The Unexpected Link Between Neuroscience, Spirituality & Happiness | Andrew Newberg, MD

Hi.

Thanks for listening to the Tony Robbins Podcast. This is just a quick note about this episode in case you'd rather watch and see the video of this conversation, and that's found@YouTube.com tonyrobbinslive if you'd like to listen, you're in the right place.

I am here today to talk about the relationship between our brain and our spiritual selves. What do you think about when you think about a spiritual experience? People often up to me and say, I don't really believe in God, but my spirituality is the dancing that I do or something creative or being out in nature. So there's a lot of ways in which people can express their spirituality. Part of my goal here is to basically show you that everything that people like Tony and Sage are telling you, it makes sense. One of the things they first told me in medical school is never talk about neuroscience after 10pm so but my daughter reminded me that we're from Florida, So it's still 2pm My brain's time. So we're going to go with that and hope that we can talk about this. So, as you heard in my introduction, I am here today to talk about the relationship between our brain and our spiritual selves. That's the basic gist of what we're going to be talking about, but it is a very complex tapestry of interweaving different ideas about the brain, the mind, consciousness, spirituality, self, sexuality, and all the things that really make us who we are as human beings that ultimately can lead to the kind of happiness that you're talking about at the conference. In fact, part of my goal here is to basically show you that everything that people like Tony and Sage are telling you, it makes sense. There's a reason behind what they're saying, because it really has a lot to do with how your brain is responding to the world around you to help you have all of these different experiences. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I think there's some very important things. I'm going to give you kind of this grand tour of all the work that I've been involved in over the last 30 years. Looking at these questions. There's a couple of important points to keep in mind here that while I can show you some cool brain scans and we're going to look at that in a little bit, if I don't know what the person is doing on the inside, my brain scans are meaningless. So it's really essential that I ask people questions about what they think, what they Feel. And I'm gonna do that a little bit later on tonight as well. But one of the things I want you to start thinking about is what do you think about when you think about a spiritual experience? Maybe a spiritual experience that you've had, spiritual experiences, you've heard about, you know, read about, what does it mean to have a spiritual experience? And this slide just shows you that there are so many different kinds of terms that people talk about, and there's a range of them as well. So it's things like spirituality, wisdom. It can be science, reason, it could be joy, bliss, happiness, self realization, awakening, but sometimes even things like a void or emptiness. So there are so many different ways that people start to think about what is spiritual. And I think that in and of itself is very important for us to keep in mind as we start to explore this entire topic now, this entire field of research. I'm going to throw out a term here that I don't know how many of you may have heard of this called neurotheology. And it is the term that has been used now to start talking about these kinds of ideas, the blending of neuroscience, looking at the brain and our spiritual selves. But I think there's a couple of important points that I want to stress here for all of you tonight, so that when you start to think about these questions for yourself and. And think about, well, what's going on in my brain, that there are important things to keep in mind. So, for example, for me, at least, for the term neurotheology to work, I say that it has to be defined very broadly, both sides of that. So the neuro side is not just neuroscience, although that's part of it. It could be neuroimaging. We're gonna look at some brain scans in a little bit, but it can be psychology, anthropology, all the ways that consciousness studies, all the ways that we get at how we think and feel as human beings. And theology is actually a specific discipline that looks at a given tradition and tries to analyze its sacred texts, try to make sense about it, tries to help us understand what we're supposed to do as part of that tradition. And that's all part of what we can look at as well. We can look at all the ways our brain helps us to think about those really big questions. Questions about, do we have free will? What is free will? How do we think about concepts like revelation, for example, or spiritual awakening? What does that mean in terms of the brain? But it goes far beyond theology as well. So it goes into all the kinds of practices that you've been doing here this week. So when you're doing a practice like chanting or meditation or dancing or stretching, how is that changing and affecting our mind and our brain? And it also has to do with the beliefs that we hold. You've talked a lot about that in the conference. What are the beliefs that you have now? How do you modify them? How do you change them? How do you change them effectively so that you can lead a very positive and happy life? And so all of the beliefs that you hold are also things that are going, you know, based on things that are going on in your brain as well. So we can look at both the theology and all of the religious and spiritual side. We can look at the brain and neuroscience and all of that side. And ultimately, to me, part of what makes this a very exciting field is it expands really from very esoteric questions, things like, you know, the meaning of free will, how we understand the nature of reality, to very practical questions. And if I decide to meditate, why is that going to reduce my anxiety or reduce my depression? So we can look at all the different ways of understanding, not just how we are spiritual, but how that affects our psyche. And ultimately, I'm in the field of integrative medicine, so how that affects our body as well. Our body and our health as well. So I think there's a lot of very important information that this field of study can help us with, and that's what I'm really going to share with you tonight. Now, another important thing, because hopefully, as you've gone through the conference today and as you've gone through your lives, each of you have had a whole variety of spiritual experiences. And they range from the very mild kinds of experiences. We went to the mosque today. I think a lot of you went to the mosque, right? Probably most of you felt something when you walked in there. You don't have to be Muslim to feel something when you walk in there. It's an incredible place. But if you're not Muslim and you walk in there, you might feel something relatively mild. Oh, that feels really amazing. It's sort of awe inspiring, for example. So that's one kind of experience that you can have, but it expands all the way to the most powerful mystical and spiritual experiences that human beings can have. Those experiences where you lose yourself, where you feel at one with the universe. And we're going to talk about those in a little bit more detail in a few moments. But there's a whole continuum in between. People often come up to me and say, well, you know, I don't really believe in God, but my spirituality is the dancing that I do or something creative or being out in nature. So there's a lot of ways in which people can express their spirituality and have a spiritual experience that may not necessarily be a truly mystical experience, but also isn't just kind of that mild experience that you might feel. This ultimately goes into fairly intense meditative states and practices that again, many of you may have had to these very profound mystical experiences. So I think there's a continuum of these experiences, and, and there are different ways of even thinking about that. So when we talk about the elements of these experiences, and I am going to talk about this in just a few moments, one of the key pieces of a lot of these experiences is a sense of oneness or unity or connectedness. And some people actually even develop a little figure like this. So they could say to you, well, when you had that experience, where were you on this graph? Where would you. You have self versus other on the far left side. That's where I'm here. And. And the world's there. And that's kind of what we call our everyday reality, for the most part. But then as you go through this in a kind of graded procession, you get to feelings of flow, mindfulness, romantic, intimate love with another human being, a feeling of inspiration, and ultimately to these very profound mystical experiences of oneness and complete unity. So this, again, is something for all of you to think about as you've had different experiences, where did they fit in this continuum? And how can you actually kind of understand where all of the different experiences that you may have had kind of land on this particular graph? Because we're going to talk about the parts of the brain that seem to be involved in helping us to feel this sense of oneness, this sense of unity. So where in the brain do spiritual experiences occur? Well, I don't know how many of you out there are neuroscientists, but you're about to get a crash course in neuroscience right now, and there will be a short quiz at the end of my presentation. So here's our brain, and there are some very important areas for us to think about. Now, I have to caveat everything I'm about to say by telling you that the brain is