Ep. 17-Dr. Andrew Newberg: Is Our Brain Hard Wired For God and Spirituality?

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, winner and certified entrepreneur coach, Jason Wasser.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the You Winning Life podcast. I'm Jason Wasser, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach. I am joined today by one of my favorite academic researchers, Dr. Andrew Newberg, who's the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health in Philadelphia. He's also a physician at Jefferson University Hospital. Board-certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine. As a neuroscientist, he studies the relationship between brain function and various mental states. He is a pioneer in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences, a field known as neurotheology, and his research, research includes taking brain scans of people in prayer, meditation rituals, and trance states in an attempt to better understand the nature of religious and spiritual practices and attitudes. But wait, there's more. He's been interviewed for documentaries such as What the Bleep?, Religiolous, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and most recently, the neuro-emotional technique therapy-based documentary Stressed, and is an author of books such as How God Changes Your Brain, Neurotheology, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, and Why God Won't Go Away, plus more. Dr. Newberg, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me on the program.

So as we were playfully talking before our interview started, as I was looking through your CV to pull out pieces to share with the audience of who you are and why I'm so excited to have you today, I think it totaled 82 pages is what I would have as of today. So, so I've been busy. You've been a busy, busy man, which is really amazing. So your background of now, you— I want to kind of reverse engineer the conversation. You have all these things that you're doing, this incredible, incredible field of study. What was your background and how did you decide to go into the field of neurology? And even before that, what held your interest as a high school and college student?

So, I really was very interested in all of this since I was a kid. When I was very young, I was asking a lot of questions about— the nature of reality, how we get to know what reality is. And I was trying to figure out sort of how best to answer that question. So my initial attempt or my initial thought was to look at neuroscience and to look— I figured, well, it must be our brain that is doing this, is helping us to experience the world around us. And so perhaps I should start there. I looked at what we knew about the brain and how the brain worked. I looked at science in general. Of course, I have a deep love of science. It is remarkable in what it can show us about the world. I also kept running into these barriers about human consciousness and if we're trapped inside of our brain, how do we know if what we're thinking is real? I began to look at— other perspectives as well. I was raised in a Reform Jewish household, but we had certainly a strong sense of spirituality, certainly less doctrine, but it was always challenged to ask a lot of questions. So I started to look at Judaism, Christianity. I mean, I looked at all the different traditions, a variety of philosophical approaches, and ultimately kind of came to the thought that that both sides kind of had a lot to say about the answer to these questions, but also both sides wound up being a little limited in getting all the way there. So I kept thinking to myself, well, maybe there's some way of bringing these two perspectives together, the sort of the philosophical and the spiritual on one side, the scientific on the other side, and see how we could kind of bring them together in a way to answer these questions. So right around when I was in medical school and really contemplating a lot of these issues as much as I could, I had the good fortune of meeting two mentors, one who led me down the path of brain imaging, another one who led me down this path of looking at the brain in the context of religious and spiritual phenomena broadly, various practices and experiences. Then there was the proverbial light bulb that went off, and I said, "Well, if we're using brain scans to study Alzheimer's disease and depression and so forth, well, why can't we use it to study religion and spirituality?" That was really what launched a lot of the research that at least I've been involved in over the last 25 years, trying to explore what's going on in our brain when people have various religious and spiritual experiences, when they hold different beliefs, and really trying to combine the best of what we understand spiritually with what we understand scientifically, with the goal of still trying to answer that fundamental question about the nature of reality.

So high school, college, and you're reading a bunch of stuff, you're trying to get your hands on as much materials to inform you as possible. What were some of the things that you were reading? Who were you reading? Who was influencing you? At that time on both the spiritual side that was giving you at least somewhat of a good answer, both from the spiritual side and from the academic or medical side?

Well, I think from the academic side, I was just looking at the research articles that had come out. I certainly had read some of the books exploring the mind and consciousness. Gödel, Escher, and Bach is a book back in the late '70s, I guess, that came out that I certainly was very very impressed by, but there were many others, a lot of great thinkers in the scientific realm who published a number of articles and books on that and trying to just understand the brain in general. Then when it came to the more philosophical side, even just some of the real basics of Descartes, Wittgenstein, Spinoza. Very much impressed by what these individual thinkers had to say, Kant, Hume. Then I was also particularly taken by some of the phenomenologists in the more— like the 19th and 20th century, trying to— because that to me was very relevant to what's going on with the brain if we're talking about how we experience the phenomena of the world. Then again, it kind of comes back to what's happening in the brain. So, got into reading people like Husserl and phenomenology, which also was some of the people who had influenced some of my mentors as well. But I had some wonderful college professors in philosophy. I had a college professor at Haverford College named Ashok Gangadhin, who was my Hindu professor, and he was very influential on me in terms of thinking about this whole other way of understanding human consciousness and reality and different ways of thinking about it. So there were lots of people who influenced me throughout, and even a lot of my friends. One of the funny stories was that when I published my first book, I got an email from a guy I hadn't heard from in ages. I went to overnight camp with him, And he said, "You know, we used to have all these late-night conversations about God and reality." He said, "I didn't think you were taking them seriously." So, but you know, all those conversations influenced me as well. You know, there's something to learn from everybody and from every perspective.

