Andrew Newberg, Michael Cromartie and David Brooks

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Andrew Newberg is one of the leading neuroscientists in the country, at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. He has also written several books on why a belief in God persists. He is also now the second person in the history of these events to wear a tie. (Laughter.)

After we hear from Dr. Newberg, we'll hear from David Brooks. But I give you now Andrew Newberg. Thank you, Doctor, for coming.

Andrew Newberg

ANDREW NEWBERG: Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. When I was first asked to talk, and obviously I was very excited about coming down here and sharing the work we've been doing, I said to Michael, "Can I bring some slides?" He paused for a minute, I don't know --

CROMARTIE: It was me?

NEWBERG: I think so. (Chuckles.) It was funny because I was reflecting back to when I was first making some presentations on this stuff about eight years ago. We were coming out with some of our first data, and I was asked to give a presentation to our radiology department at Penn. I was in my office getting things together, and one of my colleagues came in and said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I'm getting myself together for the talk." He said "Are you using slides?" I said yes, I was going to use slides, and he said, "We're all radiologists; you have to put a picture on every slide because that's how we respond, everything is visual to us." (Laughter.) So I realized the importance of that. Some of the images would be very difficult to explain to you without actually being able to see them.

This topic is obviously a huge area just ripe with so many different questions and ideas and thoughts. So I'm going to try to give you an overview of some of the work that's been done, some of the areas we're headed toward, and also try to tie it into the topics of this overall conference. That was also one of the things I struggled with. It's great to think about what's going on in the brain, it's really interesting to say how does the brain help us when we're becoming religious or political or whatever. But I wanted to try to tie that in as much as I could vis-à-vis some of the discussions taking place at the Key West conference, so I want to start off with just a couple of relevant comments. I'll try to keep this in line with the rest of my presentation, but obviously, I heard a lot of conversation about Reverend Wright's ideas and this whole idea of the theology of the black church, the theology of liberation. This is the quote from Reverend Wright, "It is a theology of transformation, and it is ultimately a theology of reconciliation."

Of course, I look at this not so much from a political perspective but from the perspective of what does all this mean? Where does our sense of liberation come from, if we're going to talk about that? How do we know if we are free, and if we are, how do we know when we are and when we aren't? If we're talking about transformation, how do we change ourselves? And if we're talking about reconciliation, we're talking about how do we reconcile ourselves with other people. How do we forgive other people?

Again, I take it one step further from a neuroscience perspective and ask, how does the brain tell us when we are free? What goes on within us that the brain says to us "Yes, you're okay, you can do whatever you want to do," or "No, this is not okay?" How does our brain actually change or transform? This is a critical issue if we're going to change the views of a voter, if we're going to change a person's religion. If one of these things happens to a person, something's got to be changing in the brain as well. So how do we look at that? How do we understand that? How do we understand what the brain can do?

I wrote, with my colleague, a paper on forgiveness and revenge several years ago, about what would be the neuropsychological correlates of that. It becomes very interesting: how we think about ourselves, how we have a construction of ourselves, and how that self relates to other individuals, and how we reconcile when somebody has injured or harmed us. This is part of how I can tie in some of the topics I'll be covering with some of the topics that have been more broadly discussed here at Key West.

Keeping in line with the Reverend Wright issue, this was another quote that came from him. I'm sure most of you have seen this, but let me just read this: "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America; that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human; God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God, and she is supreme."

The first question I want to ask all of you, from a neuroscience perspective, is how does this make you feel? What is your response, and what's going on inside of you as you begin to feel whatever it is you're feeling, because there are a number of different responses that can take place. Obviously, as a lot of us have discussed, it can invoke anger and fear in you, and that's something we tend to attribute to the amygdala, part of the brain's limbic system, and we'll talk about this a little bit later.

Does it invoke thoughts in which you want to rationalize and try to understand where is this coming from, and ask what does it mean, and how does this affect us on a political landscape, in which case the abstract areas of your brain -- your temporal lobes and your parietal lobes -- would start to work. Does this invoke some empathy and compassion in you, a desire to understand where this is coming from in terms of history--a lot of people have looked at compassion as originating in parts of the frontal lobes. So again, it's not just looking at this from a particular political perspective, but what you can say about how it affects each one of us physiologically?

