Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [78]
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