incredibly complex, so there's no way for us to talk about all of it. Right now. I'm going to focus on the things that the brain does that are most relevant to our ability to have different kinds of spiritual experiences and engage in different religious or Spiritual practices. So I'm going to kind of just hit those highlights. And the other thing that I also really want to emphasize and is that I'm going to talk about different parts of the brain. We're going to talk about the frontal lobe and the temporal lobe and things like that. The brain operates as an integrated whole. So even though the frontal lobe does certain specific things, it's working with other areas to help us do all of the things that our brain does. So let's talk about some of these. So these are the big sort of outer areas of the brain. These are the lobes of the brain. As we recall, there's four of them, actually, four main lobes. So the frontal lobe is along the very front part of the brain here. Okay. And the frontal lobe is very involved in helping us to focus our attention. It helps us to concentrate. So if you're driving a car in Abu Dhabi and you get lost and you're trying to find your way, then your frontal lobe kicks in and it helps you, wait, where do I have to go? What was that map? What was it we were showing? So that's your frontal lobe that's turning on to help you concentrate and find your way. The frontal lobe also is involved in what we call executive functions. So that's things like planning your day, keeping your checkbook, knowing where all your appointments are, all the, you know, oh, I have this job I have to do a week and a half from now. So the frontal lobe is very important in kind of helping guide us through our entire day and helping us to concentrate on that. And the other thing which is interesting about the frontal lobe is that it connects to what's called the limbic system, which is our emotional centers of the brain. And it helps us to regulate the emotional centers of the brain. And we'll take a quick picture of that in a second. But just keep that in mind that the frontal lobes are involved in a concentration and attention. That's why I call it an attention area. And it also helps to regulate our emotions, responses. Now, along the side of the brain is our temporal lobe. And the temporal lobe has a number of very important functions. It houses part of our visual system, but in the upper part of it, that's at the junction between the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe, the upper part of the brain. That's where a lot of our verbal and conceptual processes occur. So a lot of the things that you're talking about, the exercises you just did, about the things that you're thinking about, the ideas that you hold the beliefs that you hold, ideas that you want to think about. Ideas about God. I know Tony yesterday was asking you, does God grow? So where in your brain are you processing that? Well, it's this verbal, conceptual area. You're thinking about things, and you're thinking about ideas, and you're thinking about words. And it's where a lot of your words come from as well, how you understand the words. The frontal lobe actually helps you to generate your words. But the temporal lobe helps you to receive and think about the words. So the temporal lobe is very involved in a lot of these different processes. And the parietal lobe, which is in the back part of the brain. Is very involved in taking all of our sensory information. And helping us to create a sensory representation of ourself where our self is in the world. So at the end of my presentation or at the end of the night, when you get up out of your chair and you navigate through the hall and through the door, your parietal lobe is kicking in. It's, oh, where is everything I gotta see? Oh, I bumped into somebody. I felt that. So it's really what helps you establish your sense of self. And keep that in mind, because we've talked about your sense of self. And we're gonna talk about what happens to that in just a few moments. And in the very back of the brain is the occipital lobe. That's your visual areas of the brain. Not going to talk about that a whole lot in this particular presentation. But just know that when you go to see certain things, when you see the mosque, when you see a sacred symbol, when you visualize an object that you might be meditating on, you use your visual areas as well. So that also is an important player in all of this. But we're not going to talk about that quite so much tonight. Now, if I go a little bit deeper inside the brain, this is actually parts of the temporal lobe and a little bit of the frontal lobe. This is where our limbic system is. And it is, in many ways, the main emotional centers of our brain. You've probably heard of some of these areas before. You've read about them in the paper. Scientists find out that romantic love is in the amygdala or something like that. So the amygdala and the hippocampus Are two very critical areas of the brain. That help us to have all of our emotional responses. The amygdala is particularly important for motivational things. So if you're a motivational speaker like Tony, you want to activate People's amygdala. And as he always tells you, it's the emotions that are changing all the things that you think and feel about. And that's true. And in fact, part of why that's true is that the amygdala and the hippocampus work together. And what's interesting about the brain is that our emotions in the limbic area are connected to the hippocampus, which is what primarily writes memories into our brain. And so all of our beliefs, our ideas about the world, they all kind of originate in this area. And this makes sense. I always thought, this doesn't make sense when I first learned about this. Like, well, you have emotions, and then you have memories. Memories seem cognitive and, like how you think about things and emotions are how you feel about things. But evolution was very smart about all this because you want to remember things that are emotionally important, particularly the bad things, right? You want to avoid the bad things. If you went over to this other area and your friend got eaten by a lion, well, you're gonna avoid that in the future. How many of you have gone to a restaurant and you got sick and you threw up? Well, it makes you feel very emotional. You don't go back, so that helps to protect you. But it also happens to turn on when something positive happens. So if you come home and your puppy greets you at the door, or your wife or husband greets you at the door, then your amygdala also turns on because it tells you, hey, this is something important. And that's why the various emotional responses that we have are a fundamental part of creating all of the beliefs that we hold as part of our ways of thinking about the world. So the limbic system is very, very important with regard to helping us to feel our world and understand what things are important for us to believe in and to focus on as part of our lives. Now, before we get to the brain scans, I just want to re Emphasize this point that it's really irrelevant for me to show you that your amygdala turns on or your parietal lobe does something unless I know what you're thinking about. Because if I don't talk to you, if I don't ask you what you felt, then it doesn't really help me all that much. So at one point, about 10 years ago, we decided to do an online survey of people's most intense spiritual experiences. And this became, for me, as a researcher, as a scientist, geeking out on all this stuff. It was a treasure trove of data we asked people where they were from, what their age was, their gender. We asked them all kinds of questions about their psychological history, medical history, and so forth. But ultimately, we gave them a box and we said, tell us about your most intense spiritual experiences. And we got about 2,000 respondents. We obtained, like I said, all different kinds of information. And for me, it was just such an incredible moment because it helped me to understand why, what these experiences are all about. In fact, when I talk about neurotheology and I talk about things like mystical experiences, one way of doing that is to go to the great textbooks and read about Buddha's experience, read about all the great mystics of history and what they felt. That's wonderful and great, but I'd like to hear from each one of you, what do you all feel when you've had a spiritual experience? Because that's where I really start to understand what's going on. And now if I look at your brain, I can say, oh, okay, well, you said you felt this and. And your frontal lobe turned on. Well, that's interesting. That helps me to understand a little bit more about what's going on when you are actually engaged in a spiritual practice or having some kind of spiritual experience. So there's a couple of very important things that I learned from all of the information that I got from this survey. We came to the idea, we started to look at all of this data, and we came up with. We had all these different narratives, basically, and we analyzed them. So the first thing that I want to point out, because I. I heard Tony say this the other day, and I really wanted to emphasize this. Somehow this slide didn't get in here. But I was fascinated by the fact that everybody's experience was completely unique. And I think that's really important, especially for this group, that no matter what you're doing, no matter what kind of experience you have, and no matter how similar it might seem to somebody else's, it is totally unique to you. And that, to me, is very, very important. Because I think one of the things that I hope people get from all of this research is the incredible diversity and kind of the mysterious complexity of everybody's experience and the