So in the academic world, how much kickback was there at the beginning, right? You're presenting this new idea. I want to study religion. I want to study God. I want to study spirituality. Or even going as far as saying theology, right? What was the kickback at that point? Was there anybody who was like, "No, this is not what we do"? Because I know that the mindset is academia is academia, religion is religion, and we coexist. We don't necessarily always support one another. So what was that experience like for you?

Well, I certainly had some people who were close to me who wanted to make sure I was careful about it. You know, they didn't say I shouldn't do it, but they did, you know, make sure that I was aware of what I was getting myself into. You know, again, I was very fortunate to have a lot of wonderful people who supported me, and I think part of it, you know, I've tried to always present the work that I do in as in a respectful way to the religious and spiritual traditions, but in hopefully a rigorous way scientifically. So I'm trying not to make any bold statements that are not founded in the data. And over time, I think more and more people have come to recognize the importance of looking at these kinds of questions. Whether you are a devout believer or a devout atheist, You can't deny that religion is, and spirituality is not a part of humanity. The question is, what do we do with that? And to me, as a scientist, to me, it's something to be studied and to be evaluated. So, I think encouraging people to ask those questions, and ultimately, I mean, is how many people, including incredibly well-respected researchers, are asking the same questions. Whether in their private life, going to church, going to synagogue, exploring the brain, they recognize that there are these big questions that lie behind all of this that we need to address somehow. And maybe it's not something that they feel that they can do based on their knowledge base or where they're coming from. But they have a deep respect for the need to ask those questions. And so hopefully the work that I've done helps to further people along in trying to explore them. But in general, I mean, and I always say, maybe I'm naive, but part of what's excited me about the field of neurotheology is that people seem to be able to come at it from a lot of different perspectives. And I've enjoyed giving talks at atheist groups. I've enjoyed giving talks at churches and synagogues. I've enjoyed giving talks to psychiatrists and psychologists and medical specialists. So, you know, it seems that everybody kind of can find something of value to them. And that to me is also important, that we all kind of— we have to reach to where people are to start and then kind of bring them in and get them to ask the questions and then let it go from there and let them explore it on their own.

Well, I love the fact that this was previously an area that was kind of avoided to ask the questions about, right? It's— we couldn't mix it in. A lot of my family background are medical doctors and clinical psychiatrists, um, and keeping religion was outside of your academic or professional world. So what is the most exciting part for you about being a researcher, doctor, and scientist, um, that you found as you've been going through the studies from day one and maybe even till now?

Well, you know, there's a couple of ways of answering that. I mean, to me, without sounding overly grandiose, you know, whenever we do a new study, it's a little bit like walking on the moon for the first time. I mean, you know, when we did our first study of meditation, when we do our first study of of prayer. We did a study of speaking in tongues, which is a Pentecostal Christian practice. We have a new study that we're going to be launching looking at a different kind of meditation practice. So you never fully know what you're going to see. And that to me is always sort of the fun of exploration, of seeing something that no one else has ever figured out before, ever looked at before. On the other hand, I think that part of what has been very gratifying is that we, meaning myself and my late mentor, this doctor named Eugene De Quille, had developed some models about the areas of our brain that we think are involved in these kinds of experiences and these practices. So it's always very rewarding when we do the next level of research and we have our hypothesis, which is based on what we had done before. Before, and we get something that looks similar, that we get some justification for that. It's also always exciting when you find something that's a little different and a little new and pushes the models and pushes your hypotheses to the next level, to the next generation of ideas. That's always been very important. Perhaps the last statement to make that, to me, I guess, has always been one of my take-home messages of everything that I do is we've studied 400, 500 people now and looked at all different kinds of practices from all different traditions. To me, one of the most important things that I've learned is to have this very healthy respect for every person's beliefs and every person's ideas about the world, about God, for or against, that basically, Everyone's brain is trying to understand the world, and it's not a surprise then that people come to different viewpoints. I think this research tries to help us understand that a little bit more. And again, idealistically, what I hope neurotheology helps people to see is the value of every person's beliefs, and also the acknowledgement that each person's beliefs have a great deal of value and meaning to that person. And so, we need to be respectful of that and treat each other with a level of compassion and empathy, understanding that we're all just kind of— all of our brains are trying to do the best they can at figuring out what's going on around us.

It's an interesting note that that last section that you just shared very much ties into the 12-step, right, Alcohol Anonymous and rehab world of the God of our understanding or the God of your understanding. So, right, they very much talk about It's not this monolithic God that you have to accept, but it's the God that you've created in your mind that will work for you in order to have this spiritual and personal transformation. So, and I know reading your books and watching some of the— seeing you in the documentaries and watching a lot of the video clips, a lot of the things, like you said, the speaking in tongues from the Pentecostal or the meditation, I wonder if a lot of people out there are afraid to look at this because they hear neurology and that completely overwhelms them. With this understanding of like having to know the left and right brain and all these different technical terms and how they work. And I know in, I think in one of your books, you have like a quick page and a half synopsis, right, of neurology in a nutshell type of thing. So for the listeners who have not yet read your books, or is there, can you give us a little bit of that, of where in our brain show up, how that works, and how that influences. And then afterwards, if you want to tie that into some of the studies of how that played out with the results.

