Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [83]
“This is incredible,” Newberg whispered to another assistant, and they stared in astonishment as the two women gaily babbled away for the next fifteen minutes. Morgan eventually became a subject and co-author of the journal article describing brain activity while a person speaks in tongues.7
The brain scans suggest why glossolalia is rarely heard at Harvard or Oxford. From a cognitive-processing standpoint, it is rather lowbrow. For when Newberg developed the brain scans and peered at the frontal lobes—the executive part of the brain, which manages the higher thought processes—he stared at the images in disbelief.
“The frontal lobes actually shut down,” Newberg told me. “This actually made a lot of sense to us on reflection.When you’re meditating, you kind of control the process.You focus on something, you attend to something, and you’re willfully doing that. In speaking in tongues, the experience is that your will is not in charge of this whole process. These people have surrendered, and whatever happens just happens through them, there’s nothing specific that they are in control of.”
“Who is running the show, then?” I asked.
“Well, that’s a good question,” Newberg responded neutrally.“Obviously the spiritual answer is that it’s the Spirit of God that is controlling this. From a physiological perspective, one might postulate that there’s another part of the brain, a preconscious part of the brain that is causing these changes to occur. And that’s why it sounds like language but it’s not really language—because it is not tied into the cortical areas that would help you to produce something that is comprehensible. But we just don’t know.”
In other words, Saint Paul may have been describing a neurological reality when he wrote to the Romans, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”8
Newberg spotted another unexpected activity in the Pentecostal brain. In contrast to the brains of the nuns and monks, the activity in the parietal lobes (the association area) in the charismatic brains actually increased. While the nuns and monks lost their boundaries and merged into God or the universe, Pentecostals remained keenly aware of themselves as separate from God. It is a relationship, not a union, a finding that other “neurotheologians” have picked up on as well.9
In short, speaking in tongues is the physiological antithesis to Christian centering prayer. Despite their shared beliefs in Jesus as the Son of God, their spiritual practices have very little in common, both in the brain and outside of it—which is not to pronounce one right and the other wrong, but rather to suggest that there do appear to be many routes to transcendence.
A Spiritual Marker
Six weeks after Scott McDermott prayed in the brain scanner, Andy Newberg called me with the results. They were not dramatic, he said, but he found them a little surprising. Scott’s frontal lobes decreased in activity, and the association area (the parietal lobes) increased. This meant Scott’s brain behaved more like a Pentecostal than a contemplative nun.
I was not surprised. Scott had told us that when he prays, it is “dia logical,” that is, a conversation. “When I’m praying for people, I’m just trying to hear God, and flow with God’s heart toward that person. I don’t feel a loss of myself at all.”
In other words, Scott engages in conversation with Jesus, and does not “merge” into Him.
Moreover, when you hear Scott describe his prayer life, beneath the polish and the Ph.D. is a happy charismatic. Even when he was praying in a sterile examination room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Scott told me he heard God’s voice, saw a vision, and spoke to God in tongues. So intense was the experience, he wanted to scream. In other words, it was a primal experience that did not require much heavy lifting in the frontal cortex.
However, what really