appreciation of the fact that somebody might have an experience that comes out of the Jewish tradition, the Muslim tradition, the Christian tradition, Buddhist, Hindu, just natural experiences that people have. So that, to me, is very important. But within that large group of individuality, we were able to start to think about how people use certain words. We do what's called a content analysis. And we came up with five core components. And in fact, I want to kind of go through this a little bit because they were hopefully things that many of you have experienced. So the five core components are a feeling of intensity, a feeling of clarity, a feeling of unity, a feeling of, of surrender, and a feeling of sort of permanent transformation. So let's talk about all these in a little bit of detail. So the feeling of intensity. So what I mean by this is that when people have this experience, they say that some element, maybe the whole thing, but usually at least one element is the most that they have ever felt. It might be the most beautiful vision they've ever had. It might be the most intense feeling of love, the most incredible sense of joy. Whatever it is, it's more than anything they've ever felt before. And all these descriptions, we get descriptions where people say it was infinite ecstatic white light or something like that. So you just hear all of this incredible sense of intensity. And I actually want to ask here, because this is a great group for me to learn about, is how many people have had some kind of really, really intense experience as part of what they might call a spiritual experience. Okay, great. So lots of you. That's good. That means my data still holds. Ok, I'm glad. So where does the intensity of this experience come from? Well, you can see. So I'm going to orient you to this brain scan. This looks very weird now, right? Okay. So this is basically a slice of the brain. It's as if I took a person's brain and I took a slice right through this way. And I'm using a kind of imaging technique called SPECT imaging, and that's an acronym for a very complex scientific term which is single photon emission computed tomography. It's a lot of the, the kinds of brain scans that I do. And what this is looking at is the activity of the brain and it's doing that through a kind of surrogate marker which is blood flow. What's interesting about the brain is that it kind of operates like a gasoline powered car. I don't know how much longer I can keep using that analogy, but it works like a gasoline powered car, which is that when you use a certain part of the brain, it gets more gas, it gets more gasoline, just like your car engine gets more gasoline to go faster. So if you're going to use your frontal lobes, as I was talking about, you're concentrating on something, your frontal lobes should activate, it should turn on and you should deliver more blood flow because that's the gasoline for your Brain, it delivers energy, it delivers oxygen, it delivers sugar, and ultimately allows that part of the brain to work a little bit better. Now, as I mentioned, this is a slice through the brain. So it's as if I sort of took a slice here and popped the top of your head off. And I'm now looking at the brain, although, oddly enough, in radiology, we always look at the person from the feet up. So as you're looking at this scan, it's as if you're kind of looking at the person's brain looking up this way. And. And so just to orient you a little bit here. So the top of the scan is basically the frontal lobe. Okay. And the back of the scan, the bottom of the scan is the back of your head. Okay. So for those on this side, here's the frontal lobe up here. This is the occipital lobe back here. And the temporal lobes are along the sides. And then when we do these scans, they actually involve a little bit of radioactivity that helps us to see where the blood flow goes. So the colors represent the amount of blood flow that a person has in a particular part of their brain. The red areas are the most active, followed by the yellow, the blue, and the black. So that's how we got a little bit of a sense. So this is a person in the resting state. They're just sitting there calmly. They're not doing anything in particular, and their brain is on. Your brain is always on until you die, basically, which is a good thing. And so when you're asleep, the brain is on. When you're awake, when you're meditating, whatever you're doing, the brain is on. And so. And normally it's pretty active. So if you look at all these different areas, there's a fair amount of yellow and some reds and things like that. Well, where that arrow is pointing is the interior part of the temporal lobe, which is the limbic system. That's where the amygdala and the hippocampus are. So here is the resting state of the brain. But now I'm going to show you the next slide, which is going to be the brain during a very intense meditation practice. And look what happens right where that arrow is. You see that area gets a lot more red. Right. I'll go backwards. So you can see that the limbic system turns on. Well, doesn't that make sense? Right. The limbic system is involved in things that are important to us, very emotional to us. And so you would expect that the limbic areas would turn on when somebody is engaged in a spiritual practice that elicits very strong, very intense feelings, emotions, whatever, that the person has as part of that experience. So we can start to see how the experience that the person actually has is now starting to relate to what's going on in the brain itself. So let's go to the next core element. This is a feeling of clarity. So this is the kind of experience that you have where you feel like, I got it, I understand it. I mean, again, part of what you're here for is to get that feeling of clarity through some of the things that you're doing. The different exercises, the different practices, the different tools that you're getting from Tony and Sage are trying to help you to find that sense of clarity. So this is. You know, it's just that a person gets it. They understand the world in a way that they never had before. So I'm gonna do another show of hands. So how many have had this kind of sort of revolutionary sense of clarity as part of one of these kinds of experiences? Okay, great. And for those of you who haven't felt that yet, that's okay. These are experiences that might be awaiting you down the road, but what's important is that you can start to see how these begin to happen in the brain. So where does this feeling of clarity happen in the brain? Well, where this arrow is pointing is at a very central structure, which is called the thalamus. As you can see, it really sits in the very center of the brain. In this case, there's two little red blobs there. And because it's in the very center of the brain, it has some very important functions. It connects different parts of the brain to each other, and it's also very involved in helping to bring our sensory information up into the brain. Many people think that the thalamus may be really the part of our brain that is absolutely essential for our entire perception of reality. So, theoretically, then, if your perception of reality is shifting, maybe something is changing in this thalamus. So if you look here at the thalamus, you can see that both sides are pretty equal in their red blobbiness. Okay? But look at what happens to this area of the brain when the person then goes into a deep spiritual practice, in this case, a kind of prayer practice, There's a shift, right? All of a sudden, that one side kind of goes dark, and the other side becomes more active. So maybe this is part of what starts to happen when a person has this experience that the thalamus shifts, and that Helps to rearrange all the different ways in which your brain starts to function and starts to interconnect with each other. So, again, we're learning about what's going on in the brain. That helps us understand what these experiences are ultimately doing to us as individuals. Now, earlier on, I was talking about the sense of oneness, the sense of connectedness, the sense of unity. This is probably the most well known of the elements of these experiences. What we're talking about is a person feels at one with the universe. They feel at one with God, maybe they feel at one with nature, with all of humanity, maybe with a group of people, maybe all of you here feel a connectedness with each other. Right? So that sense of oneness and connect. So how many people out there have had a very profound sense of oneness or connectedness as part of an experience that you've had? Okay, great. So again, these are these core elements of these experiences. Now, where does this happen? A little earlier, you started to see me talk about. You heard me talk about the parietal lobe. So the parietal lobe is involved in our spatial representation of ourself. So what's going to happen to our spatial representation of ourself when we lose ourself? Well, if this area of the brain turns on when we develop our sense of self, then what would happen when we lose that sense of self? It should theoretically start to quiet down. It's not working as much because we're kind of losing. We're literally losing our spatial representation of ourself. And this is exactly what we see in our brain scans. So this is a brain scan from one of our Buddhist meditators. And this is their resting state. Again, we always sort of have a comparison state. But when they get into a deep meditation practice, what happens? Well, if you look at where that arrow is, which is all red and kind of similar red to every other area of the brain, all of a sudden, that area quiets down. So instead of turning on, this is an area of the brain that actually quiets down during these experiences. Again, just so you can see that here