Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Scott paused to steady his voice.

  “The change has been dramatic. I can’t say I’m a perfect man as a result of this, or that every day I walk on cloud nine, but I will tell you this: Because of that, I know how much I’m loved by God. And when life gets hard—and life does get hard—God’s love is there to see me through.”

  After his mystical marathon, Scott said he was horrified that he had made himself such a spectacle. But the next day, he said,“People would ask, ‘Why would you have an experience like that and not me?’ And I didn’t have an answer to that one.”

  I think I do. Scott McDermott is a spiritual virtuoso.

  Scanning the Mystical Moment

  I thought about Scott McDermott often over the next three years, because he possessed an uncommon combination of qualities: the polished intelligence of a scholar and the all-consuming spirituality of a mystic. What was more, Scott practiced the presence of God, and his long, daily prayers seemed to give him access to another reality.

  When I read in Newsweek that a scientist was studying the brains of Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, I thought of Scott.What was going on in Scott’s brain when he connected with God, I wondered, when he saw the Kidron Valley or heard the voice of Jesus? I could not wait to get his brain scanned.

  On June 1, 2007, Scott and I met in the radiology department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. We chatted for a few minutes, then followed a nurse down the hall to a cul-de-sac of examination rooms and one brain scanner. This was Andy Newberg’s kingdom.

  Andy Newberg is an associate professor in the department of radiology—with secondary appointments in psychiatry and religious studies—at the University of Pennsylvania. He is in his early forties but looks twenty-four. His curly dark hair has flecks of gray, but the rest of him cries out that the gray is an optical illusion. He gives the impression of a seventh-grader who went to bed thinking about his geometry test and awoke the next morning to find himself a neuroscientist.

  Newberg has authored three books and countless articles on “neurotheology”—the study of the brain in the throes of spiritual experience. Why God Won’t Go Away, which he wrote with his friend and mentor the late Eugene D’Aquili, explored the events in people’s brains when they enjoy mystical experiences. This is the research that made the cover of Newsweek, the story that rendered me sleepless for a week.1 Another Newberg book, Why We Believe What We Believe,2 looked at different types of mystical experience, including speaking in tongues and the meditation of an atheist. He proposed a theory of why we seek out religious experience and how the experience cements our beliefs about God and the nature of reality. Newberg is a rock star in the small world of neurotheology, and certainly among the media, even though fellow neurologists sometimes tut-tut about the gleeful abandon with which he explores the human brain. Newberg doesn’t seem to care. He’s traveled way too far into the brain to turn back now.

  For the past few years, Newberg has studied spiritual experts of all stripes: Tibetan Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns, Sikhs, Pentecostals— in other words, those who practice prayer and meditation long and hard. I had already witnessed him measuring the brain-wave activity and scanning the brain of a Sikh while he chanted his prayers. And on this first day of June 2007, I would watch as he scanned the brain of a Christian in prayer, my minister friend Scott McDermott.

  One mystery about spiritually inclined people is this: What turns people into spiritual virtuosos? I have come to think that people like Scott McDermott are to prayer what Tiger Woods is to golf. From an early age, their natural talents channeled them toward golf, or toward God, and once they felt the rush of watching that ball fall into the hole or sipping the unearthly wine of transcendence, they pursued their passions. They trained because the reward was so sweet and so constant. Nature and nurture, genes and sweat, schemed to create these masters.

  Scott was sixteen when he says he first “encountered” God directly. From that time on, prayer became the central habit of his life, around which all other events orbited. Scott has prayed one to two hours a day for more than thirty-five years. On Fridays, his day off, he is often on his knees for four. During those sessions, Scott feels peace and joy. He says he often hears a voice and receives visions.

  “I begin early,” he told me.“I begin at five-thirty. I’m not a morning person. I stumble down to my basement. My study’s down in my basement. I have a recliner down there. I walk down, turn the lights on, and say, ‘God, it’s just me. I just want to spend some time with you.’ And I sit in that chair and we begin to have a conversation.”

  I turned to Andy Newberg, who was standing with us in a small examination room at the hospital. Newberg was listening intently.

  “I’m curious, Andy, what would that kind of practice do to the brain?” I asked.

  “Well, some of the research we have been doing suggests that when people are engaged in practices over a long period of time, it does ultimately alter how the person’s brain functions,” Newberg responded. “As one does a particular practice or a particular task over and over, that becomes more and more written into the neural connections of the brain. So the more you focus on something, whether it’s math or auto racing or football or God, the more that becomes your reality.”

  I glanced at Scott to see if he picked up the ambivalence in Newberg’s response: God may be “your reality” and still be imaginary. The belief in God may shape your worldview, and your brain, in the same way Harry Potter books shape the brains and imaginations of children. But no one would argue that a wizard like Harry Potter actually exists.

  I put the question to Newberg more explicitly:“When people pray, do they connect to God or tap into a dimension outside of their bodies?”

  Newberg was prepared with a careful answer.

