Neurotheology: The Coexistence Of Science & Spiritual Experiences with Dr. Andrew Newberg

A lot of the flow states occur around sympathetic nervous system activation, highly energetic, highly arousing. That's the fight or flight response. Well, that's supposed to be a short-lived response. I mean, it's supposed to get you out of there. It's supposed to protect you in the moment, but you ideally are not in that state for a super long period of time, in large part because it's utilizing your energy resources up way too fast.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your tallest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. We're joined today by Dr. Andrew Newberg. Dr. Andrew Newberg is the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health, and he's also a physician at Jefferson University Hospital. He is Board certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine and is the author of a number of incredible books, including How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain. And Andrew's research focuses on how brain function is associated with various mental states, in particular religious and mystical experiences, which obviously relates to the peak states that we focus on here at Flow Research Collective. And his research has included brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals, and trance states. States, as well as surveys of people's spiritual experiences and attitudes. And he has also evaluated the relationship between religious or spiritual phenomena and health and the effect of meditation on memory. Andrew has also used neuroimaging research projects to study aging and dementia, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, depression, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders. And I know Stephen, you and Andrew have had a long relationship by the sounds of it as well. So maybe Stephen, you could just kick us off by mentioning how both of you ever— you first ever connected and what your relationship has involved.

I've always said I'm not actually sure I have a career without Duncan Hoover. I always think of you as my first mentor, and I want to back up and—

thank you—

actually get there. You have to understand that when we talk about Andrew's work kind of looking at the neurobiology underneath so-called mystical experiences. He was so early to this idea and so early to bringing the tools of neural imaging to these harder, more philosophical questions. You did it at great considerable personal risk and expense. And you really did. And it was, you know, in the '90s when you first started doing this work, I always tell people now, we, you know, we have open conversations about consciousness and free flow. Back in the '90s, You couldn't even talk about emotions as a real thing, right? Like until Jaak Ponssepp does his work in 1996, you can't talk about emotions. They're not real. Consciousness doesn't really— until Christof Kotz does his work in the early 2000s, people don't start accepting that as real science. So you really were first. And when I was doing my very early research into flow, and this was when I was working with action adventure sport athletes, And they kept reporting so-called mystical experiences in flow. They would have out-of-body experiences. They would have so many of the stages of near-death experiences, profound trance states, all kinds of stuff. So Dr. Newberg had just done his first imaging studies on oneness with everything. What does it feel— why do we feel one with everything? And this is a very common flow experience. It's become one with the mountain. Surfers become one with the ocean. Distance runners become one with the terrain. It goes on and on and on. So I called up Dr. Newberg and I went, Meditation requires a lot of focus, but surfing requires a ton of focus. And we started there and I will say very patiently, I think over the better portion of 3 years, we sort of walked it back to, okay, we think the neurobiology is— there's enough similarity there that I felt comfortable writing West of Jesus. This was the foundational work in flow right around the time I was discovering that all these states I was looking at, or most of them, were called flow, right? They had been mystical experiences and they've bifurcated and gotten all these different titles, but flow seemed to be one consistent thing underneath it. As we'll hear, there's all kinds of neurobiological fine-tuning under each of these states and there's overlap and there's contrast and it's fascinating. It's also, I think, which brings us to today's conversation, then I'm going to shut up. I think this is the cutting edge of peak performance. Understanding that states, and not just stages of growth, but states of consciousness can impact performance is kind of, it's not a very new idea, right? Buddhists have been doing it for years, but it's an old idea now underpinned by neuroscience. And we're starting to get into the immense variety of things that we can produce and train up and work on. So that's where I think Dr. Neuberg really lends himself to the peak performance conversation.

Yeah. Well, thank you very much for that.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, exactly. Dr. Neuberger, what I would love to just kick off with is if you could talk a little bit to us about what neurotheology is. I've always thought of you and heard of you as the pioneer of that whole field of neurotheology, and the term itself, I think, spikes a ton of interest in people. So I'd love if you could break that down for us.

Well, I think the simplest definition of neurotheology is that it's a field of scholarship that seeks to understand the relationship or the link between our brain and our religious and spiritual selves. That's the basic definition. Then, but to take that a little bit further, which I think is important, is a couple of things. One is that neurotheology, for me at least, for me, for it to work as a term, it needs to be understood as a full two-way street. And what I mean by that is that it's not neuroscience looking at religion only. It is not just Buddhist and Hindu perspectives on consciousness telling us about science, but it is science and the spiritual sides of ourselves kind of looking together at these things and looking at each other and helping us to ultimately understand who we are as human beings. So to me, part of it is that we need to be kind of very, very open and very appreciative and respectful of both sides of what neurotheology is. The other aspect is that when we talk about those two sides, the neuro side and the theology side, It also has to be understood that those need to be kind of blown up in terms of being able to accommodate a lot of other aspects. So neuro typically refers to neuroscience or neuroimaging, but it can also include psychology. It can include anthropology. It can include health, psychological as well as physical health. So there's a lot of things that go into the neuro part of the neuro side of neurotheology. And then the theology, you know, theology is a very specific discipline. It's taking the foundational texts and ideas of a given tradition and trying to understand them and break them down, figure out what they mean and so forth. And we can certainly look at theology from a brain-related perspective, but that also needs to be expanded. It needs to include different experiences, flow-type experiences, mystical experiences, spiritual experiences, practices like meditation and prayer. It needs to include different aspects of human beliefs, rituals, you know, so all these different things that go into what religious and spiritual phenomena ultimately are. And if we kind of use those two basic ideas, the two-way street and a very broad perspective on it, I think as a term, you know, it works very well. I mean, we toyed with other possibilities, psychospirituality and biotheology and all that kind of stuff. For lack of, you know, no real good reason, neurotheology just seems to be the one that has stuck. And the first mention of the term actually goes back to a 19— I believe 1961 novel by Aldous Huxley called The Island. And he's talking about a futuristic society that does all these kind of, you know, newfangled things. And one of them is he refers to as neurotheology, but doesn't really define what it is. He just kind of mentions it, but, but from there, As Stephen was saying, over the last 25, 30 years, we've been able to really delve into it in a much greater way than we ever have before, especially bringing in the neuroimaging. But there's a lot of different pieces to it. And obviously, I'm sure we'll cover a bunch of them today.

One thing I want to— this is, in a sense, we've done a couple of partnerships with much more spiritually-minded organizations, Mindvalley, for example. A lot of the ideas floating around in those organizations still make me as a person usually uncomfortable. But the reason I pursued these partnerships is exactly what you said, because both looking at yourself, looking at the phenomenal work that Richie Davidson has done, and Madison and other people, it is the collaboration from both sides together that really have— without that collaboration, without the— just to use Davidson, for example, I always think that without the Dalai Lama's input into that conversation, it would have taken us 25 years to bother looking at compassion-inducing meditation. It's just not a Western thing that people are going to be like, oh yeah, we should study this first. But the Dalai Lama was so insistent that this was at the center of it and you had to start there. And we would have never started there. And as a result, we have a new understanding of how empathy works in the brain. We have a new understanding of how perspective-taking works. And we have a new understanding of kind of the social impact of meditation like we've never had before. And that's amazing. That's totally out of the collaboration, would have never happened had we pursued these solitarily. So I just had to add that in because your emphasis on this has sort of driven our research a little bit and some of our partnerships.