it is in the baseline, and then here it is when the person has a quieting of their parietal lobe and this decrease in their sense of self. And interestingly, there may even be a difference between the left and the right sides of the brain, particularly in this case, because the left side of the parietal lobe seems to be a little bit more about the sense of self, the actual spatial sense of yourself. And so if we decrease the activity on the left side, you lose that sense of self. The right side is a little bit more about objects out there. Where is this camera? Where are you sitting? And so forth. So if that shuts down, I begin to lose my spatial representation of everything out there. So not only am I losing my sense of self, but I'm losing the sense of everything being discreet. And so I have a sense of absolute oneness that I then can become part of. And theoretically, you can have either of those experiences or both of them at the same time. And many of you have probably had that kind of experience. Now, the feeling of surrender is an interesting one. This is actually particularly appropriate for being in Abu Dhabi because the whole goal of the Islamic tradition is the idea of surrendering to God. And in fact, it was actually a study of Muslim prayer that made me really start to think about this whole concept of surrender a little bit more. Because when people have these experiences, when they have spiritual experiences, you know, part of what you're learning here are the tools that kind of get you down the road. They start the process. If you do a meditation practice, the meditation isn't the mystical experience. It's the tool that gets you there. So as you are beginning to concentrate in your meditation, you might increase your frontal lobe. You're concentrating. You're concentrating on a prayer. You're concentrating on an object of meditation. Maybe you're concentrating on your breath. But if you get to this experience where it starts to just kind of happen, well, you start to not be the one who's making it happen. And the experience is that it kind of takes you over. So instead of you actually making the experience happen, it feels like it kind of pulls you along. You just kind of surrender to it and you go along for the ride. You feel, some people talk about as letting go. A feeling of surrender, a feeling of release is another term that people talk about. So how many of you have had that feeling of release or letting go as part of these experiences? A sense of flow is another term that people talk about. Yeah, so if the frontal lobe turns on when we have a purposeful sense of what we're doing and helps us to concentrate, what would you expect to happen to the frontal lobe when you let go of that purposefulness? Well, I thought we would see a decrease of activity in the frontal lobe, and that's exactly what we saw. So this is from our study of the Muslim prayer. And what you can see is now the arrows are pointing to the very front of the brain, and you can see that there Are kind of a little bit of red and some yellows there. But look at what happens when the person goes deep within the prayer practice itself. Those areas really quiet down. They go from kind of reds and yellows to pretty much all kind of blues and greens. So this is exactly what we were hoping to show. And it's very much a part of these experiences that as you surrender yourself to this whole process, your frontal lobe shuts down and the whole thing just completely takes you over. So to me, this is so helpful for us to understand how these practices and these experiences interweave with what's going on in the brain. It helps us to understand the experiences, but it also has a tie into what's going on from a health perspective as well. And one of the things that we also asked people was about the transformational element of these experiences. We asked them, how did it change you? And what we found were some remarkable effects. Almost 90, 95% of people had positive experiences, and it changed things, and it changed their lives in positive ways. It changed their family relationships, their fear of death, their sense of health, their sense of meaning and purpose in life, and, of course, their sense of spirituality and religiousness. So this, to me, is extremely helpful because it tells us how valuable these experiences are for people. Again, this is why Tony and Sage are talking to you about the tools to work towards having these kinds of experiences, because they know how much they can really change people. Now, as a medical doctor and somebody who's always interested in kind of the good and the bad, I'm still a little bit intrigued by the fact that there's a few percent of people who reported that things didn't go so well. And that took one of two forms. Sometimes people had an incredible experience, incredibly positive experience, but it was so different than anything that they had ever learned before that they didn't really know how to incorporate it into their belief system. It was a real challenge for them. It created, you know, they would go. I know there was a couple of people, for example, who were Catholic, who, you know, were pretty devout Catholics, and they had this experience and they were like, this had nothing to do with, you know, it had nothing to do with what I have normally believed. And then they go to their clergy, they go to their friends, and they kind of, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. You know, well, you were just hallucinating or something like that. And they're really struggling. It was an incredible experience for them, and they don't know what to do with it. So I think that's one way that people can have a negative outcome from these experiences. And, of course, there are people who truly have negative experiences. A lot of you, I'm sure, have heard a lot about the research being done in psychedelics these days. And psychedelics can lead to some really incredible spiritual experiences for people. But sometimes people have bad trips, and we don't always know why that can happen, exactly what's going on. But again, for me, this is where this kind of research can ultimately lead. It'd be great to know what's the difference in the brain when somebody has a good experience versus a bad experience, when somebody's struggling versus understanding things easily, and help us to try to redirect people, to figure out the most appropriate approaches that we can use to help people find the paths that work best for them. Now, everything that I have shown you so far is talking about the moment of the experience. And a lot of this came out in a book that I wrote called how enlightenment changes your brain. And part of what I came to realize about the concept of enlightenment is that there's really two ways of thinking about it, right? One is the moment of enlightenment, which is kind of what we've just been talking about. But then the other is the person is enlightened. This is something that they carry now with them through the rest of their life. So theoretically, then, these kinds of practices are going to change your brain, not just in the moment, but are going to change your brain over long periods of time. And the question is, how do we start to look at that? Can we study that in some way? Could I scan every one of you right now and then scan you again two or three years down the road and find out who felt that they really had a spiritual transformation, who changed? And can I learn what happened in your brain, which is different from the person next to you who didn't have that experience? Can I learn something about it? And to me, this becomes very important because it teaches us about ultimately what the goal of this conference is, which is how do we get to the achievement of these incredible feelings of enlightenment, happiness and understanding about the world, a greater sense of even meaning and purpose in life. So back to the brain scans. Well, this was the very first study that at least I'm aware of that was ever done with a longitudinal design. That means that we did what I was just talking about. We scanned people at one moment, and then we took them down a path of doing a particular meditation practice, and then we scanned them again. You guys have been doing a lot of chanting in this conference. Right. So here's what you're doing to your brain right now. Okay? This was a kirtan kriya practice. So they were doing a chanting meditation, and we were taking older individuals. So this is also good for those of you who are a little bit older, because it means that you can always change your brain, even if you're old or young. And we scanned them initially. In fact, the A scan is the very first. They just basically came in off the street, and we said, you know, they're part of our study. And we scanned their brain just at rest. Then we taught them how to do this practice. We scanned them while they were doing the practice for the very first time. That's the B scan. Then we sent them home, and they did this practice every day. They did it for about 12 to 15 minutes a day, every day for about eight weeks. And then they came back and we scanned them again. The C scan is again them just coming in, and that's their resting state. And then their D scan is the final meditation practice. Well, I was really pretty astounded by the results of this, and I was very comforted by the results of this. So there were two main things that we found. One of them is where the arrows are pointing, and this is in our thalamus, going back to what we were talking about earlier. So if you look at this person's thalamus on the A scan, where the arrow is pointing, that one part of the thalamus is a little bit more active. It's a little bit more red than on the other side. So that was the way they were at baseline. But if you look at the