How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [54]
Anything that you value will also stimulate different structures in your limbic system, but if the emotional circuits in your brain are weakly stimulated, then God will have little meaning in your life. This is what we think we saw in the brain scans we've taken of atheists. Frontal lobe activity went up, signifying that they were thinking about God in an abstract way, but we saw little activation in the areas that generate meaning, value, pleasure, or discomfort. This suggests that people who perceive God as distant are not emotionally stimulated by the idea. Neurologically, such a God would feel less real, or more distant, and would incline an individual toward agnosticism or disbelief.
In the four personalities described in the Baylor study, God maintains an “otherness” in the mind of the believer. Neurologically, activity in the parietal lobe is responsible for maintaining this quality of otherness about God. The parietal lobe makes God an object that has a specific location in the universe, separate from yourself. You see this most clearly in children's drawings: God is “up there” in heaven, and we are “down here” on earth.
The religious philosopher Martin Buber believed that one must maintain an “I-Thou” separateness and otherness in order to have a personal interaction with God,3 and this makes perfect neurological sense. For example, when we brain-scanned Pentecostals while they were speaking in tongues, activity in their parietal lobes increased as they experienced the Holy Spirit talking to them. Other forms of contemplative meditation decrease parietal activity, which allows the practitioner to feel more unified with God. God, then, appears to be everywhere and nowhere, a formless energy, both universal and unique. This God was frequently identified in our studies and surveys, but was not reflected in the Baylor study.
THE MYSTICAL PERSONALITY OF GOD
Our Survey of Spiritual Experiences, which we described in Chapter 4, illuminated a fifth personality of God that we think the Baylor study missed. The Baylor researchers provided a checklist of qualities one might associate with God, but they did not include terms that could reflect unitary spiritual experiences in which God transcends the biblical image of a heavenly powerful deity. Instead, their list of “personality” terms was biased toward the otherness of God. For example, they chose words that are easily associated with human traits, like motherly, fatherly, kingly, etc. Other questions also reinforced an anthropomorphic image by asking if the respondent saw God as angry, concerned, involved, or uninvolved in one's affairs. Only one question allowed the participant to describe God as a “cosmic force in the universe.”
In contrast, when we asked our survey participants to describe their spiritual experiences, many talked about God as an emotional presence, using words like peace, energy, tranquility, or bliss. God was not a separate entity, but rather a force that permeated everything. God didn't create the universe, God was the universe, a radiance that extended throughout time and space. God was light, God was freedom, and for many people God was consciousness itself. For them, a mystical God often cannot be described with words.
GENERATION “WHY”
Generation Y is a loosely defined term for people born between 1978 and 1989. Many of these Y'ers are in college today, and when we gave them a broader list of “God” qualities to choose from, we found evidence to dispute the Baylor study. Most of these students, as we reported in Chapter 5, see themselves as freethinkers and agnostics. They are actively involved in questioning every aspect of religion, which is why I'm calling them Generation “Why.” In the survey we handed out, some of the most commonly selected words were mysterious, indescribable, and unknowable, qualities we associate with a mystical God. Other popular choices included: everywhere, nowhere, transcendent, nothing, everything, and metaphoric. However, many