Right. Well, and again, part of what I think also makes neurotheology exciting as a field is the need for input from so many different directions. And so We need the input from the neuroscientists. We need the input from the theologians. We need the input from the practitioners, the people who are doing these things. And I think the other thing which often gets kind of overlooked is that we need the information from everybody. One of the things we talk about a lot is, you know, if you're going to study spirituality, I mean, you could— I could read the Hindu texts. I could read the Buddhist texts. I could study the life of Buddha. But another approach is to just ask people. What do they experience when they feel the things that they do? And I think that's really a testament to a lot of the work that you guys have done, because you're looking at the kind of experiences that lots of people can have. And so that to me is fundamental to this.

It was this conversation early on, 'cause I was having conversations a lot when you and I were getting to know each other. I was also getting to know Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer. And now 25 years later, I now know Laird is incredibly precise in his speech, and he will name the thing exactly as it is. But back then, he would say things like, "I was out surfing and I felt one with the wave," and I thought, "Oh, he's using this new age hippie, not like," I couldn't wrap my head around the language. And it was through conversations with you where I started to realize that he wasn't being metaphorical, he was being literal. And if I actually took him at his word and believed him, —right? I could actually get to the biology. I had to start believing my interview subjects about their experiences, which is a really— as a science guy, and Edo is nodding with this— that's a hard step to take, right? I don't believe you understand your inner subjective experience. I'm a professional.

I've had training. You are 100% right. I mean, I, you know, I've listened to so many people give me descriptions which, you know, from a purely scientific perspective are very challenging. But oftentimes people ask me towards the end of the interview, what have you learned from all this? So we'll start with that. But what I've learned is just what you just mentioned, which is that a very healthy respect and compassion and understanding for each person's individual experiences of these things, that we have to take them very seriously. We have to do our best to understand them and what they mean and how they affect the person. And to the extent that we can even get the narrative descriptions, as you're talking about with like with Laird or something like that, you know exactly what they're saying and how they're saying it. That's incredibly powerful stuff for helping us to understand what these experiences are like. And then ultimately tying it back into what's going on in the brain itself.

I think oftentimes an aversion that folks who are in more of the spiritual communities can have to the science guys, Stephen, is that they I don't think that you both, or folks like you, are attempting to reduce the experience down to something that's happening in the brain, but you're just saying that, you know, there is the experience and there is this thing in the brain. It's not that the experience is not its own thing.

Could you talk a little bit about how you think about that?

Yeah, and that goes back a little bit to what I was saying about the two-way street. I mean, it is— while there are times where it can sound reductionistic because we're okay, this is what's going on in the amygdala, and this is what's happening in the frontal lobes, or something like that. We do have to be very cautious about exactly where the causal arrow is with regard to these experiences. What are the different aspects of them? It really is an opportunity to understand all the facets of these experiences. And even if somebody has a mystical experience where they perceive the universe in a completely different way and they have a sense that there's a universal consciousness or there's a God, I can't prove that there is or isn't a God based on what I'm doing. But I can tell you what's going on in the brain of the person who has of experience. And if somebody feels connected to God, if somebody feels connected to universal consciousness, what are the changes that are going on in the brain? It doesn't eliminate the other part of the conversation. It doesn't eliminate that spiritual side, that experiential side. But it adds something that we've never had an opportunity to add before. And it also then enriches the discussion about, well, so what exactly is that experience? And because there is a little bit of, well, Is it just a brain phenomenon? I mean, these are valid questions that need to be carefully considered. But as we go through it, if we're careful, we don't just jump to these kind of answers. Oh, well, it's just that or it's just this, that we realize that there really are very complex, multidimensional aspects to these experiences. You also—

one of the things when you follow, you take people and their experiences at their word, you find such subtle— I'll give you a weird example, but it's one I think of very often. There's a spectrum of trance experiences. Okay, the biggest mystery in flow, in my opinion, is the characteristic known as the sense of control, right? A feeling of I can control things that are beyond my normal control, right? It's that sense of credible mastery. In the trance literature, there's two sides to that coin. There are trances where you're in control of your actions And then there's a whole other side, possession states, speaking in tongues, stuff that Neuberger has looked very much at, that for a really long time, people dismissed and said, "Oh, this is so crazy. There's no—" But if you look at it from a flow question, well, in one experience, you have total control and mastery over your situation. I'm in flow, whatever challenge you put in front of me, I got it, right? Versus I'm in a trance state, I'm in a possession state where something else feels like it's controlling me. And so if you take those experiences seriously, as Dr. Neuberger— first of all, it teaches you something about how does the brain create this sense of control that we all feel? And when we give it up for certain experiences, is there something really sacred in those experiences, right? You hear much more spiritual language attached to experiences where we I've been taken over than when we're in total control. If you take that seriously, then you'd have to say, well, interesting, there's some neurobiology there that we don't quite understand. And it seems somewhat related to the reward system, right? People like this better. Why is that? What can that teach us about motivation in general? All those questions are worth addressing from a science side. Get there unless you're really literally going deep with people into experiences that you have to take their experience, at least what I've learned from Dr. Neuberg, is you have to take it very, very literally until proven differently. It's like in court, right? You're truthful until proven different, right?

Right. Well, it's difficult to argue with an experience. Someone is having the experience. It's tough to say, you know. Very nice.

Right. Well, and also it raises some interesting questions about, you know, can you— I think it's a great point Sue was making about, we've always talked in our research about this continuum of these experiences along a lot of different lines. And when you look at the richness and diversity of these experiences, it does become essential to know what people are really feeling. And then it raises some fascinating issues. You know, I mean, maybe another similar tangential way of the way I talk about it. Is when we look at spiritual experiences, some people will say, I felt an energy. Some people felt a force. Some people feel love. Some people feel God. Are those the same experience described differently because of the ways in which their belief systems kind of started them out? Or are they fundamentally different experiences? Is the experience of being in God's presence completely different than an experience, an incredible enraptured sense of love, for example? And this is also part of where it's not just the words, but then it ties back to what's going on in the brain. If we do a brain scan and we find that people experiencing God have a different kind of pattern than people who are experiencing love, that may tell us something as well. That there really is something fundamentally different biologically. Or on the other hand, if the patterns look very similar, then maybe the experiences are far more similar. And now this is a way in which people kind of start to talk about them in different kinds of contexts because of their underlying belief systems that they're taking into it with them.

Let's dive straight into one experience that is described in many contexts as more of a trait or persistent experience than just a one-off, although I think it can have elements of both, which is enlightenment. And you've written a lot obviously about this. So could you talk to us a little bit about what enlightenment is and how you think about it, and then what some of the underlying neurobiology of enlightenment is.