Sure. So, you know, one of the other big things that I have learned is that, you know, there isn't just one part of our brain that is the spiritual part, that many different parts of our brain become involved. And to me, it's not a surprise considering the incredible richness and diversity of of different religious and spiritual phenomena. So, when it comes to sort of a simplification of what's going on in the brain, we talk a lot about the different parts of our brain, and there's many different parts of our brain that become involved. And so, for example, it wouldn't be a surprise, I think, to people that there are emotional areas of our brain, a part of our brain called the limbic system, and there's different structures in there, like the hippocampus and the amygdala, that that help us to feel our emotions. So when you are now feeling an emotion in the context of a religious or spiritual system, if you feel joy, if you feel awe, if you feel love, you know, whatever that particular feeling may be, there's something that's going on in the emotional centers of our brain when we feel that. On the other hand, when you start reading a sacred text like the Bible, You're using your language areas, you're using your abstract thought areas, and we have different ways of looking. We have an area of our brain, for example, that I refer to as the binary function, which basically sets aside opposites that we can think about. And of course, in the context of religious and spiritual ideas, there are lots of important opposites like right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark. God and human beings. So these different opposites are demonstrated to us, and then our brain makes some sense out of that, and then we utilize that as part of the ways in which we think about the world, and part of the ways in which we think about our religious and spiritual beliefs. Another area of our brain that has been partic— we think has been particularly involved in spiritual experiences is the parietal lobe, and this is in the back of the brain. There is a— this area normally takes our sensory information and helps us to create our sense of self. And so, when it turns on, we have a clear view of what our self is like. What we have found in a lot of our studies of meditation and prayer practices is that this area actually starts to quiet down. So, what's going on if it quiets down? Well, we lose our sense of self, we lose the boundaries between ourselves and the world, between objects in the world and each other, and people have this kind of classic experience of a feeling of no self, or a sense of oneness, a sense of unity with God, with the universe, and so this is a very fundamentally important part of our brain that has to do with that particular part of the experience. But then, again, it gets really complicated, and so that's part of what makes it fun for me as a neuroscientist. But what I really try to encourage people to realize is that they don't necessarily need to know all of that neuroscience to derive some understanding about what's going on, and that there's something happening in the brain, and that we can observe that by using these brain scans.

So the benefits of practicing something, even without fully understanding it, will still have an effect on the neurology and on the emotions?

Well, absolutely. Obviously, part of what is fun to be able to talk to people about is, okay, you're doing this kind of prayer practice, you're doing— religions started thousands of years ago and were remarkably good at understanding how our brain works, even though they obviously didn't understand how our brain works, but they tapped into those processes. They tapped into our emotions, they tapped into how our brain responds to various rhythms and rituals through music and body motions and things like that. So, these are the things that have developed through the process of various religious and spiritual traditions and make use of these different biological processes. Here we come now with our brain scans and being able to say, "Oh, okay, when you do this kind of practice, these are the things that are going on inside of your brain. This is why you feel connected to God. This is why you feel love. This is why you feel calmer. This is why you feel less stress." Now, again, when I say this is why that does it, from a biological perspective. So, for people who are deeply religious, it's all part of that process. That's how God has that interaction through us. For those people who are not religious, then it's just the biology of the brain, but ultimately it does help us to understand what those relationships are and how these things actually seem to work within us. So, there's really a lot of value in being able to explore what is going on. And one of the most recent book I wrote called The Rabbi's Brain was designed to look at Judaism in particular. There again, we're trying to look at the different ideas, the beliefs, the practices, the rituals, and how they are taking advantage of these different brain processes, and where are the similarities and the differences between what people of the Jewish tradition will do versus ultimately people who are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and so forth. There's some wonderful opportunities to see where the similarities and the differences are.

That's incredible. So one of the things that I remember reading in one of your books was about the person who came in with, I believe it was like high blood pressure and really stressed out, and you put them on a 20-minute meditation protocol and you taught them a few different things that had to do with exactly what you're saying, right? There was a mantra chant, there was some movement, and there was some vocal, right, as well. Right. Can you walk us through that? And what were you comparing his results to? Because I know there was a baseline that you had based on people who were meditating for a significant period of time, correct?