C scan, it looks like it's much more the other way. The other side seems to be much more active. And in fact, actually, if you look at the D scan, the other side is even more active. That other side is even more active. So it seems that when they do the practice, they're sort of shifting the activity in their thalamus, and it seems to stick, because remember the A and the C, that's them just at rest. That's not while they're doing the meditation. So this is actually changing the way their brain is functioning. And the analogy that I like to use, and I think Tony was using a little bit yesterday, I heard him talking a little bit about kind of the. He was using the word exercise. Well, this, to me, is evidence that these kinds of practices are exercise for your brain. And I think the analogy is really wonderful, because what happens if I lift weights with my arm? What does it do. It gets bigger and it gets stronger. Right. I can lift more and more as I do it. So what happens if you do this kind of practice? Well, it's changing your brain over time. And actually, if you look at the A and the C scan now at the very top part, that's the frontal lobe. And you can see that it becomes a lot more red after they have done this practice. So if you look here and you look to here, there's more red activity here than there is here. And that means that their frontal lobes actually became more active even at rest. And interestingly, another set of studies that I was not involved in, but people have found that those who are long term meditators literally have thicker frontal lobes than those people who are non meditators. So just like you can exercise a muscle and make it bigger, you can actually make your brain bigger and you can make it stronger. And so this is, to me, fantastic evidence to show exactly how that seems to be happening. And of course, this was about 12 minutes a day for eight weeks. So imagine what you could do with your brain if you do it for months, a year, a lifetime, and how that changes your brain to look at the world in a completely different way and to operate in a completely different way. Now, this is all about some of the ways in which we think about the world, but what about the ways in which we feel about the world? Okay, so now this is a really weird looking brain scan. Okay. All you see, it almost looks like an owl with like two blobs of eyes here. So these are in two other areas of the brain. These blobs of red activity are in a very central group of structures called the basal ganglia. These are areas of our brain that are involved in dopamine and serotonin processing. Now, this was a study that we did where we actually scanned people initially, and then we sent them through a very intense, very immersive spiritual retreat program. What we did was it was actually based on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. For those of you of the Jesuit and Catholic tradition, you may know of St. Ignatius, and he developed these exercises which were basically a lot of meditation, contemplation, self reflection, a lot of the things that you're doing here. So we sent people to a week long retreat and then they came back to us and we scanned them again. And I hope that what you can see in this area here is that they're sort of less red than there was at the beginning. Now this caught me a little bit less red here than you See, at the beginning. Now, this caught me a little bit by surprise because I had seen some studies that showed that when you meditate or pray, you release dopamine. Now, that makes sense for those of you who don't know what dopamine is. A lot of people refer to it as the feel good molecule, because when you get a release of dopamine, makes you feel good. In fact, if you get a lot of dopamine all at once, and one simple way which is not recommended by this physician, is taking cocaine. But if you take cocaine, it causes a complete release of dopamine in your brain, and that's why you get this euphoric high. So don't try this at home, folks. Yes, only if you're a professional. That was his joke. I give credit where credit's due. So what's interesting about this scan is it's actually not looking at dopamine, but it's looking at how the brain handles dopamine. And the fact that it's decreased means that this person is actually kind of doing what cocaine does to the brain, but doing it naturally. And so basically, the people who are coming in through this study were making their brain more sensitive to the effects of dopamine. And if you look at these two little blobs down at the very bottom here, I'm going to use the pointer for this one. So down on the bottom line, these are in the brain stem, the very lowest parts of the brain, and these are where the serotonin receptors are. And the most famous antidepressant drugs, drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and so forth, they bind to the same receptors that we're looking at here. It's called the serotonin reuptake site. And this also changed. It also became more sensitive to the effects of serotonin. So just think about that. If naturally you made your brain more sensitive to serotonin, you're basically doing what the antidepressant drugs do, but without using the antidepressant drugs. And that's part of why, when people have now done a lot of other clinical studies, they have found that practices like meditation and prayer and so forth reduce depression, reduce anxiety. And dopamine not only makes you feel good, but actually it helps you to concentrate. It helps to improve your cognitive powers as well. So it improves all of the ways in which your brain functions. Now, again, this is not while they're meditating. This is not while they're doing the practice. This is a resting scan of the brain, but it shows that you can change the brain and change it in a very positive way by doing these kinds of practices. Now, we're going to take a little bit of a detour here, a little shift here, because I've told you most of what I can tell you, at least for the moment, about how our brain is affected by spiritual practices and how it changes our brain. But the question is, why is all of this in here in the first place? How did our brain get to have these sort of spiritual abilities? Well, of course, there's the religious issue, and I always pay homage to that particular perspective because I think it's an important one. And you heard it a little bit in the video at the beginning. I don't know if you were able to hear all that, but one of the things I said is, you know, look, if you're a religious individual, you believe in God, we're down here, God's up there, whatever there has to be. It would make sense that we would have a brain that could connect with God, that could read a sacred text, that could say a prayer, that could, you know, have a spiritual experience. It would be kind of silly if we didn't have that brain. So it would make sense that this is built into the brain. And of course, a lot of the earliest traditions really understood that. They kind of took this idea of God creating us, and whether that was sort of the mother Earth or the fertility goddess that's kind of birthing us and creating us to have this kind of ability, this kind of experience, or in some of the monotheistic traditions, a little bit more on the masculine side, God the father type of idea. That seems to be all very well and good, but then the question is. One of my mentors was an anthropologist by training. He said, well, you know, if we have the ability to have these experiences, and how do we get them? Well, many times we get them through different ritual practices. A lot of the things that you've been doing this week are rituals, right? Dancing rituals and singing rituals and chanting rituals. They're rhythmic, they're repetitive. They get your body going, they get your flow and energy going. So, okay, that's great. So we have these rituals that can generate these help us to generate these experiences. But where do our rituals come from? Well, if you're an evolutionary anthropologist, well, they had to evolve in us, and they theoretically had to evolve in us from animals. And my late colleague, a fellow by the name of Eugene De Quilly, who is brilliant, brilliant human being, psychiatrist and anthropologist, spoke like four different languages. He was incredible. And he loved rituals, and he started to study the rituals of animals because animals are loaded with rituals. There's all kinds of rituals, but there's one common trait of all rituals and animals. They're all mating rituals. But what does that mean? So how do we start to think about that? Why would that be the case? Why would mating rituals ultimately lead to all of the rituals that we have as human beings? Well, and again, part of what he was thinking about was, how did this happen? Because if mating rituals are all this kind of one particular thing, they bring these animals together for mating. But how did we get into this incredible complexity of what we have? We have ceremonial rituals that help us to celebrate holidays and help us to think about different ideas of a tradition. We have life cycle rituals about birth, marriage, death and so forth. The practices that we were talking about, meditation and prayer. So we have all these incredibly complex rituals. But again, if all animals are mating rituals, how do we try to create that link? So we started to think about that and we said, well, what do mating rituals actually do? They do two main things. They identify and they connect. So what do I mean by identify? They identify another animal out there that is for us to mate with. And that's why, you know, you don't want a lion mating with a gazelle, or probably the other way around would be worse. But. But, you know, you want to be mating with an animal of your species, and you want to identify a