Sure. Well, to sort of pick up from the last conversation, the last line of discussion we just had, even the concept of enlightenment is fascinating because by using one word, enlightenment, people can mean lots of different things. And we wrote a book called How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain. And we started with kind of the classic experience of enlightenment, people talking about the Buddhist enlightenment and the Buddha having that enlightenment experience. But then if you follow the history of enlightenment, you get to the Age of Enlightenment, in which enlightenment goes completely away from spirituality and completely towards rationality and science. The whole idea of enlightenment was to get away from spirituality. And yet, so ultimately, when we start to think about what enlightenment is on a very broad perspective, it's really about a sudden experience that someone has. That radically changes their perceptions of the world. Now, one of the things that we also do in our book is we differentiate a little bit between what we refer to as the big E and the little e experiences. And we do that for a couple of reasons. But the little e experiences are these sort of little aha moments that can happen throughout a person's life. Most people have had at least a few of them. And that's part of why I think they're helpful because people can, you know, that's a taste of that bigger It's when you're dealing with some problem, you're struggling with some issue, and then suddenly that light bulb goes off and you have a new way of thinking about it. But usually we call them little e-experiences because they kind of are restricted to a specific concept or domain or part of your life. They don't change everything about you. They just change this one part, or you suddenly get something that you hadn't gotten before. But when you have the big E experiences, this is where you are having this completely radical shift in virtually every way in which you look at the world. So the evidence points to the fact that these experiences change people's— the way they look at their life, the way they look at meaning and purpose in life, their fear of death, the way they look at their job, their relationships, their health, and their spirituality. So all of these things radically change in what arguably can be moments. And what's fascinating is, of course, when and where these experiences occur, which, based on the data that we have of about 2,000 experiences, can kind of be anywhere. I mean, there's obviously the classic where people, monks and so forth, who have spent 30 years meditating, and then suddenly they reach an enlightened state. But some of our favorite examples were just people walking down the street or driving their car, and then suddenly they just saw the universe in a completely different way. And so there are lots of different ways that these experiences can happen for people. Sometimes in a very religious or spiritual context, sometimes not. But ultimately, what we're seeing is a common core component, which are— and which we kind of divided into several different things based on these narratives. We actually ran a survey of people's experiences. We got about 2,000 people describing them. And people described several core components of the enlightenment experience. And we've talked about some of them already. The feeling of kind of surrendering, being taken over, seems to be very fundamental to a lot of these experiences. A sense of oneness, being connected to the universe, God, whatever that particular person experiences. It's also associated with a profound sense of intensity. That's something that characterizes these experiences as profoundly different for people. It's the most intense feeling of love, the most intense feeling of energy, the most intense feeling of oneness, whatever it is. It's kind of the most of whatever experience that this person has ever had. And it also leads to this very profound sense of clarity that they kind of understand the world in a way that they never have before. And so for them, you know, it really, it does change the way they think about things, and it signifies this new way, a clearer way of of looking at the world around them. And then the final aspect of the big enlightenment experiences is that while enlightenment is kind of a momentary experience of enlightenment, you can also be in enlightenment, meaning that you kind of persist in that state pretty much in perpetuity. And that is, again, part of what we have found is that people feel that it radically changes how they are, not just in the moment, but really for a lifetime. And so Looking at all of that, then we can get a better understanding of what these experiences are like and then start asking questions. Okay, if they feel this, this, and this, what's going on in the brain when those experiences actually happen?

Ray, and I've managed to hold off my absolute geekery up to this moment. Go, go, go, go. But I have to. There's 3 questions. I'm going to start with the fastest one. So we know that during orgasm, It's presence of oxytocin that is intensity of the orgasm, right? It's not the pleasure of the orgasm, but it's the intensity of the orgasm. Does oxytocin code for intensity across the board? So we talk about enlightenment and the intensity of the experience, just that quality. Right.

I don't believe that there have been any studies which have looked at that, but yeah, I mean, absolutely. It's a great point and it's something that I have been trying to figure out that, you know, how we can do that study to be able to see, because I do agree with you.

I think— Oh wow. Okay.

Very likely there will be a release of oxytocin that's going to be part of that.

Yeah. Cool. All right. Here's the second question. And I sort of know the answer to it, but as you were talking, it sort of crystallized in kind of a coherent fashion. When you talk about little e enlightenment, I've done a little bit of work with Mark Beeman and John Koinos, two people who you know, who have worked on the aha experience, right? And in creativity, when you have an aha insight. And that shows up a lot in flow, so it folds in, right? So my question is, when you talk about little e enlightenment experiences, is there something in the— when you hear about the spiritual side of it that says there's more going on than what John and Mark have found in sort of like aha moments of enlightenment?

Yeah, I mean, I think the little e experiences are, you know, really more of those aha moments. They more typically are not interpreted as religious or spiritual. They can be, but often not to that extent. Or if it is something that has a religious or spiritual connotation to it, it's that they just understand something different about their spirituality or about their religion that they didn't understand before, but it's not that kind of full-blown, "Wow, I got it," kind of experience.

If you look at it, their experience is obviously very much centered in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is what discovers that new solution. Right? Right. And so if we were to measure little e enlightenment, you think we're going to see similar activity?

I think we will see some degree of similar activity. Yes, absolutely. Now, to segue into perhaps your next question, I mean, I think what we see in the bigger e experiences is at least built upon that. I mean, I think that there are certainly some fundamental similarities between them. But there seems to be other aspects of it that would be— Yeah.

I remember, I mean, right around the time you did your foundational work, there's a woman, Willoughby Britton. She was in Arizona. She's now running a neuroscience department at Brown, brilliant researcher who looked at people who've had near-death experiences, right? And found permanent changes in their brain after the experiences, somewhat related to some of the changes that you noticed happening in people's brains, but these seem to be permanent. And that, I mean, William James said that, right? Way back when he said, hey, these experiences appear to be psychologically real. They totally change personality on the other side. And I think it took a long time. So my question is, I'm assuming there's a wide variety of what enlightenment actually looks like in the brain. So Willoughby, I remember, like your work had pointed at changes in the right temporal parietal junction, temporal parietal lobe, and she found permanent changes on left temporal parietal lobe. I always wondered if that's what happens when things mature, if it just switches from left to right, and I often wondered about that. But what else have you found? What do you see as the permanent kind of neurobiological correlates of enlightenment?

Well, I think, as you mentioned, there are probably quite a variety, and especially when you do look at the richness and diversity of these experiences, and the various specific aspects of them, they can be very different. I guess one of the caveats I'll throw in up front is to say that when we talk about the anterior cingulate or if I talk about the parietal lobe having decreased activity as part of an experience of oneness, one of the downsides of those discussions is that as good as our imaging is, when we look at the anterior cingulate, there are millions of neurons in there. So if it lights up, when somebody has an experience, we don't know if that's 10 neurons, 100 neurons, 1,000 neurons. And then if somebody else has a similar experience and we see it light up, we don't know if it's the same kind of neuron. So the specifics wind up perhaps coming down to what are the details, which really, at least at this time, may be beyond our ability to truly know what's going on in the brain during those experiences.

