Sightings: Andrew Newberg explains the psychological benefits of spirituality

In "Faith and the Brain" (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, July 17, 2009), Bob Abernethy interviews Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain on spirituality and emotional health:

DR. NEWBERG: We’ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over times.

[ ... ]


SEVERSON: But Newberg has made another discovery, a controversial one, that our belief system, how we view God, can make a huge difference in how it affects our well being. If we believe in a loving God it can have a positive effect, even prolong our lives. But believing in a judgmental, authoritarian God can produce fear, anger, and stress, and that’s not healthy.

[ ... ]

SEVERSON: Newberg believes the number one activity that can exercise your brain and enrich your life is faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: When you have those kind of positive, optimistic beliefs in the world, in God or religion, depending on the person, that that really, over the long haul, seems to be the thing that really provides a benefit for us in terms our mental state and in terms of our physical health and well-being.

SEVERSON: As for his own faith, he describes himself as a searcher who is still searching. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

New book watch: Newberg and Waldman's How God Changes Your Brain

This from a Washington Post review by Wray Herbert (March 29, 2009) of Andrew Newberg and Robert Mark Waldman's new book, How God Changes Your Brain:

Newberg, a neuroscientist and memory expert, has a special interest in spirituality; he has scanned the brains of worshipers ranging from Franciscan nuns to Pentecostals speaking in tongues. So why was he bothering with Gus?

Well, Newberg explains in "How God Changes Your Brain," his studies (with coauthor Mark Robert Waldman) had convinced him of a link between spirituality and cognitive health: The neurochemical changes that he observed during meditation and prayer appeared to improve brain function. But Newberg had studied mostly devotees with years of spiritual training; he wanted to see whether a novice might benefit, too. Newberg, a neuroscientist and memory expert, has a special interest in spirituality; he has scanned the brains of worshipers ranging from Franciscan nuns to Pentecostals speaking in tongues. So why was he bothering with Gus? Well, Newberg explains in "How God Changes Your Brain," his studies (with coauthor Mark Robert Waldman) had convinced him of a link between spirituality and cognitive health: The neurochemical changes that he observed during meditation and prayer appeared to improve brain function. But Newberg had studied mostly devotees with years of spiritual training; he wanted to see whether a novice might benefit, too.

Gus, a Philadelphia mechanic, experienced failing memory, and sought help ... .

He got help, via Hindu spirituality. I am glad. However, I wonder whether failing memory is primarily a spiritual problem.



I suspect that any set of intellectual exercises - consistently pursued - will help many patients. But we shall see. It's a young field yet.

Andrew Newberg: Meditation helps, but - how many times do we have to say this - you must WORK at it ...

At Sharp Brains, Alvaro Fernandez interviews Andrew Newberg, author of Why God Won't Go Away and several other books, on recent studies in meditation. Newberg notes,

A variety of studies have already shown the stress management benefits of meditation, resulting in what is often called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. What we are researching now is what are the cognitive - attention, memory- benefits? It is clear that memory depends on attention and the ability to screen out distractions - so we want to measure the effect of meditation on the brain, both structurally and functionally.

Why don't more people meditate (or contemplate), despite a growing body of evidence that it helps them? From Newberg:

Well, the reality is that meditation requires practice and dedication. It is not an easy fix. And some of the best-researched meditation techniques, such as mindfulness meditation, are very intensive. You need a trained facilitator. You need to stick to the practice.

Yes indeed. As I have said elsewhere, and not as graciously as Dr. Newberg: "Real Buddhism scholar to "neural Buddhists": The real Buddha does not infinitely morph and would never drop two grand for meditation gear.

Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - afternoon

The afternoon panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal, featured some interesting exchanges between a number of non-materialist neuroscientists.

Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is not a mere illusion created by the workings of the brain.

(Both the morning and afternoon panels were televised and can be viewed here. My excerpts from the morning panel are here.)

As before, French philosopher Elie During led off the panel, featuring (in order of first speaking), neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, M.D., near death researcher Bruce Greyson, M.D., spirituality and health researcher Christina Puchalski, M.D., and neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.