mate that you think is good, that works for you. And so that becomes a very important part. You identify that mate, but it goes beyond that. Through the various rhythmic elements of the practice. The movements, the different sounds that they make, the visual displays and so forth, they ultimately connect them. They break down the self other dichotomy so that the two animals can actually come together for the mating process. And that's what ultimately leads to this sexual experience and mating. And in fact, it drives areas of the brain and areas of the body. In the body, it's called the autonomic nervous system, the arousal and calming parts of our body that ultimately lead to that kind of sexual ecstasy that becomes a whole part of that mating ritual and that mating process. How do spiritual rituals work? Do they work in a similar way? Well, yeah, they do because they identify as well, they connect you and identify you with a tradition. You do certain rituals because you're Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, whatever you are. They connect you with each other. You're all here, you're all doing certain things. You're identifying each other as being part of a group that is very an important part that you then connect with. And those rhythms then actually help to connect you with each other and help to connect you with the ideas that are part of the tradition. They might ultimately create a kind of experience that leads to a fundamental sense of connectedness and oneness with the world, with God, with the universe, whatever it is that you're ultimately feeling connected to. And so these rituals ultimately stimulate lots of, and engage different parts of the brain. They involve the sensory systems, the movements that you do, the sounds. I mean, think about what you were just doing before I came on, right? You had lights flashing, you had the music, you were bouncing around, you were moving around. That's all ritual. That's all these different rhythms and movements that ultimately drive the arousal system. In the case of doing something very energetic, or if you're doing something very calm, it can quiet you down, it can get you to a very profound sense of calmness and blissfulness. But they drive the. The autonomic nervous system, it drives the limbic system to help you have these very profound, powerful emotional responses. And ultimately it affects the brain itself. Now, I had the opportunity to find a little bit of a missing link by studying a practice where people did a meditation practice using sexual stimulation as part of that process. Now, at first you might think, oh, that seems a little odd. But think about many different meditations, maybe even the ones that you've done here. A lot of times you focus on a bodily process. You focus on your breath, you focus on how your body is feeling. You may focus on movement, you may focus on slow movements, or if you're doing some Tai Chi or something like that, you're focusing your mind on those movements. So a lot of times when we do a practice like meditation, we focus on some aspect of the body's physiology. In this case, they happen to be meditate using sexual stimulation. And it's also not that far out of the realm of understanding these ideas. If you look at various traditions going back in history, there's a lot of emphasis in ancient cultures and Hinduism, for example, that uses sexual energy as a source of spiritual energy. So when we did the brain scans of people who were doing this practice, we found certain common elements of sexual stimulation which were in some of the core areas of the brain. But we also found some common things that we just talked about a few moments ago. So instead of going from one to the next, these are just side by side. And so if you look at these two scans, you're looking at the resting scan here, and the meditation Scan here. Hopefully I can convince you that the frontal lobe is much less active here during the practice. It kind of gets much less yellows and oranges, and it's kind of more purpley. And that's because their frontal lobe actually became less active, just like we found in those different experiences of surrender with different types of prayer and meditation practices. And then if we looked at the parietal lobe, it's sort of more bright yellows compared to the purples that you see during the meditation practice. So just like many of the other meditation and prayer practices, this practice also decreased the activity in their frontal lobe, decreased the activity in their parietal lobe, and helped them to have this brain very powerful feeling of oneness. And also a sense of kind of flow and surrender. That seems to be exactly what people experience. So this, to me, was very exciting to be able to start to tie together the relationship between the sexual experience and the spiritual experience. And, of course, ultimately, when you have sexual orgasm or climax, that involves a very, very intense feeling of arousal and alertness, as well as a profound sense of blissfulness and calmness. And it probably isn't a surprise that the word ecstasy can be used both to describe sexuality as well as spirituality. So there seems to be a very profound connection here between our sexual selves and our spiritual selves. And this then starts to help us to. Under all of this information now kind of connects back to the conference. We're all here talking about happiness. Okay, so how do all of these ideas. How do all these practices help us to find happiness? Well, some people have talked about rituals creating a kind of threshold that kind of, you know, when we talk about spiritual experiences. One of the early slides I showed was that the idea that we have sort of our everyday reality and then we have the spiritual experience, well, there seems to be a jump that we make. And it seems that these rituals help us to kind of cross over that threshold that separates our everyday world from the sacred spaces that we make and that we can feel. And so in those sacred spaces, we can achieve that kind of spiritual growth, that sense of flourishing that Tony and Sage are talking about here in the conference. Now, one other very important thing I heard Tony say yesterday, which I also just want to reemphasize that there's the biological evidence to support what he's saying is the idea that everything that I've shown you tells you that when you do these practices, they can have a profound effect. But what I didn't show you were a couple of other scan studies that we had done, which showed that it's not just doing them that has the effect, but the more you can engage them, the more they have that effect. So if you just say a prayer just for the sake of saying the prayer, It'll do some things to your brain. But if you say it like you mean it, and it's something that's really important to you, and it connects to your beliefs, Then it really changes your brain. It really activates a lot of these different parts of the brain. It changes the way the brain operates. So a very, very important thing is for everyone to realize, as Tony was saying yesterday, that it's important to, you know, they're going to give you all these tools, and you want to find the ones that work for you, because if you do, the ones that don't work for you, they're not going to work. But if you do the ones that do work for you, they really will affect you, and they will change your biology. And this ultimately leads to this concept of eudaimonia that I don't know how many of you have heard of this term, but some of my colleagues have talked about this. It's a kind of interesting philosophical idea, because in many ways, this is really what we're talking about at the conference. We're not talking about being happy right now, you know, having a nice, happy experience or enjoying a nice dessert or something like that. We're talking about happiness. We're talking about a sense of fulfillment and understanding, really aligning yourself with your true self. And it's a really very spiritual idea. And this idea of eudaimonia Is something that really derives out of these kinds of experiences. Because these different rituals kind of connect you to yourself. They connect you to the world around you. And so, ultimately, this idea of creating a sense of eudaimonia Is about the process of living well and getting to a profound sense of healthfulness, spiritual awakening, and a sense of eudaimonia. This is really leading a life that you want to live, Leading a life that is performed with dignity, with respect for yourself, for the rest of world, the of humanity, for the other people in your life, for the universe itself and nature. And so this is a very powerful way of kind of interconnecting everything that we've been talking about and understanding how our biology connects to our spirituality, connects to our sexuality, and ultimately changes who we are as human beings. So, ultimately, I hope that all of you have come to learn tonight that religious and spiritual experiences have a tremendous impact on you. They are changing your brain. They are changing your body, they are changing your mind. And it transforms who you are. It transforms your perspectives on reality, your sense of your jobs, your relationships and so forth. And this has a very profound implications for understanding this incredible interwoven tapestry of who we are as human beings. That's what it's ultimately all about. How we are as human beings. How our biology, our spirituality, our sexuality are all intellectual, intimately connected with each other. So if any of you are interested in pursuing some of this discussion more, I certainly encourage you to take a look at some of the books that I've had the good fortune to be able to work on. Give a hand to Andy. Does anybody have any questions for Andy? Ah, good. Okay, go ahead.