I think that's the answer to Rian's earlier question, right? It's those nuances. In phenomenology, in the description, that says, hey, you really do are going to have to take this down. We're going to have to find out, are those pyramid cells or are they spindle cells or take your pick.

Even when we do figure that out, there's still a phenomenology that kind of sits above it as its own thing. Right.

And so, again, I think what we have found, and I'm not sure if this is an answer to both of your points about this, but when we look at the enlightenment experience, if I say that there is a fundamental feeling of oneness or unity or connectedness, So we can look at the parietal lobe and we can say, this is an area that normally is involved in our sense of space and how we interact with other things. And if there's a drop of activity, then we start to lose that spatial representation of ourself. We blur the boundaries between ourself and other, and we have this experience of oneness. But there's another level of that question, which is, what do you feel at one with? And so while every experience of oneness may be associated with the decrease in the parietal lobe, whether you then feel a sense of oneness with God, with a population of people, with a community. These are all the different aspects that become much more detailed and granular in terms of understanding the nature of those experiences. And so there's been even some interesting studies that have shown when they actually are able to put needles into individual neurons, and there was an article that came out about a Jennifer Aniston neuron that in each one of us, when you see a picture of Jennifer Aniston, there's a couple of neurons that fire that tell us, hey, that was Jennifer Aniston. So, you know, when we think about somebody that we need to look at or listen to or, you know, pay attention to, there could be very different kinds of experiences and very different kinds of changes in the neurons that turn up whenever somebody has these kinds of experiences.

So I've got another question, Andrew, on the topic of enlightenment with the experiential aspect of it. One of the things that struck me was the mention of persistence, because a lot of the spiritual traditions in one way, shape, or form point to this final binary state of no-self, non-duality, enlightenment that persists and that is what Buddha got to or whatever. Do you think that is the case? Is there such an experience that persists to that degree and that is of that magnitude?

Well, there's a lot of interesting points when it comes to our issues when it comes to this notion of permanence. Let's start with the experience in and of itself. The main way in which we understand how our brain works is that it changes slowly over time. We go to school, we learn mathematics, we start with 1 1 2, then we do multiplication and division, then we do algebra, then we do calculus, and we kind of build slowly upon all of that. When people have these enlightenment experiences with One of the remarkable things about them is that in what literally could be a moment, it seems to shift everything about the person. And the evidence does suggest that there's a permanence to it, that it continues to persist in many ways throughout the course of a lifetime for people. So the real interesting question then is, how does that happen? Does that mean that this pattern was always in us and we just didn't access it, like a video game where when you get to a certain score, suddenly it releases a new character, but it was always built into the game? Or did somebody literally reprogram their brain from that moment on? Did it rewire the whole brain? And we don't have a good answer yet as to how that works. But the other point, which is, does this then lead to something which is permanent? Certainly, the people who have had these experiences— and Steve mentioned near-death experiences— again, people often describe when they've had a near-death experience that that what persists from that lasts them a lifetime. They remember the experience. It changed, you know, they no longer fear death. They have a whole new way of thinking about their life and the way they are as a person. So, you know, it's certainly— we certainly know that there are these kind of permanent aspects to what these experiences are all about. But then maybe the last thing, and I think this also gets into some of the stuff, some of the really great work that Stephen has been doing over the years, is, you know, does this mean that human beings are capable of kind of getting to another level, you know, almost from an evolutionary perspective. Can we actually transcend where our limitations of our brain are today and get to something which is a whole other way of looking at the universe? And I, you know, I'm an old Star Trek fan and, you know, very often they would find some, you know, some type of being, some kind of creature that's like only conscious energy or something like that. And that they had evolved, you know, beyond the material aspects of the brain. Now, whether that's possible or not, I don't know. But it's interesting that when people have the description of these experiences, that that's kind of what they talk about. That you get to this completely other level that, arguably speaking, is something that could happen not only for the individuals, but for humanity in general. And obviously there are— so there are a lot of very interesting questions that come up when you start to ask about the permanence of these kinds of experiences and what they mean for us.

It seems also— I guess this isn't pedestrian, but it's less spiritual. It's an accelerated learning question. Literally, like, as we move into an environment where people are going to want to level up their skills very, very quickly to keep pace with exponential technology, et cetera, et cetera, this is an example of the brain taking on a radically new perspective, bunch of information, right? It's all the downstream effects of learning, basically. But stretched out over 10 years in an instant. And that's really, just from a very practical, non-spiritual perspective, that's interesting and worth looking at. Andrew, as you were talking, I had a question pop into my head. I'm guessing the answer is no, but to me it'd be the dream. Do we have before and after, forget even neurobiological stuff, but just like a cycle, a personality, a Big Five personality from before enlightenment, after enlightenment? Do we have, do those exist anywhere in the research? In the data, are there any before and after things?

No, I mean, not to my knowledge. I mean, there are, I'm sure, anecdotal, you know, people who have reported this. And of course, in our survey, you know, we're obviously getting people after they've had the experience and we ask them to explain to us what they feel has happened. But no, to my knowledge, there never has been.

Could we just go back to those same two people and say, by chance, did you happen ever to fill out a psychological questionnaire along the way? Perchance the big sky baby. I don't know. Myers-Briggs.

But on a more basic level, ourselves and a few other investigators have been exploring. We did a study of people going through a spiritual retreat. And so we took people who had been religious or spiritual in one way or another, but had never really done something truly immersive. And we sent them through a 1-week spiritual retreat based on the Exercises of St. Ignatius out of the Jesuit tradition. And we scan their brain before and after, and we ask them, you know, a lot of questions before and after. And the hard part about the question that you're asking is that we never truly know when someone is going to have that kind of an experience that really— you know, even in these retreats where people were very moved by these retreats, I don't know if I could honestly tell you that anyone had this kind of true, you know, mystical enlightenment experience that radically changed them. So But clearly, we saw changes. We saw changes in the brain itself. And you had mentioned dopamine earlier. We actually were doing a study looking— did the study focusing on dopamine, and it changed the way their brain responded to dopamine. And there were clear differences in their psyche and their feeling and their depression and anxiety levels. And certainly, very substantial differences in terms of their sense of spirituality and their sense of connectedness and things like that. It's never been quite tested the way I think you're asking about.

Is that an epigenetic change in dopamine? Is that how you would talk about that? I mean, is that what you mean?

It probably is an epigenetic piece because what we found was a very interesting thing. I have to get really geeky here. We actually did a scan called DAT scan, which looks at what's called the dopamine transporter. And the transporter isn't really a dopamine receptor in the sense that it responds to dopamine, but it takes up excess dopamine. That after you have a nerve firing, the brain is very good at recycling. And so it says, hey, I didn't use this dopamine. I'll bring it back in and repackage it and use it later. So if you block these transporters, you get a lot of excess dopamine around. And in fact, that's what happens when people take cocaine. That's exactly where cocaine operates. It blocks the transporter and then you get this flood of dopamine and you get the high. So I thought that because these experiences would be associated with higher and higher levels of dopamine release, that you would have an upregulation of the dopamine transporter because that's typically what we see, that it sort of regulates depending on how much dopamine you have. But we actually saw the opposite. We actually saw the dopamine transporter decrease as a result of going through this retreat. But what that actually means then, and that is controlled by genetics, I mean, it's controlled by—

That means your dopamine sticks around for longer.