Andrew Newberg

We were talking about this at lunch: There have been some studies that have looked at political perspectives, trying to understand what happens in the brain of people who are Republicans and the brains of people who are Democrats. We talked about some of this, and I'd just highlight a couple of interesting studies. One was an fMRI study, which is a magnetic resonance imaging that looks at blood flow and activity in the brain, and it showed that people who scored higher on liberalism tended to be associated with stronger what they called conflict-related anterior cingulate activity. Now, what that means is, you have a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate, which helps you mediate when things are in conflict with the way you already believe.

The researchers then interpreted this, and we can go into all the questions about how should we interpret these studies. People who had greater liberalism seemed to do better or were more sensitive to altering some habitual response pattern, implying that they were more open to change, more open to other ideas, more open to conflict, than people who scored lower on liberalism. Does that mean something about people who consider themselves to be liberals versus conservatives, Republicans versus Democrats?

Of course all people, regardless of what their particular perspectives are, when they're viewing their own candidate, that has a different effect in their brain than when they are viewing a candidate from the opposite party. When you're looking at somebody from the opposite party, or thinking about them, it tends to activate the amygdala, the limbic areas, again, that tend to trigger more of an emotional response, whereas when you're looking at people who are concordant with your views and beliefs, that tends to activate some of the areas of the frontal lobe and also that anterior cingulate that helps you mediate your conflict-resolution powers.

This is just a broad overview. I threw this in to put this into a little bit of perspective, but what does this mean in terms of why should we do this? Sometimes when I give a presentation such as this, I feel it's valid to try to justify exactly why this research is important. I think it is important on a number of different levels. In particular, it helps us to deepen our understanding of who we are as human beings, how the human mind works, and how the human person works. It helps us understand not only how it affects us, but also how we might be able to mediate those effects and alter those effects over time. So this helps us understand a deeper relationship between religion and spirituality, and its effects on individuals as well as on society.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this whole area is more philosophical, more theological, and thinking about what does this mean in terms of how we believe in religion, and the religious beliefs that people hold. Does this tell us something about those beliefs and experiences? When somebody has the experience of being in God's presence, and we can get a brain scan of that, what does that mean, what does that say, and how can we interpret that either for religion, against religion, or in some other alternative perspective of simply just trying to understand it better?

Now, beliefs themselves have a tremendous power over us, and I look at this all the time in the context of the placebo effect. This is very relevant to the healthcare professions I work with, how people believe things are going to happen, what their beliefs are about their health and the things they need to do -- it's critical. Unfortunately, I think the healthcare system severely overlooks how beliefs have power over what happens to somebody. I'm sure probably all of you know somebody who's dealt with a severe medical problem, maybe cancer or heart disease. We have always noted, at least anecdotally, that when people have that spirit and drive to get better, they seem to have a much higher likelihood of doing that, whereas those who are ready to give up tend not to do that well. That also goes to the importance of how beliefs affect our whole body, not just the brain itself.

Certainly all of you are well aware of the importance of beliefs in the context of the media, and how we can be influenced by various forces and stimuli and ideas that come into us, in terms of how they are presented, and visually presented, and what is being said. All of this has an impact on our culture and our political and moral beliefs. Of course, we can also look at religious and spiritual beliefs, which is what I will try to focus my talk on throughout the day here.

I always try to come at this from a philosophical perspective. Why do we believe anything at all?

From a neuroscience perspective, if this slide here is supposed to represent everything that exists, everything out there in reality, then somewhere within that is each one of us, and each one of our brains, floating around, so to speak, trying to take in a huge amount of information. It is an infinite universe for all intents and purposes. We are able to be subjected to only a very, very small amount of that information. Obviously there is tons of stuff going on in Key West right now, but we are only able to perceive and understand what is going on around us right now in this room.

Now, unfortunately, an even smaller amount of that information is ultimately put into your consciousness. I'm sure all of you have given presentations before and probably way-back-when, you were taught how to give presentations. One of the most important things everybody always says is figure out what your take-home points are. Why? Because if you talk to somebody for 45 minutes, they are going to remember maybe three or four things. It is a depressing thought if you are giving a presentation to people, but that is the way it is, that our brain's consciousness can only hold onto that very small amount of information. So when we talk about Obama's speeches or anybody's speeches, what do we really remember? That is the nice thing nowadays about the Internet: We have the transcript. We can go back and look at each specific thing. But even with that, when we actually go back and recollect what was said and how it affected us, we are usually talking about a very small amount of information that we actually hold onto.

