Fingerprints of God (25 page)

“Who is running the show, then?” I asked.

“Well, that’s a good question,” Newberg responded neutrally.“Obviously the spiritual answer is that it’s the Spirit of God that is controlling this. From a physiological perspective, one might postulate that there’s another part of the brain, a preconscious part of the brain that is causing these changes to occur. And that’s why it
sounds
like language but it’s not really language—because it is not tied into the cortical areas that would help you to produce something that is comprehensible. But we just don’t know.”

In other words, Saint Paul may have been describing a neurological reality when he wrote to the Romans, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”
⁸

Newberg spotted another unexpected activity in the Pentecostal brain. In contrast to the brains of the nuns and monks, the activity in the parietal lobes (the association area) in the charismatic brains actually increased. While the nuns and monks lost their boundaries and merged into God or the universe, Pentecostals remained keenly aware of themselves as separate from God. It is a relationship, not a union, a finding that other “neurotheologians” have picked up on as well.
⁹

In short, speaking in tongues is the physiological antithesis to Christian centering prayer. Despite their shared beliefs in Jesus as the Son of God, their spiritual practices have very little in common, both in the brain and outside of it—which is not to pronounce one right and the other wrong, but rather to suggest that there do appear to be many routes to transcendence.

Six weeks after Scott McDermott prayed in the brain scanner, Andy Newberg called me with the results. They were not dramatic, he said, but he found them a little surprising. Scott’s frontal lobes decreased in activity, and the association area (the parietal lobes) increased. This meant Scott’s brain behaved more like a Pentecostal than a contemplative nun.

I was not surprised. Scott had told us that when he prays, it is “dia logical,” that is, a conversation. “When I’m praying for people, I’m just trying to hear God, and flow with God’s heart toward that person. I don’t feel a loss of myself at all.”

In other words, Scott engages in conversation with Jesus, and does not “merge” into Him.

Moreover, when you hear Scott describe his prayer life, beneath the polish and the Ph.D. is a happy charismatic. Even when he was praying in a sterile examination room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Scott told me he heard God’s voice, saw a vision, and spoke to God in tongues. So intense was the experience, he wanted to scream. In other words, it was a primal experience that did not require much heavy lifting in the frontal cortex.

However, what really caught Andy Newberg’s attention was an inexplicable quirk he found during Scott McDermott’s resting state. He spotted the same quirk during the resting state of every one of these spiritual virtuosos. It involved the thalamus—a tiny part of the brain that serves as traffic cop, taking in sights, sounds, and other sensory information (except for smell) and routing them to other parts of the brain. (You may recall the thalamus’s role in bad mushroom trips: it fails to filter sights and sounds, allowing a nightmare of sensory overload to occur in the user’s brain.) Newberg argues that the thalamus, armed with all that rich sensory information, makes the spiritual experiences feel lucid and
real
.

Here’s the twist. In most people, the thalami (there are actually two, one on the right and one on the left) have the same level of activity. They beat along, side by side, like an old married couple. Newberg has analyzed thousands of brain scans during his day job at Penn, and they look pretty much the same. He scanned my brain, for example, and found only an anemic 3 percent asymmetry.

But in every spiritual virtuoso he studied—the nuns and monks, the Pentecostals and Scott McDermott—one side is more active than the other. Scott’s thalami, for example, showed a 15 percent asymmetry. Newberg says that in his ten years of reading brain scans, he has never come across a similar finding. In fact, this kind of asymmetry was so rare that he searched for other such cases in the literature. The only similar cases he found were in people who had neurological damage caused by tumors or seizures.

“I think of it as a spiritual marker,” Newberg told me. He confesses to be mystified about what purpose that asymmetry serves. Nor does he know whether people are born with a lopsided thalamus and the quirk somehow inclines them toward God—or whether their hours of prayer and meditation create the asymmetrical thalamus. But the finding does offer more evidence that spiritual brains are special.

It occurs to me that other “fingerprints” of God have been detected down the ages. Not inside the brain—for until recently we did not possess the technology to peer inside—but in the behavior and perception of those who claim to have touched God. One fingerprint was erotic: consider the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, who was reported to have orgasms when she prayed, or the sexual feelings described by Sophy Burnham. Another was sensory: Saint John of the Cross’s sudden revelation that we are one with everything in the universe, and the same insight that swamped Arjun Patel as he meditated in his dorm room. A third was auditory: the voice heard by Joan of Arc, and the one that speaks when Scott McDermott prays. The fingerprints leave a lasting psychological mark, since the person undergoes a radical change in personality and ambition after he or she has touched the hem of God’s garment. Usually, the change is lifelong.

History and theology have recorded these events, with little explanation except to say, here is mystery, or here is madness. But now, with our ability to peer into the brain, it seems the stories of people being felled and changed by the spiritual are the
outward
evidence of
internal
rewiring, just as unspoken ideas may take form in a painting or a book or a joke to a friend. I stumbled across one other neurological fingerprint of spiritual experience in my research, involving near-death experiences. To my mind this does not solve the mystery but uncovers another dimension, allowing us to excavate, like archaeologists who discover ancient civilizations, the hidden layers of spirit.

But wait—good news is at hand for the spiritual Luddites who are not graced with naturally mystical brains. If we are willing to pay the price of admission, we, too, can tune up our brains and go to spiritual destinations we never imagined.Why? Because our brains are plastic.

Geographically, the Dalai Lama lives in exile in Dharamsala, a remote refuge in India. Scientifically, His Holiness has a ubiquitous presence. In 2005, he drew a crowd of 5,000 scientists to hear him speak at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. Given his fascination with the nexus of science and meditation, it is hardly surprising that the Dalai Lama eventually heard of the work of Richard Davidson, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin who had studied the neural correlates of emotion. The collaboration of the holy man in the Himalayas and the tall gangly one in Madison, Wisconsin, would put neurotheology on the map.