Exactly. Exactly. Wow. And so it potentiates the release of dopamine in the future. And I think this is hypothetical, but getting back to, well, so why does meditation— why is that typically the avenue that people take for achieving enlightenment? And why does it not happen immediately? It probably is a process that as time goes on, more and more you become sensitized to the release of dopamine. And then at some point, when your body has some kind of surge of dopamine release, you are really primed for having this incredible experience.

That's interesting. It's like the dam bursts.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you're ready for it.

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You know, let me ask you a question because I say this all the time. People always want to know, are there big differences between flow and spiritual experiences? And I say, well, one of the big ones is always in dopamine. And we've talked about this. You've studied some of the Kabbalistic Jewish traditions where there's pattern recognition and pattern recognition produces dopamine. Same thing with some of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions where you're doing complicated visualizations. It's again pattern recognition. Those traditions seem to produce dopamine, but the other I can't find an activity that seems like it's going to produce the dopamine, which is interesting on top of what you just said also. But you see it like Zen cones. That's clearly a way of getting dopamine. It's clear that the ACC making a remote association between what is the sound of one hand clapping? Well, it's an unsolvable question. So the ACC has to make a really remote link and you're going to get a shit ton of dopamine. And I guess if you got enough of it over time, you would get to what you're talking about, and thus you would have the big, not just satori, but I'm losing what the Zen Buddhists call the big enlightenment breakthrough. That's interesting.

I'll throw in one other piece to this to just talk about one other neurotransmitter, which is that DAT scan also is nonspecific, so it binds to the serotonin transporters as well. And those also were affected. And of course, the other piece to all of this, which we haven't quite hit yet, are the effects of psychedelics, which by and large, but not all, but by and large, the real effect of LSD and psilocybin is on the serotonin system. So some combination of dopamine and serotonin seem to be very relevant to these profound experiences. And whether or not somebody like Laird Haldane works. I mean, again, he probably didn't have the flow experience the first day he ever surfed, but over time with practice, and it's almost as if he was a surfing monk and just kept doing it, doing it, doing it, and then eventually, you wind up having these experiences.

It raises another flow question, which is, does flow over time actually produce enlightenment? There's arguments for and against. The arguments against would be, Well, you could argue that pro surfers have a tremendous amount of flow. Does that equate to a tremendous amount? So those are open, weird questions. And so what is it about flow over time doesn't always get you there? Maybe meditation over time, we only hear about the success stories. We don't hear about the negatives. So maybe it's rarer than we believe, or maybe it's the same thing. I'm just curious about those differences. And I'm also curious, can the flow community, if enlightenment is slightly different than flow over time and enlightenment brings a level of perspective, any new perspective is great for problem solving, is great for performance, is great for creativity and innovation and learning. So is there something we can feed back in? Is there something that we're not getting from flow that maybe we want to, you know, reach into some of these other toolkits for?

These are great points. There's a couple of ways of trying to address them. First of all, part of what I would say is that on one hand, yeah, I mean, you would perhaps think that if somebody is able to have more of these flow experiences that their brain is more primed for having a kind of bigger enlightenment experience. Part of the reason why they may or may not may ultimately have to do a little bit with context. Obviously, somebody who is meditating who has something in mind that they're trying to achieve achieve is perhaps more likely to get to that level than someone who isn't specifically seeking spiritual enlightenment. And actually, similarly, going back to the discussion about psychedelics, people have had some very, very intense spiritual experiences with them. My guess is, is that the people who have had those experiences are probably doing them in the context of some more spiritually oriented program, as opposed to doing it at like a frat party, you know, on a Friday night when you're in college. You may have a really intense experience, but you may not interpret that as spiritual. But one other really interesting piece to, I think, the point that you're making here, which is something that my colleagues and I have talked about before, is the duration in time during which an experience can occur. So for a surfer, theoretically, the flow experience is happening, or maybe not theoretically, but practically, it happens while they're surfing. And so when the surfing stops, so does the experience to a large extent. Now, again, some people may be able to have things proceed beyond that, but for the most part, I would imagine that when you— for a musician, when they get into a flow state with the music, when the music stops, all of that feedback and all of that experiencing also tends to start to to come to a halt. Whereas with a practice like meditation, which can be done almost indefinitely, I mean, you can read the stories of the monks who meditate for days and days and hours and hours and hours on end. You can't do those other— it's harder to do surfing for days and days and hours and hours on end. And so that's perhaps part of why a practice like meditation might be a little bit more likely to lead to an experience like that. Than these other approaches. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but it's just a likelihood.

Let me ask you, because this is something I have noticed that I find very interesting. I have been looking at— by the way, it started, you and I, I don't know how long ago, a year ago, we were starting to talk about how do we develop a high flow lifestyle questionnaire, a way to figure out if you've had a tremendous amount of flow in your life over time, which is still something that we're working on. But spinning off of that, I've been talking to a lot of people who've had high-flow lifestyles about what have you noticed over time. And the only thing that has come up, and this is anecdote again, but it's a lot anecdote because I've been having a conversation with a lot of people, that does seem consistent is people ride the high of flow a lot lower over time. Like they get the performance benefits, but the actual emotional high that comes with it they really like, that becomes less attractive because it becomes emotionally expensive. Same thing with the lows. So what I find is people flow over time as empathy and perspective start to widen. It's not that the experience isn't producing the same big up or when it's gone, sometimes the same big low. It's that people pay a lot less attention to the emotional, the feeling of the experience and a lot more attention to how it works. Like, the emotions become less important over time, which is sort of like saying the spirituality, the spiritual quality of the experience becomes less important than the practicality of the experience over time. And I've heard of that, certain, certain— like, in the Hindu traditions, they talk about the siddhis, right? The— these are the temptations along the way to enlightenment. The superpowers, right, that seem to show up. And some of them, who the hell, you know what I mean? People have looked at levitation. I don't think anybody can levitate. Nobody's ever found somebody who can levitate. I don't think that's a real thing, people. But certainly there's stuff there that is real that does speak to phenomenological stuff. And by the way, you do have to take the levitation somewhat seriously, as I've learned from Dr. Newberg, because it's in so many traditions across time, long before there was mass communication, long before— You just have to say, "Okay, well, I don't know what this is, but there's some experience that must correlate to a feeling that feels like levitation at least." I think you've got to at least take the feeling side of it somewhat seriously because it's everywhere before mass communication.

That notion is very interesting in terms of, do people kind of get to some sort of tolerance, if you will, or whatever term you want to use where they don't engage the experience as much as they did originally. Some of it could be the novelty element of it. Some of it could be the intensity of it. You know, I mean, obviously, maybe this is not a great analogy, but obviously when people do take drugs, for example, they have to take more and more and more because if you keep taking the same thing, then you start to get diminishing returns on that. So, you know, again, you know, you can only surf a wave so many different ways. And at some point, I guess, you know, if you continue to, you know, maybe if you go to an 80-foot wave from the 20-foot wave, maybe something else changes.