So our brain is trying to put together a construction of our reality, a perspective on that reality, which we rely on heavily for our survival, for figuring out how to behave and how to act and how to vote. But again, the brain is filling in a lot of gaps and helping us think certain things that may or may not really be there. That is the benefit of having the transcripts these days because you might say, "That is what this guy said." Then you go back to the transcript, and you say, "I guess he really didn't say it that way, or it was taken out of context." We have seen that being talked about a lot these days.

So what are beliefs? Again, I apologize, but I always come at this from a scientific perspective. I am defining beliefs biologically and psychologically as any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that a person consciously or unconsciously assumes to be true. The reasons I define beliefs in this way are several-fold. One is that we can begin to look at the various components that make up our beliefs. We can talk about our perceptions. We can talk about our cognitive processes. We can talk about how our emotions affect our beliefs. And we can also look at how they ultimately affect us. Are we aware of the beliefs we hold? Or are they unconscious? And which ones are unconscious and which ones are conscious?

Several interesting studies have shown that when you show faces of a person of a different race to people, it activates the amygdala, the area that lights up when something of motivational importance happens to us. But if you show pictures of people of a different race that are people they know, and maybe it is a famous person or a friend, then the amygdala doesn't light up. So they tend to have this ability to culturally, cognitively overcome what might be their initial response. That becomes important because now they go out into the world and respond to things. There may be certain unconscious approaches they take to the world, or certain unconscious beliefs they hold, that may have a deep impact on what they do, and how they behave, and how they think, and how they vote.

We can look at all these different forces on our beliefs. We can look at our perceptual processes, our cognitive processes, the emotions we have, the social interactions we have, to see how beliefs are so heavily influenced. One of the take-home points I always hope to get across is that as much as we hold onto our own beliefs very strongly -- and I think it is appropriate for us to do so -- we also have to keep in mind they are far more tenuous than we often like to believe.

Let me go through some of these processes in a bit more detail. Let's talk about our perceptions. The brain is out there, as I said, trying to interpret all of this information. It is trying to take in a huge amount of information and make some coherent picture of the world for us. But, unfortunately, the brain makes lots of mistakes along the way. The most important problem with that is it doesn't bother to tell us when it does make a mistake. We just go along happily as if we really understand everything going on around us even though the brain is really misperceiving things very drastically.

I have here a couple of visual illusions, and some of you may have seen them before, but I'll just show you a couple of my favorites. One of them is this one.

Hopefully you see these lines appear to be curved. They seem to be expanding, like a little bubble coming toward you. Now, I spent a good half hour on this with a ruler. Every one of these lines is exactly parallel or perpendicular. They are all straight lines. And even though I know this, and even though I am telling you this right now, there is no way you can make your brain see this other than the way it does. So clearly your brain is shaping the way you see the world and doing it in a way that is inaccurate. Yet it is telling you that you are seeing it correctly. There is no way to convince yourself otherwise.

This one is a movement illusion. Everybody likes this one. This is a three-dimensional mask that looks as if it is coming toward you. But as you focus on it, you realize you are looking at the interior part. So it is going away from you. Yet sometimes, it seems to come toward you. It is not until it turns all the way around that you are able to perceive it the right way. So again, if our world is moving past us at much greater speeds than this, and this last illusion was stable, you can imagine how much we mishear and misinterpret. If we are listening to a speech, if we are thinking about an idea, if a friend is telling us something, how well are we really doing at gathering that information out there? How easy is it for us to be manipulated in terms of the beliefs we hold?

Now we move over to the cognitive functions of the brain. I had a conversation with somebody about this earlier. We were talking about the relationship between the heart and the head when we make decisions. Of course we use cognitive processes to make decisions and help us decide things about the beliefs we should hold. We use various parts of our brain to do that. So when we think about the environment, when we think about the abortion issue, as we were talking about earlier, what cognitive processes do we bring to bear on this? Do we bring causal functions? Maybe we think, "What is causing global warming to occur?" Obviously nowadays we have a fairly strong sense as to what that is, but for a long time, there was a lot of debate. What was causing it -- is it our activities? Is it our carbon dioxide? Is it coming from something else? And what is this ultimately going to cause? To some extent, we don't really know that. We don't know how much resiliency there is in the earth's environment.

That raises all kinds of questions. How much should we assume we can understand about the cause and effect of what we are doing today? Can we start to think about the evaluation of opposites? This is something our brain loves to do. We don't really like the gray areas in the world. We like to be Republican or Democrat. We like to be right or wrong, moral or immoral. As I'm sure all of you are aware, that isn't the way the world is. But our brain likes us to slot things one way or another. So we tend to construct our beliefs around these different cognitive processes of our brain, and it helps us find proofs for those beliefs. It also helps us to maintain our beliefs. So if we happen to be a Democrat, then when we look at the various issues and information that come down the road, we evaluate them from the perspective of the belief system we start out with, and we start to use our rational, logical processes to argue for the information that is supportive of our beliefs or against the information that might go against our beliefs.

