by Steve Volk
Like other religious activity, glossolalia has long been linked by some to mental illness. But a 1979 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, along with a 2003 study in the religious journal Pastoral Psychology, found no connection between speaking in tongues and mental illness. Newberg’s research turned up something even more remarkable. “I know that can be a little difficult to watch,” he told his class. “Because it’s so unusual if you’ve never seen that before. But when we looked at her blood flow, in a SPECT scan, we found that she is describing her experience perfectly.”
As Newberg explained, the woman admitted that in the early stages of speaking in tongues she herself chooses syllables randomly. But at some point she no longer feels as if she is doing the choosing. The sounds just pour from her mouth, unbidden. “That’s what we found looking at her brain,” said Newberg. “When she reached this involuntary stage, the parts of the brain that mediate and control speech were inactive.”
Of course, some might argue, strenuously, with the woman’s spiritual interpretation of the experience. They might even call her crazy. But as Newberg told his class, this is a state the woman chooses to enter, a state she achieves in minutes, that does not come upon her at inappropriate times, “in the grocery store or when her children need her,” as do the unwanted voices or visions of the schizophrenic. “I happen to know this particular subject,” said Newberg. “And she has a normal life. She is a reliable person. And this practice gives her great joy and provides a lot of meaning.”
Newberg’s research has led him to publicly endorse an “operational view” of spiritual experience: when a practice seems to work for the people engaged in it, and brings no discernible harm to those around them, then that practice seems to be one that society can and should tolerate. My guess is that most people agree with Newberg—“most people” being in the middle. But it also seems to me that Newberg’s messages of tolerance for belief, and the need for more scientific exploration, are often either lost in the din or purposefully excised from media accounts of his work. Newberg has, in fact, appeared in two films: one, What the Bleep Do We Know?, endorsed an extremely mystical view of the world; while the other, Religulous, produced by the comedian Bill Maher, endorsed atheism. In each case, Newberg himself appears almost as a different person, a product of each film’s editing.
“I am glad to have been in Religulous,” Newberg told his class. “It was fun to do. But they took out everything I said that expressed any compassion or support for religious belief, and made it look like I had said all spiritual experience was just this trick of the brain.”
Though it is disappointing, it isn’t surprising that people want to interpret Newberg’s work as they see fit. It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions. And so it follows that nonbelievers might self-identify with the statement “God is a myth,” while believers will find themselves reflected in the statement “God is real.”
This emotion, this self-identification, rather than our faculty for logical reasoning, is why so many interpret Newberg’s agnostic data as confirmation of their own worldviews. Emotion also explains why so many engage themselves in the tit-for-tat debates between devout believers and no less committed atheists. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens all mine the lessons of history to attribute a vast body count to religion; and in retort, unsurprisingly, the Christian author Dinesh D’Souza, among others, notes the number of people killed by secular or atheist regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.
With emotion siphoned from the debate, it seems no group, secular or religious, can claim supremacy on morality—and that both sides often mistake correlation for causation. Consider the suicide bomber, often cited as evidence of the inherent destructiveness of religion in general, and Islam in particular. We tend to associate suicide bombings with religious fanaticism. But ironically, in this, not even correlation is truly present. In his book Dying to Win, Robert A. Pape drew on a database of 384 suicide bombers, with known religious or ideological affiliations, who acted between the early 1980s, when the practice was first adopted, and 2003. He found that 57 percent of the bombers represented secular groups. In fact, the Tamil Tigers first perfected the tactic of suicide bombing in Sri Lanka—and they are a Marxist, secular group. Pape further released Cutting the Fuse in 2010, which draws on a far larger database of suicide attackers and further extends and supports his thesis that issues of nationalism and foreign occupation are the real motivation for suicide bombing—not religious belief. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, has studied Islamic suicide bombers in Palestine and Kashmir, among other places, and found that the reasons they engage in suicide bombing are independent of religious belief—that belief itself is neutral and only channeled, along with more important desires for companionship and self-esteem, into a violent act.
Atran himself happens to be an avowed atheist. But according to the New Atheists, he just isn’t critical enough of organized religion. Engaging in an ongoing debate with his colleagues, he fought back and admonished the most outspoken of his fellow atheists for having left science behind: “[They] ignored the vast body of empirical data and analysis of terrorism—a phenomenon they presented as a natural outgrowth of religion,” he writes. “The avowedly certain but uncritical arguments they made about the moral power of science and the moral bankruptcy of religion involved no science at all. Some good scientists stepped out of their field of expertise, leaving science behind for the unreflective sort of faith-based thinking they railed against. Sadly, in this regard, even good scientists join other people in unreason.”