Philosopher During noted, referencing Andrew Newberg's work:

What you show, based on neurological evidence, is that there's some sort of consistency or robustness to these [spiritual] experiences: they are, I quote, “the result of coherent sensory perceptions shaped by the proper neurological functioning of sound, healthy minds.” In other words, they may be unusual experiences, but they are not at all outside the range of normal brain activity. This is a very important conclusion, but I cannot get rid of a feeling of discomfort, because it seems what you’re implying is that ultimately, it is the brain that is able to answer the question of the reality or unreality of our lived experience. It is the brain—or the neuroscientist—that is the ultimate criterion when it comes to assessing the reality of those experiences. When it's real for the brain, it’s real for us. Reality, at the end of the day, is “what happens in the brain”…. This I find quite hard to accept, since the brain, after all, is itself only a piece—albeit an important piece—of the reality we’re experiencing and reflecting about: it doesn’t stand outside the picture as a transcendent norm. Do you see my point?

Newberg replied,

We often don’t know whether someone who has a normal psychology can also have a normal religious or spiritual experience versus someone who has an abnormal psychology. In fact, one of the questions that I pose to all of my students is: “What is normal?” We really struggle with that. It becomes something that is very difficult to know how to define, especially in the context of religious or spiritual experiences.

A good example of this type of problem is Joan of Arc. Fifteenth-century France was descending into chaos after the Hundred Years War, and the king of England was planning to absorb the country. A peasant girl, Joan, informed local notables that she had received visions telling her to take the crown prince (the dauphin) to the traditional place where French kings were crowned (Reims) - thus establishing a counterclaim.

At that time, of course, women, especially peasant women, were expected to mind their own business at home and keep silent. Politics was a game for men of noble birth.

Was Joan delusional? Many thought so. But she raised an army, took the dauphin to Rheims, and got him crowned, thus putting a deep - and permanent - dent in the English king's plans.

The conventional view of delusions is that they disorient us and prevent us from seeing reality clearly. But Joan's spiritual experiences had the opposite effect - they enabled her to see reality quite clearly and to do what no one else in France had managed. And she did it from one of the lowest positions in her society.

So was Joan "normal"? To ask the question is to impose on spiritual reality a standard created for Dilbert's cube world. She wasn't normal at all, and if she had been, she could never have done what she did. So part of the challenge of studying spiritual experiences is to move beyond the standards generated for measuring other types of experience, standards that may be irrelevant for the purpose.

(Note: Newberg also offered some interesting observations on attempts to measure consciousness, as I have reported here.

Panelists watched a National Geographic Moment of Death, on the complexities of determining when and how death occurs. One problem is that death, like life, is a process. Freezing cells, Hayflick-style, results in a stasis that is neither death nor life.

The panelists:

Mind-body panel 2: Andrew Newberg - "A growing openness to these kinds of issues"

Mind-body panel 2: Bruce Greyson - Brain and mind don't seem to be the same thing.

Mind-body panel 2: Christina Puchalski - "We know maybe forty percent"

Mind-body panel 2: Mario Beauregard - "Brain imaging data alone doesn't tell us whether an experience is real or not"


Next: Mind-body panel 2: Andrew Newberg - "A growing openness to these kinds of issues"

Mind-body panel 2: Andrew Newberg - "A growing openness to these kinds of issues"

Dr. Andrew B. Newberg is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a staff physician in Nuclear Medicine.

It’s not that we necessarily have to change the way science is done, although that is something that may happen. It’s not necessarily that we have to change what religion and spirituality is, although that’s something that may happen as well. But it’s the ability for people of all different perspectives to be aware of what their biases are, what their beliefs are, and to try to find better ways of having a dialogue and interacting. I think that will improve our science, our politics, and our social and spiritual interactions. That’s really where I can see a lot of this kind of research and information going.

It’s not that we have to get rid of one way of being or one way of looking at things. But we need to understand how that relates to all the other perspectives, and to try to take a more open-minded approach. I think a lot of us have been fairly impressed at the growing openness to these kinds of issues—to have centers like Christina’s at major universities where this kind of work is going on, to have the kinds of projects we’ve been talking about here, to have a national center for complimentary and alternative medicine at NIH.