I don't know. I mean, like, I'll talk to— I just had this conversation before COVID I was talking to Kristin Ulmer, professional skier, one of the best in history, and she was really excited because she was getting to go snowboarding. Yeah, right. She was like, I'm loving it, I'm snowboarding a lot. And I'm like, okay, I get it, because there's more novelty and you're getting a bunch of dopamine you didn't get before. Exactly. Sometimes they'll switch sports, right?

Right, right, exactly. And, you know, again, now whether or not the same is true within a, you know, a more purely spiritual context We were talking about some of the distinctions. I mean, at least from my read of it, that we don't tend to see— I mean, you mentioned some of the aspects a little while ago about some of the temptations and the things that distract people from it. But at least when you look at people who are deeply religious and spiritual, as far as we can tell, they seem to keep getting that level of experience. So it may be a slightly different mechanism, or it may engage areas of the brain a little bit differently. Differently that keeps bringing them back to a very intensive experience, which, you know, could be different than other types of experiences.

Is it partly the avenue in, in that, like, a simple way to differentiate between flow and meditation, for example, is that flow is an active state or is the result of action of some kind? Maybe that's the mechanism.

I think so. I mean, you know, we talk a lot about the mechanisms in the brain, and obviously we sometimes differentiate these experiences and the mechanisms as sort of top-down versus bottom-up. And so, and that it shouldn't even be quite so simplistic, but maybe just to make it easy, top-down is that kind of meditation. You're kind of concentrated, controlling, and then ultimately it changes your emotional state. And then it ultimately gets down into your body and you feel it in your body. A lot of ritualistic practices like drumming, and of course a lot of the physical activities like surfing and sports and so forth, and even music involve a lot of bodily action going on. And so again, like you said, I mean, this is it's coming from, in some sense, the bottom up, and then ultimately inducing these experiences up in the higher parts of the brain, but from a different process. And again, we were saying just a few moments ago, part of the thing is that when you stop with whatever that bodily process is, whether it's surfing, whether it's playing music, whether it's doing art or whatever, or dancing, when you stop, then that stops that part of that whole cyclical process. Whereas with meditation, because you can do it kind of sitting quietly, theoretically you can maintain it over a longer period of time and might be able to engage people in deeper and deeper experiences over time.

And does that potentially mean, and maybe this is Stephen, what is blocking flow from leading to enlightenment is that the ability for flow as a state to become a trait is less capable of doing that because it's hitched to an action or is happening through bottom-up, whereas these more passive activities or roots in potentially, I don't know, can lead from state to trait.

So one of the questions that I've been asking a lot, and maybe it's because of Scott Barry Kaufman, you know, we've been spending a lot of time with him lately during events and on podcasts and whatnot, and he just wrote Transcend and he talked about how Maslow, you know, Maslow, the king of the peak experience, but spent the second half of his life really looking at what he called plateau experiences, much more stable experiences. So one question that I've been asking is when we talk about these more stable experiences, is that a plateau experience? Are we talking about enlightenment? And if that is the case, with flow, it does seem that the expanded empathy, the widened perspective, some of the stuff that the less— it's less sexy stuff, but that definitely, right, you definitely widen out over time. You gain appreciation for nature, for the environment. You basically start seeing things you wouldn't normally notice.

That increases meaning as well. It becomes a trait.

And look, we see this in a number of aspects of human behaviors and emotions. I mean, think about love. I mean, there's always a difference between when you first— the first date and the honeymoon phase, so to speak. But then it consolidates and it consolidates into something which sometimes you don't feel quite that level of intensity, but In many ways—

Paul Zak would tell us that you're trading your love of norepinephrine and dopamine for a love of oxytocin and serotonin. Exactly. That's what we're doing over time, which by the way, I always say you see this a lot in the addiction research, which is you want to replace one addiction with another. AA replaces the addiction to alcohol, which is essentially an addiction to dopamine, with spirituality, which will get you a much wider— and community, right? So which is going to get you serotonin, oxytocin, it's going to get you those stabler chemicals on the back end. And I don't want to reduce any of this stuff down to that, but it is happening during these transitions. And it's interesting just for what does it mean? What does this mean for enlightenment?

You know, and this also goes back into both of your questions a little bit too, which is that it may also have something with what kinds of states can be maintained in the brain. And so a lot of the flow states occur around sympathetic nervous system activation, highly energetic, highly arousing. That's the fight or flight response. Well, that's supposed to be a short-lived response. I mean, it's supposed to get you out of there. It's supposed to protect you in the moment. But you ideally are not in that state for a super long period of time, in large part because it's utilizing your energy resources up way too fast. So in many ways, it's not a sustainable process.

At the front end, right? Yeah. I mean, in the work we've been doing with Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford, he's the one who isolated the fight response in the medial thalamus, and we're seeing the exact same thing at the front of the flow state. Exactly. And so you always— you're going to get that surge of cortisol and norepinephrine. Unpleasantness is going to happen at the front end of flow.

Exactly. And then the parasympathetic, again, it's also that shift from the dopamine to the oxytocin, as you were just saying. But when you get into parasympathetic and oxytocin, it becomes stable, but you can be stable at a higher level, but you don't have that rush that you get. Or you get the intermittent rush or something like that, but it's incorporated into this other way of thinking about things. So for example, if you have an enlightenment experience, if you're a Buddhist and you have enlightenment, well, now, when you no longer are having the enlightenment experience itself, you presumably have altered your baseline. Now, from your baseline, you can still go back into that mystical experience, but the trip there is not as long as it originally was for the first time. But you can still go there. But again, you're now situated at a different level. And I think to some degree, that's part of what you were also talking about. When you have these highly expert surfers and skiers and things like that, the jump from where they are to where they get to also may not be quite as great as it used to be.

Could that potentially mean, or is there any research around heightened flow proneness or the ability to access flow states with more ease for individuals who have a higher base baseline or enlightened individuals, for example?

I don't know if there's been anything that's been studied specifically with regard to flow. Again, one of the interesting corollary studies to this, which may at least start to get an answer to this, there was a guy named Dean Hamer who was a behavioral geneticist out of NIH who wrote a book called The God Gene about 10 years ago. And he found that there was a specific gene that correlated with people who had heightened ability to have a feeling of self-transcendence, which is kind of what we're talking about, this feeling of kind of getting beyond the self.

VMAT2. The VMAT2 gene. VMAT2.

Yep, that's exactly right. And you all know what the VMAT2 gene codes for. It's a receptor in the brain that handles serotonin and dopamine.

And a little bit of norepinephrine, right?

