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

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 come 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, 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, 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 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? 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. 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 really. If you're not Muslim and you walk in there, you might feel something relatively mild. Oh, that. You know, it 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 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? You know, where would you. You have self versus other on the far left side. That's where, you know, I'm here 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 course quiz at the end of my presentation. So here's our brain. Okay? So I'm not sure which way. I can't see it here. Okay. So I'd be facing this way. It's a side view of the brain. Okay. 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 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. But the brain also operates as an. The brain also operates as an integrated whole. My apologies. Hang on. Do go backwards. There we go. 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. There's the frontal lobe, which is towards the front of the brain, right behind the forehead on this side of the. Let's see if I can give my pointer a little chance there. Yeah, there we go. So the frontal lobe is along the very front part of the brain here. 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? 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. Oh, I have this job I have to do a week and a half from now. So the frontal lobe is very important, 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 emotional 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, as you can see right in this area here. I don't want to kill myself right in this area here. Okay, 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 going to 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 and 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, you know, how you think about things and emotions are how you feel about things. But, you know, 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 going to 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 reemphasize 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 what. 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, you know, go to the great textbooks and read about Buddha's experience, read about, you know, 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, you know, 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 know, you said you felt this and your frontal lobe turned on. Well, that's interesting. You know, 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. The first thing that I learned. Wait, hang on. Sorry. Want to go back? I don't know where I'm pointing. I'm sorry. I'm lasering some people. Sorry about that. I hope I didn't kill anybody there. I hope I didn't elicit any spiritual experiences. So 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 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 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 in 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. Okay, 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 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 lobe 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 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. 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 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 know that. 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 going to 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 the. 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. So 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. 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. You know, where's this camera, where are you sitting and so forth. So if that shuts down I begin to look.