  “Well, it comes down to belief systems,” he said. “When a religious person looks at our brain scans, they say, ‘Ah, that’s where God has an interaction with me.’An atheist looks at the data and says,‘There it is. It’s nothing more than what’s in your brain.’ Even if I do a brain scan of somebody who tells me that they’ve seen God, that scan only tells me what their brain was doing when they had that experience, and it doesn’t tell me whether or not they actually did see God.”

  In fact, Newberg is undecided as to whether brain images reveal there is a God or not. Materialists would say that brain scans prove that prayer is a physical process, nothing more; there is no need to bring an external Being into the equation. But Newberg points out that brain scans do not necessarily exclude an external being. Say you are eating a piece of apple pie, just out of the oven, topped with melting vanilla ice cream. If Newberg took a brain scan of you as you bit into the pie, various parts of your brain would light up—the areas that register smell, taste, form, and shape, as would the area that recalls the memory of the time you tasted pie this good, at the county fair when you were six years old. The parts of the brain not involved with the task would go dark.Who knows? You may even lose a sense of self in this ecstatic culinary moment. But just because your brain is activated in a certain way, does that mean the apple pie isn’t real? Of course it’s real. And just because Scott McDermott’s prayers correlate to brain activity, does that mean God is mere illusion?

  Newberg then announced it was time for the study to begin. He closed the door and instructed Scott to relax on a metal bed in the sterile, cool room as a nurse inserted a catheter into his arm. They dimmed the lights. After ten minutes, Newberg tiptoed into the room and started the IV. A radioactive tracer began to flow into Scott’s arm and up to his brain. After the tracer had set, Newberg led Scott to the brain imaging machine, which would take a snapshot of Scott’s brain.

  Scott lay down with his head in the machine. It was chilly in the room; the nurse tucked him in with a little blanket. For the next forty-five minutes, Scott rested with his head secured in place by pillows while the machine rotated around his head, taking images of his brain. The brain scanner then develope
d a color-coded photo of his brain: the active parts were hot red and screaming for attention; the ho-hum areas were yellow; the sleeping areas were a cool blue.

  Scott went through the routine twice. The first time, Newberg told Scott not to pray but to allow his thoughts to wander, to remember a movie he saw, or chores he had to do. He could think about anything but God. This scan would produce a “baseline,” or resting-state, image. In the second session, Scott prayed intensely for a particular person in what is called intercessory prayer. Like those weight-loss advertisements, Newberg would analyze the before and after, comparing the baseline image with the image of the brain in active prayer.3

  After Scott emerged from the second brain scan, Newberg and Scott and I gathered in the examination room.

  “Did you have any visual or auditory sensations?” I asked, thinking of his vision of running from Jericho to Jerusalem.

  “Yes, I did have some of that.”

  “What sort of things?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure you want this on tape,” Scott said, laughing. It turned out he had been praying for me. He had a vision that God wanted to shatter the molds that I had put myself in (the wife mold, the reporter mold, and so on)—that God had a special mold for me.

  “And I saw God handing you this mold of who you are. How He’s made you. And He says, ‘This is how I want you to be.’ It was intense, Barb. I would have screamed if I could have. It was that intense.”

  Newberg nodded thoughtfully. “We did a study recently of people speaking in tongues, and the whole concept is hearing what God has to say, and feeling the Spirit of God going through them.” That sensation was caught on the brain scans.

  “So, given your research,” I asked, “what are some of the things you might expect to see on Scott’s scan?”

  Newberg was uncertain. Scott’s prayer life seemed to straddle the two types of states that Newberg had studied. One type involved meditative practice, a state of mind a little like a champion dressage horse under perfect control. The other involved ecstatic Pentecostal prayer, which bucked and snorted like a rodeo bull.Which sort of brain Scott possessed would remain a mystery for several weeks.

  Looking Under the Hood

  So far, Newberg has identified two types of virtuoso brains: contemplative brains and rowdy ones. Let’s examine the contemplatives first. For this study, Newberg put Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhist monks (separately, of course) into the brain scanner at the University of Pennsylvania. The “theologies” underpinning these two practices have nothing in common. During their centering prayer—a meditative prayer that emphasizes interior silence—the nuns focused intently on God, and usually on Jesus. During their meditation, the monks nestled into a state of intense awareness, connecting with the underlying reality of life; their belief system excludes a supernatural, external “God.” Yet each group’s descriptions of those transcendent moments bore an uncanny resemblance.

  “I felt communion, peace, openness to experience,” Sister Celeste, a charming seventy-year-old Franciscan nun, recalled after emerging from the imaging machine.4 She felt “an awareness and responsiveness to God’s presence around me, and a feeling of centering, quieting, nothingness [as well as] moments of fullness of the presence of God. [God was] permeating my being.”

  Now listen to Michael Baine’s words. Baine is a Tibetan Buddhist and a scientist who works with Andy Newberg and became one of the subjects in the study. Baine described his meditation experience as “timeless and infinite.”

  “There was an intense feeling of love,” Baine told Newberg. “I felt a profound letting-go of the boundaries around me, and a connection with some kind of energy and state of being that had a quality of clarity, transparency, and joy. I felt a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.”