Mm-hmm. So yeah, so all of our studies are a little bit different. Some are more specifically focused on seeing what's happening in the moment of the practice. Some of the more recent studies, as you mentioned, are looking at that longitudinal effect over time. And the study that I believe you're talking about looked at a particular practice called Akirtan Kriya meditation, which is a mantra-based practice where you repeat certain phrases and you move your fingers to them, and you do it for about 12 minutes a day. And we did find that not only were there significant changes in the way the person's brain was functioning, even at rest, not while they were doing the practice, but even at rest, that this was associated also with changes in their memory. There were improvements in their memory, reductions in their levels of stress. And as you mentioned, also other studies have looked at these practices in terms of helping to reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and so forth. And so, these can be part of a program that people can turn to, to try to help them with a variety of different, both mental and physical health problems. Now, there's really important caveats to that. One is that you have to be doing something that you feel good about, and that is consistent with the way in which you believe. So I did a research study showing that doing the rosary reduces anxiety. I would not go to an Orthodox Jew and say, "You know, you really should be doing the rosary because it'll reduce your anxiety levels." They have to do prayers that have meaning to them. And so, part of it is finding ideas, finding practices and approaches that are consistent with your own tradition, your own beliefs, things that resonate with who you are. But if you are able to engage a particular practice, and some are much even more secularized, like the mindfulness program that has gotten a lot of attention these days, that can be a wonderful program for the right person. But every practice helps in various ways, every practice has been shown to be beneficial. But it has to be something that you feel comfortable with and has sort of personal value to you, is consistent with the ways in which you think about yourself and the ways in which you think about the world, consistent with your goals. Some people may want to meditate just to reduce their stress, and that's great. There are practices that will help you with that. Some people want to meditate to reduce pain, and some people want to meditate to achieve enlightenment. So, depending on what you want to do and depending on what your goals are, different practices have different abilities and they all can be beneficial in the right context for the right person. It's a matter of trying to go through that exploration process, which can sometimes be frustrating and challenging, but ultimately can yield some wonderful results when you find the right things.

Are you finding any consistencies outside of maybe the prayer or the meditation aspect of religion? So, let's say certain ritualistic base. You just mentioned the rosary, so I know that there's a non-conscious tactile-ness for Jews when they're praying to be swaying back and forth, which has become something that kind of becomes emotional muscle memory. But also, as you were talking about the rosary, what first came to my mind is anybody who wears the prayer shawl, the tallit or the tzitzit, the fringes, is that I've noticed a lot throughout the years that they're running their fingers through it, or there's actually a Kabbalistic and mystical tradition of counting the knots in the fringes, which is symbolic of the numbers of, right, the different letters of God and all those different things.

Right.

So are you finding different similarities even though the practice might be different, but things that are kind of— you're saying like in this religion, this religion, this religion, they're doing the same thing. They might be doing it in a different different ritual, but the rituals are very similar to each other.

Well, exactly. I mean, to some degree, we're just scratching the surface in neurotheology. We have a lot of research to go, and doing some kind of comparison of practices that use your fingers or touch certain things across traditions would be very exciting to do. We don't have that data yet, but you're absolutely right. Part of what we also have looked at, another study that we looked at, which was very interesting and relates a little bit to what you're talking about, is how various symbols have an impact on us. And so, whether you're talking about the knots on the garments that people wear, the beads of the rosary, the image of the Star of David, the image of the cross. So, all of these different symbols light up the brain. When we see a symbol that has meaning to us, it changes the way our brain works. It turns on these emotional centers of our brain that tell us that this is something important that we need to pay attention to. And then, of course, it's tied back to something. So, the Star of David is tied back to King David and the meaning, and then the Bible, and so forth. The cross, obviously, for the Christian is tied back to Jesus dying on the cross for our sin. So there's the symbol, there's the impact of the symbol on us, but then there is, as you said, how it ties us back to whatever beliefs or ideas are part of that tradition. So part of what all of us need to think about are what are the things that do have meaning to us? Ideas, certain concepts, certain symbols that work for us within a given tradition, and whether they are— how similar or different are they to what's going on in other traditions. I mean, obviously there are just, you know, both. There are certain distinctions and there are certain similarities across them depending on what exactly you are looking at. But, you know, certainly there are some very global similarities in terms of connecting to God, understanding, you know, the oneness of God, certainly for the monotheistic traditions, the importance of making that kind of a connection, the importance of developing a system of morals and beliefs that guide a person's life. You know, exactly how that works and exactly which ideas become kind of the central feature of a given tradition can vary, but even there, again, you know, Is there something about certain ideas, certain concepts that resonate with us as human beings? You talk about sort of the Golden Rule, you know, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I mean, why does that make sense to us? What parts of our brain light up? And what about people who it doesn't make sense to? What's going on in the brain of people who really wind up taking religious or spiritual beliefs in a very kind of negative way, an us versus them mentality, kill the infidel type of mentality. Obviously, people have gone to the ISIS website and say, "That sounds like a great idea." What's going on in their brain, which is different than somebody else who goes to that same information and says, "This is terrible. I can't do this." Of course, again, we see this in many different ways. People who are atheists look at the Bible and say, you know, how could anybody believe this? And people who are devout religious individuals say, look at the Bible and say, how can anybody not believe it? Absolutely.

And it's funny, I remember when I first went to Israel, 2 years after high school, I spent learning in yeshiva over there, and there was a few characters that would live in the Jerusalem area. And there was one guy particularly, particularly who, who kind of thought that he was King David. From the Bible times.

And right, I think I know that person, actually. Oh yeah, there was somebody who came to visit me one time claiming to be King David.

