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“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