  It sounded to me like two different road trips. One group drives a Lexus through the Redwood Forest, the other takes an Escalade through the Swiss Alps. The vehicles look entirely dissimilar, as does the scenery. But gazing at the giant trees and towering mountains may stir up a similar sense of exhilaration or awe. For Andy Newberg, the question was this: What is going on under the hood? Are the brain mechanics the same for Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks as they experience the transcendent, just as two different cars in two different countries operate along the same mechanical principles?

  That is precisely what Newberg discovered when he peered at their brain scans. With both the monks and the nuns, the front part of their brains “lit up” as they focused on the task at hand. Think of the frontal lobes as the chief operating officer of the brain, one with accountant-like tendencies: it handles the details, helps plan and execute tasks, keeps you awake and alert and, above all, focused. It also processes memory and language and other complicated social tasks, such as figuring out how to behave at a cocktail party or how to respond to your spouse or friend or rival at work.

  As the Christian nuns focused on God—on a word like Jesus or Elohim that helped them connect to the divine—their frontal lobes shifted into overdrive. Similarly, as the Buddhist monks meditated on an image that allowed them to connect with the ground of being, their scans showed their frontal lobes as a red glow of activity.

  Newberg found another peculiar similarity.With both the nuns and the monks, the parietal lobes went dark during deep prayer and meditation. Newberg calls this the “orientation area” because it orients you in space and time: those lobes tell you where your body ends and the rest of the world begins. That is why Sister Celeste (and countless other mystics) described a unity with God, or as she put it, God “permeating my being.” It was the neurological reason that Michael Baine felt “a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.” And, I might add, it was what those who enjoyed psychedelic drugs and natural mystical experiences reported.

  Newberg theorizes that when the nuns and monks focused on their mantra or image, their brain simply screened out other information. You’re watching Casablanca and the oven timer goes off, or you’re gazing rapturously at your beloved and the phone rings—you don’t notice. Increase that a hundredfold and you would lose your sense of time and space. It is not that the orientation area of the brain is not working. Rather, the frontal lobes are physically blocking all the information going to the orientation area—the sounds, the sights, the dog at the door or the timer in the kitchen, the things that would normally create a picture of the world around you.

  And yet the orientation area, conscientious beaver that it is, is still trying to do its job. “It’s still trying to create for you a sense of yourself and a spatial relation between you and the rest of the world,” Newberg says, “but it has been deprived of the information that it normally has to do that, so you wind up with this sense of no self, no space, no time.”5

  Newberg’s description reminded me of the way psychedelic drugs may behave in a brain to create hallucinations. Some pharmacologists believe that drugs like psilocybin block out external sensory information, allowing you to create your own, transcendent, reality. Chemicals are quicker, but it may be that prayer and meditation accomplish the same high—without the potential for a bad trip or ending up in handcuffs.

  For me personally, Newberg’s brain scans are theological dynamite. They boil down to this: a mystical state is a mystical state. The closer one draws to a transcendent state—or, as Newberg calls it, “absolute unitary being”—the more the descriptions merge. Christian mystics sound like Sufi mystics, who sound like Jewish mystics, who sound like Buddhists. And from the brain’s point of view, this makes perfect sense.

  “Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Jews who have had mystical states tend to describe the states as ‘everything becomes one.’The same terms keep cropping up over and over again,” Newberg told me. “When we look at the physiology of the brains, the most unitary state is one in which we completely deprive the orientation parts of the
brain of information. So, physiologically it should be very similar. And philosophically it should also be similar. If you have a totally undifferentiated experience, it’s undifferentiated. It really has to be the same regardless of where you’re coming from.”

  It doesn’t matter if you scale the spiritual peak using Christian centering prayer, Buddhist meditation, or Sikh chanting. The destination is the same. Or as Sophy Burnham might tell you: You must choose a spoke to get to the center of the wheel, but any spoke will do.

  Newberg’s research throws a gauntlet at the foot of my faith. If disparate religions drive the same neural routes to transcendence, can one religion claim that it is true and all others false (or at least deficient)? I had noticed in my reporting that the people who experienced mystical states tended to drop religious labels: if they had been Christian before, they often became “spiritual but not religious” afterward, or they might incorporate other traditions into their practice of Christianity. One thing they often rejected, however, was an exclusive claim to Truth. This forced me to reconsider Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Perhaps, I reflected, Jesus’ words were more nuanced than a literal reading of the text suggests.

  Of course, I was not ready to throw my faith overboard just because of a few brain scans. Even if two things appear identical physiologically, they can play out in distinct ways. Identical twins share the same DNA, but they are not identical people. Can one routinely score 100 on math tests and the other flunk? Can one become a car salesman and the other an English teacher? Of course. Biology does not determine everything—and it certainly cannot determine the nature of “Truth.” In the same way, it is too facile to say that brain states can determine the veracity of spiritual claims. And yet, I wondered, if there is a God who maps out the neural routes to communicate with Him, He could be making an explicit point: maybe the distinctions between religions are more artificial than believers want to admit.