Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [84]
Here’s the twist. In most people, the thalami (there are actually two, one on the right and one on the left) have the same level of activity. They beat along, side by side, like an old married couple. Newberg has analyzed thousands of brain scans during his day job at Penn, and they look pretty much the same. He scanned my brain, for example, and found only an anemic 3 percent asymmetry.
But in every spiritual virtuoso he studied—the nuns and monks, the Pentecostals and Scott McDermott—one side is more active than the other. Scott’s thalami, for example, showed a 15 percent asymmetry. Newberg says that in his ten years of reading brain scans, he has never come across a similar finding. In fact, this kind of asymmetry was so rare that he searched for other such cases in the literature. The only similar cases he found were in people who had neurological damage caused by tumors or seizures.
“I think of it as a spiritual marker,” Newberg told me. He confesses to be mystified about what purpose that asymmetry serves. Nor does he know whether people are born with a lopsided thalamus and the quirk somehow inclines them toward God—or whether their hours of prayer and meditation create the asymmetrical thalamus. But the finding does offer more evidence that spiritual brains are special.
It occurs to me that other “fingerprints” of God have been detected down the ages. Not inside the brain—for until recently we did not possess the technology to peer inside—but in the behavior and perception of those who claim to have touched God. One fingerprint was erotic: consider the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, who was reported to have orgasms when she prayed, or the sexual feelings described by Sophy Burnham. Another was sensory: Saint John of the Cross’s sudden revelation that we are one with everything in the universe, and the same insight that swamped Arjun Patel as he meditated in his dorm room. A third was auditory: the voice heard by Joan of Arc, and the one that speaks when Scott McDermott prays. The fingerprints leave a lasting psychological mark, since the person undergoes a radical change in personality and ambition after he or she has touched the hem of God’s garment. Usually, the change is lifelong.
History and theology have recorded these events, with little explanation except to say, here is mystery, or here is madness. But now, with our ability to peer into the brain, it seems the stories of people being felled and changed by the spiritual are the outward evidence of internal rewiring, just as unspoken ideas may take form in a painting or a book or a joke to a friend. I stumbled across one other neurological fingerprint of spiritual experience in my research, involving near-death experiences. To my mind this does not solve the mystery but uncovers another dimension, allowing us to excavate, like archaeologists who discover ancient civilizations, the hidden layers of spirit.
But wait—good news is at hand for the spiritual Luddites who are not graced with naturally mystical brains. If we are willing to pay the price of admission, we, too, can tune up our brains and go to spiritual destinations we never imagined.Why? Because our brains are plastic.
The Dalai Lama Meets the Neurologist
Geographically, the Dalai Lama lives in exile in Dharamsala, a remote refuge in India. Scientifically, His Holiness has a ubiquitous presence. In 2005, he