All of this comes into play when we talk about our memory and how our memory remembers what we think and feel. Most studies have shown how drastically inadequate our memory is, as much as we like to think it is reminding us exactly about whatever happened to us back then and how it affected us. We certainly see the problems when memory goes wrong. These areas of the brain all seem to be involved in these processes.

We talk about the parietal lobe, which is very involved in abstract reasoning and quantization. Parts of the parietal lobe are involved in helping us orient our self in the world and establishing a relationship between our self and the rest of the world. The temporal lobe, which is along the side of the brain; the cortex areas help us to understand language; and the inner parts of the temporal lobe are where our limbic system is -- I'll talk about that in just a second -- that helps us with understanding our emotional responses to whatever stimuli are out there in the world.

The frontal lobe helps us with our behaviors and executive functions, the functions of deciding what we need to do: what we're going to do tomorrow, keeping our schedule, keeping our checkbook, and so forth, while also mediating our emotional responses. There is a push-pull between our frontal lobe and limbic system that can get out of whack sometimes. If we get overly emotional, our frontal lobes shut down, and if we become over-logical, our emotional areas shut down. There is a lot of push and pull that goes on in these different parts of the brain.

Emotions are also important for placing value on beliefs. So it's not just that we feel we should do something for the environment, it's not just that we feel we should be a Republican or a Democrat, but we start to imbue those choices with emotions. We feel strongly about the ways in which we believe, and of course this can help us form beliefs. When you're listening to a speech by somebody you agree with, it probably makes you feel emotionally good. And if you're listening to a speech of somebody you don't like, it makes you feel emotionally bad, and then you're much less likely to remember the bad speech, or you're much more likely to reject that because of the emotional responses it puts into you.

The downside of our emotions can be in how they help us defend our beliefs. There has been a lot of research looking at when people start to feel combative and antagonistic toward people who disagree with them. This can be how we start to see religious conflicts occur throughout the world: It is not just that people disagree with each other, but that they get emotional about it. They start to feel hatred. They start to feel anger, and that can foment all kinds of antagonism, and ultimately lead to violence, which is obviously a big problem for how we deal with the differences in our beliefs.

The emotional areas of the brain are in part of the brain called the limbic system, which is embedded in the more interior parts of the brain.

Here is that amygdala I was talking about, which tends to light up whenever something of motivational importance happens to us. The hippocampus, which is right behind that, helps to regulate our beliefs, but also helps to regulate our emotions and write into our memories the ideas that come about from emotionally salient events. That is why we all remember exactly what was happening to us on September 11, 2001, but very few of you probably remember what happened on September 10, unless it had some emotional value to you like a birthday or an anniversary or something important happening in your life. You went through the day, but you don't remember anything that happened that day. You do remember a lot of what happened on September 11.

As we were talking earlier today, the social milieu we are in becomes very important in influencing our beliefs. We are continuously influenced by those around us. This goes all the way back to when we are a child and the influence of our parents helps us form our initial beliefs, which write into our brain at a very early age the beliefs we carry with us throughout our lives. That is why it is difficult to change your religious beliefs. It is difficult to even change your political beliefs as time goes on. If you look at the large population, very few people ultimately do change their beliefs in any very dramatic way because those are written very deeply into our brain at very early ages. But ultimately, as we do grow up, we can be influenced, and we can change those beliefs, and that is part of what we have to look at: exactly how and why this happens.

So how do these beliefs form physiologically, and what does this tell us about religious and spiritual ideas, and why religion and spirituality are so ingrained in so many individuals and have been in every culture and every time? There are a couple of statements I like to use. One is that neurons that fire together, wire together. There is physiological support for that, that the more you use a particular pathway of neurons, the more strongly they become connected to each other. There are chemical messengers and other support neurons that do that. Think very simplistically back to how you remember that one plus two equals three. When you were a kid in school, you said, "One plus two equals three, one plus two equals three," and ultimately that pathway got written down. The pathway "One plus two equals four" got eliminated from the brain. It did exist at one point, but you got rid of it. We prune back a lot of the neural connections we have as a child, so we ultimately go forward in our lives with a set of parameters through which we look at the world.