Thank you very much. So my name is Jonathan. I'm from Montreal, Canada. And thank you.

Thank you.

So first, thank you very much for your speech. I tend to be someone very analytic and in my brain, and I try to. I'm working to be more in my heart. So for me, understanding all the logic is very interesting. So my question is, what about ayahuasca?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. The question was about ayahuasca. So sometimes when I talk about neurotheology, I talk about it as a big jigsaw puzzle because there's so many different ways that people can get into these experiences. And a lot of the work looking at psychedelics, I'm gonna even blow up your question a little bit more. Cause I mean, it's looking at things like psilocybin and ayahuasca and dmt. And so there's a lot of different compounds, molecules that have been explored. And I think it's actually really fascinating work to me. It is a very important piece of this puzzle because one of the kind of cool things about these different compounds is we know where they go, right? So we know that a lot of the psychedelics, for example, activate the serotonin system. Some of them activate some other areas as well. And so we can start to see how that connects with what we're looking at in terms of the brain scans. And then I'm also working with some groups to try to understand how different compounds and taken in different ways, affect the experiences that people have. So if you take ayahuasca, do you have more of a kind of change of your belief experience, Whereas if you take psilocybin, you have more of a sensory experience. So I think these are gonna be some really important questions. And then there's also the clinical piece too. And there's a lot of Work being done now to see whether or not these kinds of substances can be helpful for people. I certainly hope that they can be, but we'll have to see ultimately what the research shows. But it's very, very important, important work. And it speaks to the other thing which is kind of interesting about these compounds is that they kind of. They blanket the brain and they activate a whole network of structures, a lot of the areas that we were talking about. And so that's part of what we're trying to learn about and trying to see how those experiences affect people. In our survey, for example, the people who had experiences that were under the influence of different psychedelics had a lot of common elements to those of the more quote unquote, naturally occurring experiences. So, yeah, so it's very important. But did you have a follow up?