I mean that would never have been thought about 25 or 30 years ago, but it’s happening now. The cancer institute is working with the national center for complimentary medicine and NIMH, so people are beginning to realize that we need some kind of integration that looks at all of us, not just as biological beings, but as biological, spiritual, social, and psychological beings, and it’s combining together all of those different dimensions of who we are that is where I think this paradigm may ultimately lead us, making us look at the world in a different way.

One reason for the new emphasis on spirituality in medicine is probably demographics. Most Western societies now have large - and rapidly increasing - aged populations. Aged people often cope with several chronic disorders. Medication alone is not the answer. It can even be counterproductive - many people are injured by medications or don't take them correctly and end up in the hospital. Many health care professionals now consider mental states in promoting good health, which results in a reduced need for medication.

Newberg also brought up a problem that Mario Beauregard and I looked at in The Spiritual Brain, the problem of language. Language explains - but it also limits:

We’ve been running an online survey of people’s spiritual experiences and one of the things that we are learning from the data that we are looking at is that when you ask people to describe the spiritual experience they had, you get answers that are just all over the place: some people use the Force, some people say it’s an energy, some people say it’s God. If you ask questions in specific ways, you can get completely different answers. When we just ask general questions, it doesn’t look like there’s any kind of coherence between what people consider to be a spiritual experience, but if we start to ask questions in other ways, it seems like everybody had the same exact core experience.

That sounds right. Language is full of abstractions that can mean different things to different people - words like "love" and "peace" come to mind. Different life experiences create different spectra of meaning.

Consider a current example: For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "religion" connotes oppression - based on her life experience. But in my own life experience, religion was the bedrock of philanthropy and social development and the guarantor of civil liberties, at home and abroad. So, because the word "religion" means such different things to the two of us, saying that we were both raised in a "religious" environment doesn't tell you anything. Further questions must determine what that means.

For other examples of new approaches, see Adopting a dog better for your health than pills? (Pfizer is promoting a "More than Medication" program)

Meditation really can change the brain

Getting past the "you are a computer made of meat" phase - a look at Andrew Newberg's work

Next: Mind-body panel 2: Bruce Greyson - Brain and mind don't seem to be the same thing.

Mind-body panel 2: Mario Beauregard - "Brain imaging data alone doesn't tell us whether an experience is real or not"

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is currently an Associate Researcher at the University of Montreal in the Departments of Psychology and Radiology, as well as the Neuroscience Research Center. Here's a snippet of dialogue he led off, from the second panel:

Mario Beauregard: Well, I have only one thing to add because a lot of things have been said already. It’s true that we have to take into account the meaning and content of the experience with respect to the experiencer, and we cannot rely solely on brain imaging data to determine whether an experience is real or not. If you take the case of hallucinations, for instance, you also have neuro-correlates for delusions, auditory hallucinations, etc., so it’s only one piece of data and we have to consider many other parameters.

Elie During: One thing I’ve learnt from your book The Spiritual Brain is that there are actually ways to detect the difference between someone who is faking it and someone who is hallucinating, based on brain imaging techniques.

Mario Beauregard: Sure, it can be useful, but that is not the only piece of evidence that we have at our disposal to consider.

Elie During: I believe there is a more general issue at stake in our discussion. I’ll put it this way, as a question addressed to all of you: what role does belief, and here I mean your own beliefs, play in the kind of research you’re involved in? When I say belief, I don’t necessarily mean religious belief, but more broadly, the systems of beliefs or values that shape your view of the world, especially those beliefs and values that relate to the way in which you draw the limits of reality.

My personal feeling is that no one can help having beliefs in that sense. Again, these beliefs can be based on philosophical, cultural, or religious grounds. How do these beliefs interfere with your activity as scientists or working professionals? Do they interfere at all? Because you are all well aware that one of the objections that is often raised against the kind of research programs you’re involved in is that it is quite biased.

The suspicion is that there is some hidden agenda— that you are either trying to provide evidence in support of specific personal beliefs, or you are trying to force facts into your own framework without even being conscious of it. Is it reasonable to expect people to sustain a purely neutral, objective stance on such issues? How does it work for you?