The other idea about neurons is the old use-it-or-lose-it concept, that when you stop thinking about certain things, when you stop focusing on something, then those connections go away. We all probably took courses in college we remembered a lot of at the time, but if we are not doing it anymore, then we don't remember it anymore. I took a great course in Russian history: It was wonderful, and I learned all kinds of stuff about the history of Russia and all the czars, but I would be lucky if I could name two or three czars for you right now. But if you ask me about the neurotransmitters in the brain and the different receptor subtypes, I could do a pretty good job recalling that because I use that every single day.

How do we begin to invoke that? The practices and rituals that exist within both religious and non-religious groups become a strong and powerful way to write these ideas into our brain. Again, go back to the idea that the neurons that fire together, wire together. The more you focus on a particular idea, whether it is political or religious or athletic, the more that gets written down into your brain and the more that becomes your reality. So that is why when you go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they repeat the same stories, and you celebrate the same holidays that reinforce that, you do the prayers, and you say these things over and over again, those are the neural connections that get stimulated and strengthened. That is a strong part of why religion and spirituality make use of various practices valuable for writing those beliefs strongly into who you are.

Let me present some of the data from the studies we have done. We have looked at a number of different religious and spiritual practices over the last decade or so. I am just going to present a couple of snippets from that.

These are a type of scan called a SPECT scan, which stands for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. The SPECT scans look at blood flow in the brain. We capture a picture of a person's brain when they are at rest or when they are in some kind of comparison state, and then when they are engaged in the practice, a practice like meditation, for example.

This is actually a slice through the brain. You are slicing through the brain, popping the top of the head off, and looking at what areas of the brain are the most active. The red areas are more active than what you see in the yellow, and then ultimately in the purple and the black areas. In this part of the brain called the frontal lobes, which I have labeled as an "attention area," because it helps focus our attention, we see a lot more of this red activity while the person is actively engaged in meditation than when the person is in the baseline state.

In the normal waking state, which was the baseline state, there is still a fair amount of activity in the frontal lobes because you have to be ready to attend to whatever is going on around you. But it is activated that much more when the person does this particular practice. I mentioned earlier the parietal lobe, which often functions as the orienting part of the brain. We have argued in some of our hypotheses that when people engage in these practices in a very deep way, they do two things. First, you are focusing on something, usually it is a sacred object or an image or something like that, but, second, you also screen out irrelevant information. As you do this, more and more information that normally goes to the orienting parts of your brain doesn't go there. So it keeps trying to give you a sense of your self, an orientation of that self in the world, but it no longer has the information upon which to do that.

And if you look at the orientation area, it goes dramatically down in its activity during the meditation practice. It is mostly yellow and just a little bit of red, compared to what you see in the normal waking state. So this area of the brain becomes much less active. We think this is part of what is associated with somebody losing that sense of self. They feel at one with God, at one with their spiritual mantra, whatever it is they are looking at. This was a group of Tibetan Buddhist meditators.

We also looked Franciscan nuns in prayer. We saw some interesting similarities and differences. The nuns were doing a prayer called centering prayer, which is kind of meditation. They were focusing on a particular phrase or prayer. It is much more verbally based, I guess, than the meditation of the Tibetans. Again, one of the similarities we saw was a fair amount of increase in this red activity in the frontal lobes. So they activated their frontal lobes as they were focusing on this particular prayer or phrase from the Bible.

They also activated the IPL or parietal lobe area. There is a much bigger glob of red in the prayer scan than what you see in the baseline scan. This is part of that verbal conceptual area in the temporal lobes, in the parietal lobes, that helps us think about abstract ideas and language. We didn't see this in the Buddhist meditators, who had a more visual practice.

But we did see a similarity of decreases of activity in this orienting part of the brain; again, it's all more yellow with just a little bit of red, compared to what we saw in the original baseline state.

One of the more recent studies we did, which was very interesting, was a study of Pentecostals speaking in tongues. This was a much more exciting study for me because when you're looking at people who are meditating or in deep prayer, they're just sitting there and all the exciting stuff is going on inside, whereas when people are speaking in tongues all the exciting part is on the outside. Since I had never seen it before, I was actually pretty terrified as to what would happen. (Laughter.) Part of it is I have to know when to give the people this injection of radioactive material -- we can talk about some of the details of this later on. (Laughter.) They don't know that I'm doing it, so I had to know when to do it.

We had to come up with a different baseline because obviously if I showed you a person's scan while he or she was simply resting quietly, versus up and about and dancing and singing in tongues, of course you would see all kinds of changes in the brain.