So if he lived in Jerusalem at a certain point in his life, that might have been him. So, but besides the people that are having obviously some significant mental health challenges, where in the mental health space have you found that there's this influence that meditation, chanting, prayer, whether it's someone's looking at it from a religious experience, or just from a, like you said, a spiritual side, and I don't always equate religion and spirituality. My belief is that, right, if someone is religious, I'm hoping that there's a spiritual twist to it. But you don't need religion to be spiritual. Where have you seen specifically from the mental health side, the benefits? Because I know you've talked about a decrease in heart rate and decrease in stress. Has this been tested, or has there been anybody who's come in like, "Yes, I have anxiety and panic on this level," or, "I have depression on this level," and you've seen this have a drastic result in the practice?

Yeah, so the whole field of study of looking at different— at the relationship between mental health and religion is quite fascinating and is a very important part of neurotheology for several reasons, and you kind of touched on them, so one aspect is mental disorders that lead people to unusual religious beliefs. So when somebody believes they are the Messiah, when somebody believes they are King David, what's going on in their brain? Why was there something going on? Is it schizophrenia? Is it temporal lobe epilepsy? I mean, there's a variety of different neurological and psychological conditions that have been associated with these unusual religious or spiritual beliefs. And I think trying to understand that could be very helpful for us in terms of understanding the overall relationship between our brain and our religious and spiritual selves. On the other hand, then there's the flip side of that, which is how do we make this practical? This is sort of the applied neurotheology piece, which is can we turn to religious and spiritual practices or beliefs as a way of helping people through various mental disorders. And there's a very rich literature on this. The whole psychology of religion has focused a lot on that. And again, in general, the results have been very positive. Practices like meditation and prayer have been shown in a variety of patient populations to be very effective at reducing symptoms. That includes depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. Attention deficit disorder, so there's a lot of circumstances in which it can be beneficial. There's, I guess, the other, and what we even mentioned earlier, addictions as well. People who go to Alcoholics Anonymous or dealing with drug addiction, sometimes having that spiritual peace can be very valuable. Some people have even taken this a step further where they integrate more traditional psychological approaches to therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, and infuse that with various religious and spiritual ideas and concepts. So, it's kind of a combination of religious and spiritual approaches, as well as psychological ones, with the theory that, which, you know, I think seems to make some sense, is that a lot of times when people have depression, for example, they have some very negative attitudes or views about God, and turning to that religious perspective can be helpful in helping to bring them out of that depression. Now again, this has to be thought of carefully, and you would not work on an atheist using religious and spiritual perspectives very much, and you'd want to do things that are consistent with the given individual's spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs, but the data certainly suggests that there can be some very valuable synergy there. And again, it's still also important for us to recognize when there could be a negative side to this. And meditation sometimes can make people feel worse. Prayer can, if they feel, if somebody's praying and they feel that their prayers are not being answered, they might get more anxious. Things always have to be done with an eye on caution and thinking about how best to do it, but yes, all of this helps us to understand the nature of the relationship between the brain, the mind, our psyche, and our religious and spiritual selves.

This is a perfect tie-in to the next part of our conversation, which is now bringing in all of the neuro-emotional technique side. If we're talking about trauma, right? Specifically, even in the world of what you were just sharing, if people have had a negative result or a negative experience growing up in a synagogue and church and Hebrew school and Sunday school, whatever it may be, that can create longstanding traumas that can limit their connection to other people, connection to spirituality, connection to themselves. So trauma, as we know, could even include spiritual and religious events. And I'm not talking about having someone willfully and purposely doing something to another person, but just their own I remember my dad telling me his Hebrew school experience in Scranton, Pennsylvania was the Hebrew school teacher with the ruler walking around, right? So we're talking about like 1950s, 1960s. So different, very parochial mindset of like learning. A lot of people in Catholic school, I'm sure, have this similar—

I was gonna say, it sounds like an ex-nun who started to become a Jew. Yeah, exactly.

So I know like there's, you know, and even though that didn't necessarily affect my father when it came to his global understanding, but there's always, That was a story that he told me. So clearly it stood out. And like many other people in the world, they could have— what I've played around with, with one of my mentors, Rabbi David Aaron, in the Old City of Jerusalem, is this God therapy. You know, the idea that we struggle with spiritual and religious experiences and connection to others because there's something bigger going on for us. And I know one of the people that we're both colleagues and friends with, Dr. Scott Walker, And when he created NET, one of the statements that he is— one of his top 10s is, I'm okay with God and God's okay with me. And using the neuro-emotional technique protocol to help clear out, even if it's not God, you know, it could be like that Calvin and Hobbes, like, well, I know someone's out to get me type of thing, right? So, so whatever that is outside of ourselves that the universe is working against us versus in our favor, we can use NET to help deal with those longstanding traumas. So, for you as someone who has been part of this NET community, first as an outsider, right, how did you first get connected with it? How did you hear about it? What pulled you into leading and facilitating the study, the brain study, with the NET studies that have been published in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship? And what have you seen and experienced from there?