Raised Jewish, Davidson had attended a yeshiva for seven years in Brooklyn before delving into Eastern philosophy as an undergraduate at New York University. In 1974, when he was a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard, Davidson ventured to India for his first meditative retreat. There he learned the mental rigors of Buddhist meditation and watched in awe as some contemplative monks sat hour after hour, sometimes fifteen hours a day, fully engaged in their internal mental world. As he did, a question arose that would chart the next thirty years of his life. Was there something about the monks’ brains that allowed them to respond to “life’s slings and arrows” more positively—and could anyone do the same?

“I became more and more interested in the possibility of transforming our brain by changing our mind, and in how meditation could play a very beneficial role in that process,” he explained to me as we sat in his office, which looked out on the snowy midwestern campus in mid-February.

Davidson believed—and later demonstrated—that mental exercise could sculpt a person’s mental circuitry, just as lifting weights could sculpt his biceps. Davidson had shown as much with the EEGs of Buddhist meditators, who could with a little focus shift their brain-wave activity to the left side of the brain. This intrigued Davidson, since earlier studies had shown that people with higher brain-wave activity in the
left
prefrontal cortex reported feeling more alert, energized, enthusiastic, and joyous. People with higher brain-wave activity in the
right
side reported feeling more worry, anxiety, and sadness; they rarely felt elation or joy. The fact that the brain-wave activity of the Buddhist monks
swamped
to the left persuaded Davidson that the brains of these meditators were different from yours and mine. The question thus became: Are these Buddhists born with different brains, which is why they gravitate toward meditation? Or could anyone achieve that state of joy, peace, and holiness with a little practice?

Enter the Dalai Lama. When the Dalai Lama heard of Davidson’s work, he invited the neurologist to Dharamsala for a chat. So it happened that in 1992, Davidson, two other neuroscientists, and a Buddhist scholar dragged hundreds of pounds of equipment—laptop computers, EEG machines, and untold numbers of batteries—to a remote mountain refuge. Their mission: to measure brain-wave activity of Buddhist “adepts.” These monks had between 10,000 and 50,000 hours of meditation under their belts. If mental Olympians did exist, they would be found there, under the wing of the Dalai Lama.

“From a scientific perspective, it was thoroughly unsuccessful,” Davidson recalled. “Most did not speak any language other than Tibetan. They have not lived anywhere other than in the Himalayas. They had never seen a computer before. To many of them, just the act of interacting with a keyboard was completely novel. And so it was a rude awakening for us regarding the problems of bridging this cultural chasm.”

The scientists left India with no data, but they did leave with a prize far more valuable in the long term: they piqued the interest of the Dalai Lama, who eventually sent eight of his monks to Davidson’s laboratory in Madison,Wisconsin.

They arrived one by one, dressed in their saffron robes and eyes wide as pies, to be slid into brain scanners, or affixed with 256 EEG electrodes on their shaved heads, hanging down like dreadlocks. Davidson would compare the brains of these monks with the brains of ten students who received one week of meditation training. In the study, the subjects were shown emotionally evocative photographs, such as a baby with a horrendous tumor on its eye, or a wailing man carrying his son away from an explosion. They were told to focus their minds on unconditional compassion, and a readiness to help all living beings.

Davidson could have predicted the results, but it was nice to have hard evidence: to wit, the human brain can be molded and changed. It is
plastic.
The students’ brains shifted slightly between the times they were resting and the times they were engaging in compassionate meditation. But when the
monks
viewed the photographs, the parts of the brain associated with empathy and mother’s love lit up like Times Square. Ditto for the area of the brain involving planned movement: their brains were saying,
Hey! Get up—do something!
Moreover, their brains confirmed what the monks already knew. They were happy monks: the left prefrontal area was a cauldron of activity, to a degree never seen from pure mental activity.

More intriguing, to me at least, was a certain kind of brain rhythm called the gamma rhythm, which is extremely fast and associated with alertness and attention. The monks’ brains were flooded with gamma waves, not in one area, but all over, and this synchronized or knit together disparate brain circuits. This produced a rare state: one writer describes it as an “ah-ha” moment
¹⁰
—when your brain brings together the sound, the look, the feel, the memory of an object, and then . . . Aha! (
That voice, that face—Oh! That’s Hugh Grant on the television,
or,
The smell, the color—Oh! There are burgers on the grill. I’m hungry.
) While ordinary mortals enjoy that moment of recognition (synchrony) for a few milliseconds, Davidson said these monks were able to sustain it for more than
five minutes
.

In other words, Davidson, like Newberg, found neurological fingerprints in his monks when they were meditating. And like Newberg, he also found a
permanent
neurological fingerprint among his spiritual virtuosos. When the monks were resting, their brains still resided in the hyperalert, synchronized, happy zone—just less intensely, as if the volume had been turned down. This strongly suggests that meditation had permanently altered their brains. In essence, Davidson’s gamma rhythm may be a fingerprint of the meditative experience, an indelible mark that something strange and wonderful has happened.

Davidson’s research indicated that well-trained “spiritual” brains operate differently from run-of-the-mill brains, but he also suspected that with enough exercise, any normal brain can scale unimagined spiritual and neurological heights. Fine. No doubt many people would like to climb Mount Everest, but who has a year to spend in preparation, acclimating to the altitude and developing the calf muscles to carry a hundred-pound pack? Who can afford to devote 10,000 hours to meditation just to alter the brain circuitry in their head?

But even as he put meditative Olympians through their paces, Davidson and others were looking toward mere mortals with jobs and kids. They suspected that with only a little training, ordinary people could also remold their brains and their outlook on life.