Andrew Newberg: All of us are human beings, and we all have beliefs and biases. That certainly holds true for science, for theology, and for philosophy. I suppose one of the things for us to always keep in mind is that as objective as somebody may think anything is, or however real or true or absolute anybody thinks anything is, we are very limited in our abilities to look at the world as human beings. As wonderful as our brain is, it only takes in a very small percentage of the information that’s out there. So whenever we apply ourselves to some part of the world, one of the problems that we have is that our brain tends to tell us that we’ve got the whole picture and doesn’t bother to tell us when it is filling in information, when it is lying to us, or when it is being inaccurate. Yet we often tend to think that we understand the world accurately, whether scientifically, politically, philosophically, spiritually, etc.

Newberg sure got that right. And, as Mario and I said in The Spiritual Brain, this is a time for exploration, not dogma.

See also:

Multidirectional skepticism: Skepticism finding its true voice?

Brain science supports traditional view of soul?

All the junk that's fit to debunk: Neuropolitics is up next

Is THIS your best shot? A response to New Scientist's recent hit piece on non-materialist neuroscientists

Back to top: Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - afternoon panel

Andrew Newberg and the problem of measuring consciousness

I will shortly introduce the Afternoon panel at the recent Mind-Body Symposium at the United Nations, September 11, 2008. (For the Morning Panel, go here.)

But first I want to comment on an exchange during the discussion between philosopher Elie During and MD neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. The subject is how to measure consciousness.

Elie During: Let me put it differently: in order to be scientific about consciousness and so-called spiritual experiences, do we need measurement? And if so, why? The feeling we sometimes get when reading the scientific literature on consciousness is that as long as it is not being somehow measured, a fact cannot be scientifically relevant. Is this true, is it still the case or are we past this? Doesn’t the “paradigm shift” you were mentioning earlier imply a different kind of science, one that does not rely so much on measurement? What else could it possibly be based on?

Andrew Newberg: I think it may still rely on measurement of some kind, but it may be going in the direction that you are talking about. I think that the spiritual perspective, the spiritual approach to learning and deriving information, as well as the scientific pursuit of that, are both valuable and important, and each has its specific uses. I’m not sure yet what exactly it would look like, but my goal has always been to find ways of integrating them in a manner that will enable us to discover what the best kind of measurement is. And that measurement may ultimately be a spiritual measurement, not a scientific one, or it may be much more of a physiological one.

All of my own training has been in the humanities, specifically in the little cluster of disciplines around English language and literature.

In language, incompetence is much easier to measure than competence. For example, if a person's grasp of English grammar is imperfect, I can spot and score errors. But where the grasp is perfect, there is nothing to spot or score. So the text looks blank, even though it is obviously full of meaning.

It is much easier to explain what is wrong with bad writing than what is right with good writing. Good writers can differ vastly in style.

A writing teacher like me can praise the writer's style ("crisp", "sensitive") but that is not nearly as specific as the terms in which we diagnose bad writing (= "She avoids the progressive tenses, probably because she was never taught to use them correctly in her "English as a Second Language Program" or "He does not transition effectively from one thought to another, probably because he does not know many transitional phrases.") Provided with specifics, a teacher moves from diagnosis to remedy fairly easily.

But what made George Orwell a peerless stylist? (Wherever possible, I assign "Politics and the English Language" as compulsory reading, to rid myself of reasons to scream at students.) J.R.R. Tolkien was also an excellent writer, but very different from Orwell (and always aware of the roots of English embedded deep in Anglo-Saxon). C.S. Lewis was different again; his writing reflects the classical rhetorical tradition.

You see? I can make observations about great writers, but I cannot simply grade them, the way I could grade "Johnny's" essay as a D-minus, recommending Johnny to the remedial writing program before his bad habits become entrenched.

Now, let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that consciousness - in which the ability to use language originates - behaves the same way as language. Using our present tools, it is difficult to measure when it is working well but easy to measure when it is working badly. In that case, loss of consciousness or lapses in consciousness would be much easier to measure and describe than consciousness itself.

Does that mean that consciousness doesn't exist? Of course not, any more than my inability to describe good writing as specifically as I can describe bad writing means that no one ever wrote well. That is not surprising because current methods of measurement are essentially the measurement of lapses or errors.

Where writing - which is an outcome of consciousness - has passed beyond mere lapses or errors, measurement fails; only description remains. Is it reasonable to think that consciousness is like that?