The most damning aspect of Atran’s critique is that the New Atheists don’t have any data. Can the scientific field of endeavor, which produces people capable of building atomic bombs and chemical weapons, claim moral authority over religion? “The point is not that some scientists do bad things and some religious believers do good things,” writes Atran. “The issue is whether or not there are reliable data to support the claim that religion engages more people who do bad than good, whereas science engages more people who do good than bad. One study might compare, say, standards of reason or tolerance or compassion among British scientists versus British clergy. My own intuition has it a wash, but even I wouldn’t trust my own intuitions, and neither should you.”
What Atran seems to be suggesting is that the common fiber running through humanity’s good and evil acts isn’t God or Godlessness—it’s us. The source of all our behaviors, good and bad, is multifaceted and rooted in what it means to be human.
Viewed from this perspective, the ongoing debate between believers and unbelievers seems counterproductive—two groups letting their emotions get the best of them. And Newberg’s attempt to reconcile science and religion in the field of neurotheology suddenly seems all the more poignant—a way, finally, of uniting humanity’s two most dramatic attempts to understand and ameliorate the human condition: the cool rationalism of science and the ecstatic experience of spirituality.
“YOU GUYS ALL RIGHT?” Newberg asked. “Are there any questions?”
Newberg asked his class how they were doing, a lot. And he wasn’t just talking about class assignments and homework. Sometime in the middle of the semester, in fact, I realized he wasn’t only, or even primarily, teaching his students about God and the brain. He was teaching his students how to get along with people who hold different beliefs, teaching them how to live more fulfilling lives, and teaching them to understand and appreciate the limits of human perception and cognition. In his class, “You guys all right?” was a question
with philosophical, neurological, theological, and psychological undertones.
Newberg’s students had by now been loaded up with information on the workings of their brains. “All my life I have meditated and wondered,” one Indian student announced, “why does meditation make me feel so peaceful? Now I know.”
Newberg asked if this learning had any impact on the student’s thoughts about religion.
“No,” he replied, serenely.
“That’s good,” said Newberg, then caught himself, suddenly. “But it would also be fine if you were changing your opinions,” he added.
Newberg took such pains to be respectful that sometimes, like right then, he and his students burst out laughing. His continual assurances, his commitment to respecting every point of view, took a lot of work. “The point is,” he continued, chuckling, “you don’t have to give up one to have the other. Science and religion can be compatible. They’re different ways of looking at, and different ways of trying to understand, the world around us.”
What Newberg stressed to his class, however, is that certainty in any of these matters can be very difficult to come by. The religious, no doubt, should accept this—ascribing their belief in a higher power to faith. But even our most basic perceptual and cognitive operations are subject to doubt. Some of Newberg’s most entertaining talks, in fact, revolved around the limitations of our ability to understand the world. “The brain receives literally millions of bits of information every second, from all our senses,” Newberg told his class. “But we can only be consciously aware of a few bits, a really small proportion, of any of that information, at a given time.”
As a result, the brain isn’t built to give us a true and accurate perception of reality. There is just too much stimuli to assess; so instead, the brain is built, in an evolutionary sense, to create a model of the world that will allow us to survive. The brain takes processing shortcuts, Newberg explained, bringing the features it deems most important into our consciousness and suppressing the rest. But sometimes the image it creates is wrong. To illustrate this, Newberg showed the class a whole series of perceptual illusions the brain creates. And in seconds, his class was oohing and aahing at its newfound fallibility.
Lines that seem to be different lengths turn out to stretch the same exact distance.
A series of black squares, for instance, separated by bands of white, can create the illusion of flashing gray circles.
Then there is the matter of change blindness: Newberg used a different example with his class, but my favorite is a video in which two teams throw a basketball back and forth for a minute. The first time I watched, I wondered what the point had been. Then some text appeared, informing me that my mind had naturally become so attuned to tracking the dynamic movement of the ball that I didn’t see a man in a gorilla suit who moonwalked right across the center of the screen.
Newberg’s lesson was simple: sometimes we miss what is right in front of our faces. But then he drove the class even deeper down the byways of philosophy: if our brains are prone to these kinds of errors, if we are only consciously aware of a small range of stimuli, how do we know our perceptions are accurate? “Well,” Newberg said, answering his own question, “we don’t, in any definitive sense.”
All our visual perceptions are created by light reaching the retina of our eyes, which is then translated into a neural signal and interpreted by the brain. To demonstrate this for his students, Newberg showed them a series of three slides, each depicting what he called the “same familiar object.”
The first image was all lines and shades with no discernible structure at all. “This is the raw pattern of light our retina receives and sends to the brain,” said Newberg. “This is what we actually see, and our brain manufactures it into an image.”
Newberg tapped his laptop and brought a second image on to the projector screen. “I’m not going to show you all the stages of processing,” he said, “but this is about halfway there.”
In this second frame, the image has begun to cohere. Now a foreground is distinguishable. And there is a figure coming into focus at the center—small and rounded at the top, flaring out at the bottom. But what was it? No one could tell. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re going to jump ahead, all the way to the end.”