Sure. Well, so part of how I got particularly involved in it is that, you know, our director, Dr. Monti, He had worked with Dr. Walker quite a bit prior to me ever coming into the picture, and was very much a part of the development of NET. So, when the time came to be able to do a research study, because of my background in the brain imaging, it was just a very natural fit for us to be able to connect with the NET community and with Scott Walker to to explore what the impact of that therapy would be. And I always do take a bit of a neutral stance on things because I feel like that's what I'm supposed to do as a good researcher. And so, you know, certainly did the same thing with the NET. That particular study looked at individuals who were, who had traumas related to a prior diagnosis of cancer, and whether it was the diagnosis or the therapy, they had some aspect of their of their treatment or of their dealing with cancer that led them to these traumas. And so, what we did was we would scan them initially, and then we would have them go through the NET program, and then scan them again. And part of that was to actually kind of have them relive those— the particularly, the most traumatic moment for them, and we would actually play back an audio of a script, so kind of, Remember when you were in the doctor's office and he came in and he said that the cancer was worse than they thought? Remember your feelings, blah, blah, blah. So, it kind of went from there. But, to me as an imaging person, the thing I was particularly intrigued by just right off the bat was that these people who were 8 or 9s out of 10 in terms of the distress that they felt initially, After they had the NET program, they came back and still playing the same exact script for them, were now 1s and 2s. And they were really completely different than what I had anticipated. I was very impressed that after just a relatively short period of time of a month or so, maybe 4 or 5 sessions of the NET, that they had a very dramatic just clinical picture of what was going on. And of course, they related that they felt a lot different. And then we saw the changes going on in the brain so that the brain was no longer reacting to that traumatic memory in the same kind of way. The areas, the emotional centers of our brain that respond to trauma were no longer responding. And so, that to me was very impressive. And of course, part of what we also saw was that there were more permanent changes in how the brain was responding to these kinds of traumatic memories. So it seemed to be able to influence the way the person was operating in a, in a general way, which then had a very specific effect on the trauma itself and allowed them to be able to manage it in a completely different way. So it was very exciting to see, you know, something that, uh, that brief have a very significant effect both on how they were functioning clinically as well as what they were doing at what's going on in their brain.

And if I remember correctly, you did not get your first NET treatment until last year. Is that correct?

That's probably true.

So was that intentional that you wanted to do it after the study? Because I know a year ago at the conference, they spent a day, a bunch of practitioners spent a day at Jefferson and working with different people and—

Right. Yes, I mean, to a certain extent, you know, I As with so many of the studies that I've done, I mentioned we've scanned, I don't know, 400 or 500 people. A lot of times, it's about access, it's about a little bit of luck, finding the right population, the right group, the right people who are interested. I certainly get to know about a lot of the different practices. I often will try them just so that I have a sense as to what they are about and what they are like. It's always a little bit better, I think, for me to do it after the fact. And even going forward, I mean, I'm hoping that we will do more studies looking at NET, but for me, I try to take that neutral stance. I'm curious to see what's going to happen, and if it has a really terrific effect, fantastic. I feel mostly good because in my heart of hearts, I just want to help people. And so, if this helps them, that's great. On the other hand, and I always stress this, I'm sure Scott Walker would say the same thing, as would many of the people who I've worked with, you don't know what you're going to see until you see it. So while I would love to say, "Yes, we're going to see something fantastic," I don't know until we do. But we've been fortunate. We've had some wonderful studies, and we've been able to see some really exciting results from a lot of the different work that that we've done, and NET was no exception.

So what would you say is the most important factor for a protocol like this that didn't come out of what the average world would call mainstream medicine, right? Dr. Walker's a chiropractor and he's been using this modality for over 35 years. And his whole purpose of doing this is that he knew that there was something there, something deeper going on, especially with all of our practitioners all around the world. There's thousands of NET practitioners and certified NET practitioners. Why is it so important, from your perspective, that this became clinically validated and proven compared to what else might be out there, even though other things could help, but this specifically for NET?

Well, again, I think it's all— when there's something that is working and is helpful to people, the more information and data that you have on that, the better you are. With a lot of the things that we look at in integrative medicine, They're not typical of the traditional approaches that people take, and the more data we can provide, when you can say, "Here's the brain scan. This is a person before and after by doing this, by doing NET," then hopefully, this is something that will be able to convince the larger psychological and psychiatric community of the value of this particular approach. Hopefully, again, these were just the initial studies. We will definitely need more. In the medical world, you're not really happy until you get that large randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial kind of thing. But if it continues to hold and we can continue to develop this base of knowledge about it, then that is going to be something that's going to be extremely helpful for everyone, and it helps to show the practitioners that what they're doing has a value to it. It helps to demonstrate the value to the patients who might be coming in, and hopefully, most importantly, is to convince the larger community of the value of the different things that we're looking at. So I think with NET, you know, again, as a bit of an outsider looking in, I mean, anytime you have a therapeutic program that can work what seems to be very, very well over a very short period of time, 4 or 5 weeks kind of thing, that's remarkable. I mean, I think that that's really very exciting, and I'd certainly much rather have people try that as a first attempt at managing these kinds of problems than using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications and all these other things that can have a lot of other problematic side effects. To have something non-pharmacological and relatively quick be something that seems to have a pretty profound effect, both in terms of how people feel clinically, as well as how their brain itself is responding, that's very exciting. And hopefully that's what this work has done. And hopefully it will, as we move on to the next stages, we'll get even more data and larger quantities of data. I mean, this is a very exciting study, but it was a small study. You know, we needed, hundreds of people, and if we can show that same kind of an effect in a larger scale-up, then that will become extremely exciting.

