( Read about what the future of religion might be like.) These are experiences that seem to be an inescapable part of human existence. But even if we leave aside any talk of God, we still have to wonder why the brain developed in ways that not only facilitate but seem to promote the kinds of experiences Newberg is studying. “If you’re spiritual or religious, the answer is obvious,” he says. Newberg thinks all the brain scans he’s collected might beg the question about why the brain is built in such a way as to facilitate spiritual kinds of experiences. “When that area shuts down, it could theoretically be experienced as a kind of loss of willful activity – that we’re no longer making something happen but it’s happening to us.” The other part of the brain heavily involved in religious experience is the frontal lobe, which normally help us to focus our attention and concentrate on things, says Newberg. “As it starts to quiet down, since it normally helps to create sense of self, that sense of self starts blur, and the boundaries between self and other – another person, another group, God, the universe, whatever it is you feel connected to – the boundary between those begins to dissipate and you feel one with it.” “When you begin to do some kind of practice like ritual, over time that area of brain appears to shut down,” he said. Though he says there isn’t just one part of the brain that facilitates these experiences – “If there’s a spiritual part, it’s the whole brain” – he concentrates on two of them. Newberg and his team take brain scans of people participating in religious experiences, such as prayer or meditation. Religious experiences, he tells me in his Pennsylvania-area office, satisfy two basic functions of the brain: self-maintenance (“How do we survive as individuals and as a species?”) and self-transcendence (“How do we continue to evolve and change ourselves as people?”). Read the first part of this essay, which examines the deep origins of religion in the animal kingdom, here. Perceptions alter, beliefs begin to change, and if God has meaning for you, then God becomes neurologically real.” New dendrites are formed, new synaptic connections are made, and the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience. Different circuits become activated, while others become deactivated. “If you contemplate God long enough,” he writes in How God Changes Your Brain, “something surprising happens in the brain. This is your brain on God.”Īndrew Newberg, a neuroscientist who studies the brain in light of religious experience, has spent his career following this hunch. But the more I think about religion as an emerging phenomenon, the more I wonder if, for all their sloppy Pentecostal vocabulary, my youth leaders were onto something: God does something to your brain. I long ago left my childhood church and often feel embarrassed about the “God as a drug” theology. (Of course, when we consider the amount of religious violence throughout history, it’s impossible to claim that there are no damaging side effects to some beliefs in God. God provided all the “positive benefits” of heroin with none of the damaging side effects. God could do the same thing to our brain – give us a rush, a sense of euphoria – but our brains wouldn’t end up scrambled. We didn’t need them, we were told, because we could get high from God. There were a few different versions of it but the gist was, an egg would be shown to the camera as a voice said, “This is your brain.” And then the egg would be smashed by a frying pan and the voice would say, “This is your brain on drugs.” We all got the point: drugs did something to your brain.Īt my Pentecostal Church, drugs were talked about somewhat differently. When I was in grade school, there was an anti-drug commercial that regularly came on television.
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