Newberg pressed a button on his computer and, suddenly, out of the amorphous collection of pixels, a dog emerged. And a super-cute one at that—its small, rounded head at the top, its shaggy body widening out beneath it as it stares into the camera, its eyes pleading for attention. The girls in the class, and I confess, this author, collectively said, “Awww.”
“He is no longer with us,” Newberg said. “But this was my dog, Cosmo.”
As Newberg went on to explain to his class, cognitive scientists studying human perception agree: we don’t experience objective reality; we experience a model of objective reality that our brain creates for us. We have no choice but to react to everything we see as if it’s real; but we are regularly missing all kinds of information our brain deems unimportant. This may not seem like that big a deal until we consider all the errors of our perception and the philosophical problems that come with this state of affairs. Just what was Cosmo? A cute dog? Or the formless hoo ha Newberg showed us in that first image—a raw pattern of light striking matter?
Philosophers have long been caught up in a debate over whether or not the world we perceive is essentially the world that is so. But for our purposes, the important thing to understand is that we also endure these same kinds of perceptual challenges when processing our own thoughts.
In the introduction, I gave a brief primer on the role the amygdala plays in our cognition. And Newberg also told his class about this perhaps most problematic part of the brain. These almond-shaped structures at the base of our temporal lobes are complicated, playing some role in mediating all the input we receive—from the interpretation of facial expressions to the processing of emotions and memory recall. The amygdala’s chief job is a simple one. It is primarily our own personal bodyguard, shouting danger any time it perceives a threat. In this respect, it is much like all our tools of perception—chiefly concerned with helping us to survive. The problem is that it is activated by both bodily danger and threats to our worldviews. It makes difficult conversations that much more difficult, causing us to feel anxiety and nervousness and the tense emotions associated with the fight-or-flight response.
We normally think of fight or flight occurring when we are confronted with some physical danger, like a man with a gun. Do we run, or try to take the dude out? But in the human brain, a contentious conversation between believer and atheist, or Republican and Democrat, provokes similarly stressful biological and neurological responses—including anxiety, sweating, increased heart rate, and the sensation of anger or even fear.
The amygdala is so closely associated with our fight to preserve our lives that the amygdalas of cancer patients undergo changes in size. And of course, this suggests a negative feedback loop in which stress and fear lead to greater stress and fear. Underscoring this, terror management theory (TMT), a new field of psychological study, has equated perceived threats to our beliefs and the threat of death itself. Reminders of our mortality, and of course such reminders are all around, render us more sensitive to and guarded against threats to our beliefs. The findings have held true for both atheists and believers. In fact, while we never managed to schedule an interview, one of the masterminds of TMT, Tom Pyszczynski, did tell me in an email that the popular focus on the religious as the only ones denying their own mortality is misguided: “Science, evolution, atheism, etc., can all take on a ‘religious’ function in that it becomes a faith beyond question,” he writes, “and functions to manage fear, especially fear of death. There’s a lot of signs of this happening in the world today.”
No doubt, then, this unruly and illogical structure of the brain affects both sides in the ongoing debate between atheists, who think of religion as threatening to the reason they hold so
dear, and believers, who think of religion as providing the source and foundation of all life. But what Newberg has found, by bringing science and religion together, is nothing less than revolutionary: because mystics of varying religious persuasions may or may not have found one true God; they may or may not have discovered the identity of Cosmo the dog; but they most definitely have found a way to render our emotional perceptions more accurate. They most definitely have found a means of settling our unquiet minds.
IT IS EARLY DECEMBER 2009, and the lights at the Church of the Epiphany in Oak Park, California, are turned down low. Two men are on stage. One is Yuval Ron, a Grammy-and Oscar-winning musician and peace activist. He is dressed all in white. His close-cropped brown hair is lost a little in the shadows on stage, where he hunches contemplatively over an oud, an ancient, pear-shaped, short-necked member of the lute family. The music Ron plays is slow and repetitive—traits not normally associated with entertaining music. But the rhythms and melodies he picks out tonight fill and structure the room, their repetitive nature creating a stable space.
Periodically, the other man steps up to a microphone at stage right. Mark Robert Waldman is tall and skinny, and here in this Christian church he wears a Muslim hat—or kufi. He speaks in sober bass tones, and what he says captures the jargon of science and the self-help industry: “Music, spirituality and the brain,” Waldman intones. “What, in heaven’s name, do these words have in common? As you contemplate your deepest values and beliefs you can change the structure and function of your brain in life enhancing ways. The right meditations can reduce anxiety and depression; can lessen symptoms of illness, and improve the cognitive function of your brain; create inner peace and enhance the neurological capacity for compassion; and maybe, just maybe, slow down the aging process of the brain.”