All of that really ties into how I started actually down this rabbit hole of the mind-body healing, even though I was always interested in it. But in 2010-ish, I was going through a significant life crisis, and I started having major, major panic attacks out of the blue, uncontrollable. Pretty much at any point in the day, pre-sessions, post-sessions, at home, and I tried everything. I tried acupuncture, which I was already doing consistently, and it didn't tap into solving it. I had meditation, yoga, running, like I did everything, even tried pharmaceuticals from a psychiatrist. Nothing was really making a dent, and a friend of mine suggested going to a colleague here in Fort Lauderdale. And within 2 to 3 sessions, whatever that thought was that was triggering me to go into a full fight or flight, literally, I can describe it as there was like Vaseline on my brain and the thought kind of hit my brain and slid off. And I never experienced anything like that. And it was so crazy that within a month from that point, I jumped on, I guess there was an N.E.T. basic training in Orlando a month later. And that was it. So that was X amount of years ago. And it's been completely a game-changing practice for me and my therapy practice with coaching, with my family and friends. Everybody kind of jokes around. It's like, "Oh, have you met Jason? Hold your arm up." So to the point where that's like now my calling card of a thing. So NET has really been such a game changer for me as a person, as a practitioner, as a way I see the world. And I want to thank you for contributing to that and helping us bring it out to the world from that level. So, to tie this all together, what are you working on presently? What are you hoping to tackle in the future?

Well, as I mentioned, one of the most recent books that we just did was called The Rabbi's Brain and looked at Judaism from the neurotheology perspective. But that to me is just, again, kind of an initial step. Every tradition, I think, warrants being able to be explored from this neurotheological perspective, and so I'm hoping that we will, on kind of a broad level, be able to apply neurotheology to all the different traditions. We continue to do research studies looking at different types of meditation and prayer-based, inner, very spiritual practices, and so we want to keep that going. We started to with our very first study, looking at some of the neurotransmitters, so neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, and the impact of these practices on those. Those physiological processes in the brain. And so there's a lot of fascinating directions to take all of this. Another part of what we've started to do more and more is to explore more of the phenomenal elements of these experiences by using surveys. So for example, in the Rabbi's Brain book, we have a survey of rabbis. In some of my previous books, we actually have surveys of just the general population and the spiritual experiences that they have. So, you know, there's just so many ways of asking questions and trying to get at how spirituality and religion has an impact on each person, as well as on the larger populations. And of course, in the back of all of this is me still trying to figure out the nature of reality. So, I always say, "If I ever figure it out, I will let everyone know," but I'm still working on it. All of this, in many ways, neurotheology is my kind of combined scientific and spiritual path, and I'm not really sure where it all ends, but I'm going to keep exploring, and hopefully other people will find value in some of the things that we find, and hopefully it will continued to lead us down a path of deeper understanding of who we are as human beings and how we are supposed to interact with the world around us.

It's amazing. Do you feel like you're further down, closer to the end zone than you were when you started?

I'm further than I was, but I'm not sure how much closer I am. I'm further from the beginning, but I'm not sure if I'm closer to the end yet.

Is that the radical non-attachment side?

Something like that, yes. But, um, no, I, I feel like, you know, there, there's always things that I learn. Um, and there's always things that, you know, again, hopefully, you know, I can bring this kind of information in different ways to people, uh, whether it helps them to deal with a problem like a post-traumatic stress disorder, whether it helps them to understand their religious and spiritual beliefs or a certain experience that they had. There's value that everyone can gain from this data and this information. Hopefully, in the end, hopefully it benefits people, and hopefully, in some ways, it brings people together. Again, to me, one of the most important idealistic pieces to this is a recognition of the value of each person's belief. I always like to say, we're sort of inside of our brain, and we're looking out at the world. Somehow, we think we understand the universe around us, which is essentially infinite. We have access to about that much of it, and yet, we seem to feel like we've figured it all out. Part of this is to say, be a little cautious about that and maybe respect the fact that other people are working hard on it too and may come to different conclusions than you. It doesn't make them a good or bad person. The nature of our brains and the nature of the universe.

I love it. So my final question for you, which is the way I titled this is it's the question on one foot. So for a person who studies religion and spirituality, this is a perfect question for you. So, right, the old story of like, can you teach me, Rabbi Akiva, can you teach me the entire Bible while standing on one foot? So if you were able to share with the listeners out there, about what would help them the most as they try to figure out their purpose and their passion while standing on one foot, which— and what that means is like in 2 minutes or less, what would you share? No pressure.