A little norepinephrine, right, exactly. So that does suggest that there are people who are predisposed to having these experiences and how they react to them and so forth. And, but it's also learned. There's a nature and nurture elements to it. I mean, if Laird Hamilton never went near a surfboard, he may not get into flow states the way he does now, but because he did, then he starts to get into them. And so if any one of us sits down and starts to do a meditation program on some kind of daily basis over and over and over again, some of us will be more likely to achieve enlightenment than others, perhaps, but all of us will get to be better meditators eventually. All of us will have certain effects, but then there will still always be certain people who are able to get to some other level a little bit easier than those who don't. I guess the analogy that I always use is playing tennis. I'm a avid tennis player. If we all played tennis 6 hours a day, we'd all get to be pretty good tennis players, but there's still going to be the Roger Federers and the Nadals of the world. Who are just better than everyone else. And we don't know exactly why, but there are going to always be those people like that.

But you still can shift or manipulate your—

But we can all get to— yeah, I mean, if we all played tennis for 6 hours a day, we'd all be really, really good tennis players. But there would still be those people who are just better than everyone else.

So you mentioned clarity, and that seems to be a very consistent element of, in some respects, flow. And maybe Stephen, you can talk more about that. But definitely within psychedelic experiences, people talk about this sense of realness or truth?

That was Dr. Neuberg's original question. That was his first question. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, could you talk to us a little bit about what is that sense of realness, and is it an actual proxy for truth, or is it just a, you know, a feeling of reality that isn't actually, you know, indicating reality?

Uh, that's the $100,000 question. Um, you know, the short answer is I have no idea. The longer answer is, is that, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, certainly a lot of what's going on is this perception of realness of reality. We certainly, you know, everyone has had these shifts in experiences of reality through dreams. No matter how real a dream feels, when you wake up, you recognize that it, you say, oh, that was just a dream. It's not as real as this reality. And when people have mystical experiences or enlightenment experiences, the same thing happens, but now they're looking back on sort of the everyday reality. As if that's not quite as real as the world that they now see. So part of it has to do with our perceptions. And my late colleague Jean DuCoullet and I wrote several articles about epistemic states, that we are in a state that feels real. And when you're in it, you assume that that is the real reality. But ultimately, it's our brain processing that. And if I were to say to both of you throughout this entire conversation, I've had my little green assistant sitting on my shoulder. You'd all kind of laugh at me and say, well, that's ridiculous. You don't have it now. But why do you say that? Well, you know, now you start using different qualia. You know, well, I don't see it. I don't— you know, it doesn't make any sense to me. I, you know, I don't hear anything. And so we start to assess reality. But ultimately, Andrew, are you saying there's a little green man on your shoulder this whole time? Maybe, maybe I am.

And I want to follow up on this with a quick extension because this is something You've written enough books that you know this experience, which is the experience of between, you know, you finish your book, you've polished it, you put it away, you send it off to the publisher, they send it back to you, and all that's happened is 2 months has gone by, right? Nothing's changed. 2 months has just gone by. And when you read the manuscript, you notice all kinds of stuff you never saw before, right? It's almost as if somebody else wrote that book and now a different person is reading that book, right? It's in psychology, that's functional fix at this. I mean, there's a whole bunch of lingo for the cognitive biases that produce this result. When we talk about the gradations of reality, even going up into these spirits, is it just the removal of cognitive biases that were in the way of other— I mean, that's what happens in every other place when we have this experience. With the spiritual, is it the same mechanism with maybe more neurochemistry producing more emotion? This reductionist in me is going crazy here.

Yeah. And part of the problem is that we really don't know why something feels real. Is it the sensation of it? Is it the emotional reaction to it? You talk about the sense of clarity. Is it just that things make sense to us? And part of the whole reason I got into this, which is even more relevant today, is when we look around the world and then you see people who are devout religious people versus people who are devout atheists, or people who are Republican versus Democrat. We're all looking at the same world, and we seem to think that we know exactly what's going on and what the reality is, when really most of the data shows that just the opposite is true. And so we really have to kind of— it's really quite a challenge for us to think about what makes something feel real to us. That's part of why I got so interested in these mystical experiences. People say, "That was the most real experience I ever had. What does that mean? What am I supposed to do to interpret that?" You mentioned the thalamus before, and I actually think that the thalamus may be a part of that.

Yeah, it's gating, right? A lot of this is gating. Yeah. By the way, Ryan, everything Dr. Newberg just said, the reason West of Jesus, my second book, is Surfing Science and the Origin of Belief. It was the same question. If you talk to surfers, surfing was their religion. It was a belief system. It was a worldview. It was their spirituality. It was everything. So I just asked this simple— I asked, where does belief come from? As a journalist back when, one of the things that I'm a little proud of this is you could send me to talk to any spiritual and religious community. You couldn't send a lot of journalists into the Christian right. They tended to go crazy and just have a bad time there. And I just found people Fascinating. I remember meeting a very, very, very powerful lawyer, one of the most powerful lawyers in America, and she was a fundamentalist Christian who believed that the earth was 6,000, 5,000 years old, or what, 4,000 years old. And I could not, like, it was so hard for me to hold that in my head at the same time that like, literally like you're the leading kind of constitutional scholar in the world which means you pore over law and evidence, and yet the Earth is— and I couldn't— and yet when I went into surfing and I would meet these surfers who, you know, I was a surfer and they thought they were having— they were one with the ocean, the ocean was speaking directly to— right? Like, these were just as magical and weird to me as a woman believing the Earth is 6,000 years old. And yet these were excellent surfers and I admired that just like I admired her legal mind. And this was some of the questions. We don't ask them that much now because the neuroscience has caught up to the philosophy. So these questions don't weigh as much as they used to, in a sense, but they're still there and very real. And to me, very interesting.

That's one of the, I think, dangers or risks with psychedelics is that, that effect of coming back to a reality that then feels less real.

Flying. I mean, for some people that experience makes things feel more real. And then, you know, for others it makes it feel less real.

This is why we have— if you will get you a t-shirt at some point, Andrew— the Flow Research Collective swag, everything says, "Never trust the dopamine." It's at everything. Never trust the dopamine. You always have to, like, no matter how strong that feeling of certainty is, It's always worth looking at. Right, exactly. Exactly.

So let's switch gears a little bit then, if that's okay, Andrew. I'd love to get into some of the practical elements or what you've seen be effective for doing things like raise your baseline and some of the more stable states like imaginative states or enlightenment. I'm curious as to what practices have actually become part of your own routine as a result of your research and what you've found through your career?

For me personally, I guess I have taken the route of being a little bit of a detached objective observer. And so I tend to like to look at these different practices. But a lot of— and Stephen knows this about me— you know, a lot of this really did grow out of my own personal exploration of all of these questions, all these great things that we've been talking about. And in many ways, even though I love to do the brain scans studies, there is a lot of personal reflection and contemplation that I do, and that, that contemplative process in many ways is a kind of meditation, kind of a combined scientific and spiritual meditation, if you will. And that's really the practice that I do, and it's really about keep working on trying to find that perspective of reality and trying to understand reality. I'm still working on it, as I always tell everyone. If I ever figure it out, I'll be I'll be sure to let everyone know. But I typically have not really engaged a lot of the individual practices. The data does support that almost all of them are good for, in the right context, for the right kind of person. And so there are lots of them out there, whether it's yoga or transcendental meditation or mindfulness. There are so many different practices that people can do. A lot of it is finding the one that kind of resonates with you, is in line with the goals that you have in mind. If you're just trying to do some stress reduction, then a basic mindfulness might be great. If you really want to achieve enlightenment, then you might want to look at something within the spiritual tradition that you come from. If you're Jewish, maybe Kabbalistic thought. It really does depend a lot. But again, I think the data generally support that all of these practices seem to have a benefit in the right context for the right kind of person.

