How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [29]
Ritalin, however, generated little meaning or value, even though a couple of people did report mystical experiences. But before you go off in search of mushroom enlightenment, consider this: A number of subjects had increased feelings of anxiety, and 10 percent said they never wanted to have such an experience again. Furthermore, if you abuse psychedelic drugs, you'll have an increased risk of lifetime panic attacks.43 We still have much to learn about how and why certain drugs influence our spiritual and religious beliefs, but the fact remains that meditation is safer.
REINVENTING GOD
All experiences, be they religious or secular, must be viewed as lying along a continuum. For one person a specific experience will be intense, yet for another the same experience may barely elicit a neuropsychological response. For some people, the word “God” evokes a negative neurological response; for others, the word neurologically stimulates a sense of happiness and peace.
Even among atheists, the notion of God evokes a wide range of reactions. When we asked Kevin, a long-term meditator and atheist, to focus on an image of God, one side of his frontal lobe became more active, while the metabolic activity in the other side decreased. In our last book, we described this as a form of cognitive dissonance.44 Thus, when people focus on a belief that they strongly reject, their brain will experience some degree of emotional conflict and intellectual confusion. Others will not. When we scanned the brain of another atheist while she meditated on God, we found no significant changes in neural activity. We suspect that atheism comes in as many flavors as theism and that different nonbelievers reach their conclusions through different neurological paths of logic, experience, emotion, and social influence. Thus, we expect that each atheist will show a different pattern of neural activity when he or she contemplates God.
A “STROKE” OF ENLIGHTENMENT
In her recent book, My Stroke of Insight, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes her extraordinary experience when, at the age of thirty-seven, she had a stroke. It caused substantial neurological damage to the left side of her brain, but it also resulted in an incredibly euphoric experience in which she felt intimately and profoundly connected with everything. She argued that the right side of the brain, when freed from the abstract reductionistic thinking of the left hemisphere, allows a person to experience the deeply compassionate and spiritual part of our human nature. Fully recovered, Dr. Taylor says she can now easily shift between the scientific and transcendent sides of her brain. Her experience supports the notion that each of us has an inner capability to access these wonderful parts of who we are—a notion supported by our brain-scan research at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since concepts of God vary from person to person, one would expect to find hundreds of different neurological “fingerprints,” which is what our research has found so far. Children, however, demonstrate a more consistent view of spiritual and religious ideas,45 which suggests that we all form a similar notion of a supernatural reality in the first few years of life, one that usually involves a face or a person who lives in the sky. This notion is rooted in the neural shortcomings of a child's brain, and is deeply influenced by what adults choose to believe in and teach. (In Chapter 5, we'll explore in detail how children and adults envision God.)
To summarize, the neural varieties of religious experience are just that—varieties. There is no “God spot,” nor is there any simple way to categorize religious beliefs. The data points to an endless variety of ways in which spiritual practices can affect the cognitive, emotional, and experiential processes of the brain, and each one of these experiences will lead to a different notion about God.
IS GOING TO CHURCH GOOD FOR YOU?
Even going to church will change your brain and your health,