Well, again, I mean, I think to me, part of what people need to realize is the We are extraordinarily finite, we are extraordinarily limited in what our brains can do, even though it is quite extraordinary what our brain can do. And with that in mind, to the extent that each one of us has to do our best to explore the world around us, to keep asking questions, to keep exploring things in the ways that we can, and to recognize that each one of us is, is kind of in that same boat. We're using the cognitive and the emotional and the experiential parts of our brain. Each time we hear something, read something, think something, that affects the reality that our brain is helping us to understand. And that, you know, until we know something for certain, which is going to be pretty unlikely, I think, given the nature of the problem. We have to kind of do our best to help each other figure out the answers to these questions and find ways of being open and understanding, empathic and compassionate to others, and hopefully to use the information that we have to better ourselves and better the people around us. But I guess that's the most important thing for somebody to learn about neurotheology at the moment, other than We'll keep doing brain scans and keep trying to figure out what's going on inside of us, but people need to realize that there are some fascinating things that go on inside of each one of us. And again, it's a combination of just so many factors, our genetics, our environment, our parents, the people we're with, our experiences, illnesses that we've had, and all of that kind of comes together to give us each one of us our own perspective of reality, but there's about 7 billion views of reality right now, so, and climbing.

Well, I think my takeaway from what you just shared is that with all of these modalities that are out there, there's going to be a resource for everybody that fits to them. So, if you're out there and you're listening and you're going through anything that you consider a stressor, the first place to look is, right, any of the resources that Dr. Neuberg talks about in any of his books, and you can find them all over YouTube. There's some really, really great videos out there. You can look him up on IMDb and see his list of documentaries that he's been interviewed in. But there's so many different things, whether it's meditation, yoga, working out, spirituality, NET, which of course I'm going to plug nonstop every time I'm on the show. Please don't hesitate to find something. And mentors also. I know that's— that was an important thing for you in this.

Yes.

In this field and one of the things that I—

Essential.

Yeah, essential, right? And I stress that over and over again. I joke that this podcast, as much as it's me wanting to share information with the world of what I typically talk about with my clients, both my therapy and coaching clients, but it's also a way for me to get in front of the people who have influenced me. And then I can still reuse that information and trickle it down to my clients. But now I'm able to get it out to the masses more with this platform. Multiple ways out there for all of us to tap into this. So, if people wanted to find you, right, your books are available all over the internet, Amazon, we'll plug some links in the show notes. Your website has some really cool articles. So, what's the address for that?

Yeah. So, that's just my name, AndrewNewberg, N-E-W-B-E-R-G.com. And as you said, we have links to some of the research articles if people want to dive in deeper. Links to different podcasts, and audio programs, and video programs, as well as the books. And to pick up on what you said, again, a really fundamental— fundamentally important point is that there's not a one-size-fits-all, and everybody has to kind of find their own journey, even though we're in many ways all on the same one. You know, how we get there is going to be a little bit different, and I think people need to be okay with themselves too. Sometimes they go, "Oh well, that person did mindfulness and it worked great for them. Why isn't it working for me?" And that's because it doesn't. Nothing works for everyone. And so, it's always important for everyone to be patient with themselves and to be compassionate and forgiving of themselves as well.

And one of the things that I want to additionally plug, especially since you just said that, is if you're thinking that a book about neuroscience and studying the brain and understanding what happens to your brain is going to be really overwhelming, really scary. The books that I've read and from the way that you've written the books are so easy to read and they're so fluid and they're fun that even I, who have a background in your work and understanding this from a therapist and from— and I'm not an academic, like I barely graduated high school, which my listeners know from my first episode where I graduated with a 1.8 GPA from high school. So all of this stuff used to intimidate me. The books are so easily written that you'll find yourself understanding it in a very simple and powerful way that you can take it and apply it and then jump into. So I wanted to make sure that everybody out there was listening, even though Dr. Newberg's doing some really amazing stuff, that it's so accessible to all of us. And I really want to thank you for making that happen.

Well, thank you. That's important to me too. It's important that everybody has an opportunity opportunity. I never want people to feel like, "Oh, well, I'm not smart enough to figure this out." There's information out there that everyone can find a value.

Which ties me, and we'll tie it up with this story of the person who went to the guru and said, "I want to solve all my problems." And the guru says, "Well, I want you to meditate for 10 to 15 minutes a day." And the person's thinking about it and he goes back to the guru, he goes, "I thought about it. I just don't have the time to do that." And then the guru looks back at him and goes, "Actually, the truth is you don't not have the time to meditate 10 to 12 minutes a day." So if you think out there you don't have the time to do this, you don't have the time to search, you don't have the time to ask, the resources are out there. We're out here. You can hit me up on all my social media. Dr. Newberg is pretty good with answering emails. There's so many wonderful resources out there. Find an NET practitioner near you. And we really hope that this episode brought you tons and tons of value. So Dr. Newberg, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So thank you very much. It's a pleasure. A lot of fun.

Thanks. Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life Podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook @JasonWasserLMFT 🎗️.