I was wondering, do you have ongoing studies right now on different type.

We always have studies that we're trying to work on. In the immediate moment, we don't, but I also work with other colleagues around the world. And so there's a lot of great research being done right now.

So do I have your blessing to do ayahuasca or.

Yeah, I have to check my medical license here. I'm not allowed to recommend them. Oh, okay. Yeah, go ahead, do it. It's all yours. Yes. Let me get this lady.

I have two questions for you. Question number one. You went through different intensity, clarity and surrender, and you showed the pictures of them separately. What happens when a person feels all of them at once?

Well, that's a great question. And so I often try to be careful about getting overly technical. But we have this whole model of all the different parts of the brain that become involved. And so all of those things are happening all at the same time. Basically, I'm showing you each. These are different slices through the brain. So I'm showing you a higher slice and then a lower slice. The higher slice shows the frontal lobe, the lower slice shows the parietal lobe. So it's a great question because everything is actually kind of happening all together and all at once. It's all the different parts of the brain that are kind of interconnected with each other. And it is a dynamic process. Of course, for all of you who have meditated, what you're feeling in the first five minutes of your meditation is completely different than a half hour later, an hour later, five hours later, the next day. So it is a constantly changing kind of effect. But lots of different things are going on and all of those things are actually happening. I don't want to say at the same time, but in a kind of dynamic process altogether.

Are there researchers, have you, Czech researchers, that prove, not the necessary proof, but that shows how deep state of alignment meditation impacts the body, specifically the brain and the rest of the body.

What was the question, though?

When a person, when we are in a deep meditative state, gratitude state, what are the specifics? How does it impact the body?

Yeah. So, again, first of all, a lot of the brain changes start to occur. But the way that meditation ultimately affects the body, which I didn't get into a whole lot, I mentioned a little bit at the end, is a lot of what's called the autonomic nervous system. So the brain's connected to the body with the autonomic nervous system. And on one side, not one side, but you have one part of it, which is the arousal part, which is referred to scientifically as the sympathetic nervous system. And then you have a calming part, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. And for the most part, they can kind of either both be activated one at a time. So if you're doing a meditation, you start to calm your body down and it's your parasympathetic system that starts to increase and it starts to lower your blood pressure, your heart rate, it reduces your stress hormone, cortisol, and then it also has changes in terms of the different neurotransmitters. So there's a lot of physiological changes. And what's interesting about those changes is, for example, if your cortisol gets lower. Cortisol, we give people cortisol to stop their immune system. So if your cortisol goes down, your immune system function goes up. And in fact, some studies have shown that if you meditate and then you're given like a vaccine, like the flu vaccine, you actually produce a lot more antibodies if you've been meditating than if you haven't been meditating. So there are actually a lot of physiological changes. And that does lead to what happens from a health perspective, because it really does change lots of different aspects of the body's function. And if you can lower your heart rate and your blood pressure, that's going to be good for your heart, it's going to be good for things like stroke and many different physiological processes as well.

Absolutely. Last question. As far as we were talking other day about loneliness, the difference between loneliness and solitude, do you have any studies? How does solitude specifically affect totally different things?

Well, you know, so one of the things that's interesting about how we work towards Getting to these experiences is that there are lots of different approaches. So it could be ayahuasca, it could be meditation. The way that things like solitude will affect us is that it kind of when I was talking about how the parietal lobe starts to quiet down, so what's really happening is that you're actually, as you begin to meditate and you use your frontal lobe to start to turn on, to concentrate on the object of your meditation. You're concentrating on the object, but you start to shut down the sensory information that's coming into your brain. So if you do that more purposefully, in the sense that if you are in solitude, you already don't have a lot of sensory information coming into the brain. So it sort of augments the effect of what's going on in the parietal lobe. You're already kind of dampening it down because there's no sensory information. So it facilitates the person having that feeling of oneness and connectedness. And it's the same kind of thing that even happens when you talk about, like, sacred architecture. So, again, you know, we went to the mosques today. Well, how are almost all spiritual buildings built a great space? Because it kind of pulls the sensory information away from you. And because you have less sensory information, your brain and your parietal lobe has less to work on. So it facilitates your ability to have that sense of connectedness, that sense of oneness. And that's part of the important part of those experiences.

Thank you so much. God bless you.

Let's take one more question. One more question. So as far as for dementia or other brain diseases, is there any evidence or exercises that show that meditation helps to either slow that down or reverse it or anything like that? Yeah. So actually, the study that I showed you with the Kirtan Kriya was actually designed to sort of look at cognitive function. And so there are. There are a number of studies that show that doing these kinds of practices can be beneficial. They can work even for people who are starting to have issues with cognitive function. Now, an important caveat to that is that you have to be able to do this practice. And I don't mean that to be silly, but one of the things that we tried was we tried that practice in some people who actually had Alzheimer's disease, and they really just weren't able to do it. But if they can do it, then yes, absolutely, it can be helpful. And what the data always has shown is that the more we have used our brains in our life, the more we have more interconnections and so forth. Now, at this age, it will stave off those kinds of problems later on down the road. So doing these kinds of practices at any stage of your life is likely to at least push off things like Alzheimer's and dementia down the road. So it definitely can help. Again, there's always a limit to how well it can help, but it certainly can help. And again, it's this kind of research that shows that kind of an effect. Awesome. Thank you. Yep. Absolutely. Hand for Andy, everybody. Thank you.

The Tony Robbins Podcast is inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings. It's produced by US Team Tony, copyright Robbins Research International.