then technology improved to the point that we could perceive another system of operations beneath the Newtonian realm. This new world of physics was quantum mechanics, and we’re still reflecting on what to make of that.