Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [79]
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 developed 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