Right. Just do one. Or tennis.

Maybe that's the— Tennis usually pisses me off.

But— So to look forward then, what is some of the research that you're currently engaging with that you're most excited about? What are some of the big questions you're most focused on right now?

We continue to look at all these different kinds of practices. You know, we've scanned about 400 or 500 individuals doing all different kinds of practices over the last 25 years from different traditions. And we continue to do that. We continue to expand that imaging research of different types of practices. So that's certainly something that's important to us. We are looking at— Stephen mentioned The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James a little while ago. One of the projects that we're doing is to kind of take a fresh 21st century look at that and really try to help us to understand the variety of those different experiences now that we have another 100 years of brain imaging and phenomenology and psychology and all that kind of good stuff. I recently wrote a book that derives out of my own background a little bit more called The Rabbi's Brain, which looked at Judaism. And I think to me, part of where neurotheology can go is to think about the individual types of traditions, you know, to be able to explore neurotheology in the context of Catholicism and Protestantism and Islam and Buddhism, Hindu, you know, really start to look at that as well. We've mentioned a bunch of times here about the different neurotransmitters. So I'd love to be able to do some studies in the future, looking more directly at oxytocin and dopamine and seeing how they play out. And then as you were alluding to, you know, certainly there continue to be studies looking at the practical, what I like to refer to as applied neurotheology. You know, how can we utilize these different things to help people, to help people with reducing anxiety or stress or depression? Help people function more effectively in their lives. And that's part of it too.

But I have to say, by the way, if anybody out there has a spare couple million dollars— Yes, I'd be happy to take it. Great flow neural imaging studies designed. We're just ready to go. So, you know, if you've got a couple million dollars lying around and you want to know what the difference is between flow and various spiritual experiences, we are your people.

Exactly. Exactly. So, and absolutely, and like I said, I mean, just looking at all these different kinds of practices and the flow experiences and how they are similar, different, and so forth. I mean, there's as much as we've done, we've just scratched the surface and there is just a ton of stuff more to go, which hopefully will keep all of us busy for a long, long time to come.

Tim, you got any questions you want to ask?

No, I just, as we wrap up, A, Andrew, this is the first of a whole bunch of ongoing conversations that we're going to have.

Sounds good. I'm ready.

That's what this podcast, you know, Flow Research Collective Radio is about, these ongoing conversations. But thank you once again for lending us your brain. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you. And I always walk away with something stuck. Now I'm stuck in my head about this question of long-term dopamine upregulation. Like this is, you've just literally like—

I'll send you the article.

Yeah, there goes 2 months. Yeah, send me the article. There goes 2 months. Here's how it goes. But thank you again.

Thanks for having me on the program.

Do you have a final wrap-up question? I've got two. Yeah, I want to ask you our permanent questions because you didn't ask them. So, Andrew, these are the two questions. What is the thing that you probably should be remembered for that people don't even know that you've been working on? You're gonna— we know you're gonna be remembered as the founding father of of neurotheology and a bunch of stuff, but I always think there's always like a whole area of research in every expert's life that they've been deep into for a long time but haven't published as much on or haven't talked about as much. What is that for you? Backgammon? Badminton?

I wish. I play a lot of hockey. I don't think I'm going to get known for that. I mean, I hope someday the sort of philosophical meditations, even though they're obviously related to this, I hope that there will be some answers that I will find that really can help people understand the nature of reality in a different kind of way than we ever have before. So maybe that would be my answer.

That's amazing. Well, we're going to have a conversation about flow and hockey sometime soon. Oh yeah. This is by the way totally news to me. I had no idea you played hockey.

I love hockey. Big hockey fan.

I did not know that. So the next time we're going to find a hockey player. For a conversation on flow and hockey, we're bringing you back. Cool.

Yeah, I've got one more, Andrew, which you kind of loosely alluded to, but we like to ask researchers this question. So if you could click your fingers and instantly have the answer to a question, or instantly have the research done, what would the question be, or what would the answer be that you're looking for?

I'd have to go back to the reality question, I think. You know, could I do a study that that helps us to prove that the reality that we perceive is accurate. Either that or the other one would be the study that would tell us what consciousness is.

Yeah, fair answers. And before you jump, where can people learn more? What books should they start with of yours? What's the best way to dive in?

Everything, people, read everything.

Buy them all right now.

That's right. So Andrew Dr. DuBerg, anywperg.com is my website, and there they can certainly learn about everything. We talked about how enlightenment changes your brain. How God Changes Your Brain is another book also. Why God Won't Go Away. Why God Won't Go Away, which is how we got connected first, I think. And then if you happen to be interested in Judaism, The Rabbi's Brain and—

Yeah, I got to tell you, I just went back a month ago and reread huge chunks of The Mystical Mind. That was the very first one. Yeah, very first one. Because there's still stuff in— you guys posed problems in there and saw stuff in there, right? This was before the field even existed, but there's still— I was wondering, I was just hunting to see, were there problems that you guys highlighted that still like are open mysteries?

Yeah, no, thank you. No, absolutely. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm always happy when our brain scans kind of support the original models we had, but then And we keep learning beyond it. And so that's exciting too.

Your book titles are phenomenal, by the way.

Thanks. I love them. We try to come up with something good. So I think I was about to say, if anybody wants to really look at it from a more academic perspective, I wrote a book just called Neurotheology. And that really talks a lot more about the field and the challenges and methodologies and things like that. So whether somebody wants kind of a light overview or really go in depth, there's all different options.

Great. Well, thanks a ton, Andrew. It's been super, and hopefully we'll have you on Flow Research Collective Radio again soon.

Anytime, anytime. Thanks so much, guys.

Thank you once again.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. It feels good to pummel your to-do list and free up more space in your life. On the subject of punching things, meet Krista Stryker. She's an amateur boxer, journalist, entrepreneur, and world-renowned fitness expert. Here's what she had to say about training with us of the Flow Research Collective. Quote, before learning about flow, I felt like life was just kind of happening to me. I felt there was no real control over it, why sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days. After completing Zero to Dangerous, my life is a lot more intentional now. Being in flow has helped me to complete my second book as a writer and prepare for my next fight as an amateur boxer, and I can't thank the Flow Research Collective enough for it. That's epic to hear, Krista. We're super stoked that you shared that with us. And if you're listening and you want to take back control of your time, your work, and your mind, go to getmoreflow.com. We'd love to work with you to achieve your boldest goals in less time and with more ease. Again, just go to getmoreflow.com to get started. All the best.

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