If so, where consciousness is a strong signal - like good reception on your TV - you won't notice it because you are paying attention to the program, not the reception. But when the reception is bad, you notice the reception, not the program.

In that case, the problem isn't really with the science of measurement, but with a faulty conception of what consciousness is. When we come to understand better what consciousness is, we will develop better means of measuring it. But I doubt that those means will be based on any materialist theory.

Spotted: Neuroscientists in the movies - Andrew Newberg!

Earlier this week, I saw Bill Maher's Religulous (because I will be discussing it on iChannel) later this month).

I found the film distasteful because Maher enjoys making fun of simple people, including the truckers who were praying for him. That's not a taste that deserves any encouragement.

In any event, Maher wasted the time of a number of scientists to whom he gave little opportunity to explain their position, including genome mapper Francis Collins, astronomer George Coyne, and neuroscientist Andrew Newberg (pictured here). Chris Knipp, the Baltimore Chronicle reviewer picks up on precisely that:

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a research neurologist who's done a study on brain activity associated with religion, is cut in walking through Grand Central Station and talking with Maher, but Maher's attitude that religious thought is some kind of nuttiness isn't Newberg's, though from the movie you wouldn't know that. (6 November 2008)

No, you wouldn't. So save your ticket money. You might consider, for example, Newberg's book, Why God Won't Go Away. He has others, but I have read that one and recommend it.

(Note: Non-materialist neuroscientists are doing okay in the world of documentaries (though Britain's New Scientist magazine is convinced that they are part of a murky plot that has never surfaced except in its own pages). In addition to Newberg in Religulous, Jeffrey Schwartz has a cameo in Expelled.)

(Note: Someone has pointed out to me that that Schwartz cameo did not appear on the DVD. (I saw Expelled in a theatre myself (the verson over which Yoko Ono famously sued, no less!), and have not viewed the DVD. But here he is in Wingclips (about 3/4 mark)!)

See also:

Commentator challenges "Religulous" documentary producer to a debate

Does religion protect us against pseudoscience?

Atheist bigots: Avoiding serious questions and targeting ignorant religious folk

Why brain scans cannot tell whether you are religious or not

Andrew Newberg, author of Why God Won't Go Away spoke recently at Princeton. Attempting to explain how people see what they want to see with respect to beliefs, he related,

When Newberg showed a Franciscan nun her brain scan and the changes in activity while she prayed, she thanked him for confirming that something unique happened in her brain when she thought about God.

But when he showed an atheist his brain scan, however, the atheist thanked Newberg for reaffirming his nonreligious beliefs, underscoring Newberg's point that different people draw different conclusions from the same message.

I am deeply suspicious as to whether the linked article conveys what Newberg really wanted to say about spirituality, but it does help get across the point that the mind is not simply what the brain does.

I read Newberg's " Why God Won't ... " with great interest while working on The Spiritual Brain. I think he is on to something, almost in spite of himself. Hat tip to Stephanie West of Brains on Purpose.

About The Spiritual Brain, Newberg has said,

The Spiritual Brain is a wonderful and important book that provides new insights into our experience of religion and God. It offers a unique perspective to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. This book is a necessary read for both the scientist and the religious person.

-Andrew Newberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe.

Cover comments for The Spiritual Brain

Okay, the box is getting slit along the sides, and the packing fluff is flying everywhere. Here are some advance comments from people in the know about The Spiritual Brain, the book to which this blog is dedicated :

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, author of Why God Won't Go Away says

The Spiritual Brain is a wonderful and important book that provides new insights into our experience of religion and God. It offers a unique perspective to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. This book is a necessary read for both the scientist and the religious person.

-Andrew Newberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe.

Consciousness researcher Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe says:

Is spiritual experience an illusion caused by a misfiring brain, as many scientists believe, or is it something more? In The Spiritual Brain neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary persuasively argue that it is indeed something more. This means the mainstream neurosciences may have overlooked something of profound importance about who and what we are. If you have a mind, you will find The Spiritual Brain a refreshing antidote to the strange arguments offered by some scientists who insist that their minds, and yours, are meaningless illusions.

- Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds

We promise it will be as good as all that ... and way more!