So the comparison state here was doing gospel-singing worship. They were up and about, dancing around, singing in English, compared to up and about, dancing around, singing but singing in tongues. One of the most interesting findings we saw in this particular study -- These are four slices of the brain while they were singing, so these are just different levels through the brain --

CROMARTIE: It's the same brain, right?

NEWBERG: It's the same brain.

The next slide is going to be the same person, now speaking in tongues. If you look in the frontal lobe area, where the arrows are pointing, as I toggle back and forth, you can see there's a lot less activity in the frontal lobes when the person is speaking in tongues. So when they started to speak in tongues, and we see this in all the people we studied, their frontal lobe activity goes down.

This actually makes a lot of sense because in contrast to the meditators and nuns, who are focusing on doing something, the way the Pentecostals describe speaking in tongues is they are not focusing on doing it; they let it happen. They just let their own will go away and allow this whole thing to take place. They don't feel like they're in control of this process. And the findings on the scan at least support the phenomenological experience they have.

I'm sure we'll get into a lot of interesting philosophical discussions on, "What is the reality here?" Obviously, for the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they say this is God or the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them. What one might argue in that context is, "Your brain shuts down so you can allow the Holy Spirit to speak through you; this is how it works." On the other hand, if you don't believe speaking in tongues is really a spiritual event, then you might say, "Perhaps there's some other part of the brain that is taking over, that is causing this thing to happen. It's not the normal parts of the brain doing it, but it's some other part of the brain."

At this point we don't have that answer and this is, again, the big epistemological question about how we understand what reality is, how we begin to think about our beliefs about reality and what we can say, ultimately, about what these scans mean in the context of what's really going on. But I think there's still some very valuable information in at least understanding what's going on inside the person who is having this particular experience.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: (Off mike) -- basal ganglia?

NEWBERG: I'm sorry, I'm trying to keep things tight for time. The basal ganglia are involved in behavior and also emotional responses. What you see in this case is a lot of asymmetry in the basal ganglia. One side is much more active than the other during the singing exercise, but during speaking in tongues, the activity on that side goes down and there's a much more symmetric activity. What this means I don't know for sure, but the implication, of course, is that it has something to do with the emotional content and how the person is responding to this experience. But other than saying something broadly about that, it's very difficult for me to say.

Just to finish up this particular slide, the other thing we have found in almost all our subjects is the thalamus becomes much more active; you can see it's much brighter during speaking in tongues. It was also much brighter in activity during prayer and meditation. The thalamus is a big relay in the brain; it allows all of our sensory information to come up to our brain. Because of that, I think, it makes sense that these are very active states for people, and, therefore, we see the thalamus reflecting that. In fact, the only practice where we saw a decrease in the thalamus, which I'm not going to present here today, was transcendental meditation, but that's really much more of a relaxation process, at least for the individuals who were doing it for us. So I think that may explain why that was a little different.

One thing that's very critical whenever you come across a study about these practices is what exactly is the practice and what exactly is the person doing, because there are many circumstances where people say "Yes, I do centering prayer," or "I do Tibetan Buddhist meditation," and there are lots of different subtypes within that. It becomes really important to know exactly what that particular approach is and how it is being studied.

So let me just wrap up in the next couple of slides here. Obviously, part of what I'm supposed to talk about is why there is such a persistence of religion. Part of why I went through this process is to say all of us have beliefs. Everything we think or feel, whether it's political, spiritual or scientific, is a belief; it's a way in which our brain is helping us make some sense out of the world, and it is doing the best it can. So if we're talking about religion as affecting our brain and our beliefs, we have to acknowledge that it must have some pretty profound effect on our brain if it is going to be something that has such a profound effect on us as people.

I have argued in the past that the brain's role in our overall life is to help us make some sense out of the world, and in so doing, to help maintain us. That's how it helps us to survive. We have to know not to cross the street when there's a red light, and what's okay to eat, and what's not okay to eat. It helps to make sure we do all the right things in the world.

It also helps us transcend ourselves, and by that I don't necessarily mean a religious transcendence, although that may be the ultimate expression of this, but we always grow and develop over time. There is this continual struggle, if you will, between wanting to maintain the status quo within ourselves and also knowing that we need to adapt and change as we go through our life, and our brain is capable of doing both. It holds onto beliefs very strongly to helps us figure out what we need to do in our world, but it can also change over time. All of us are still the same person we were when we were three years old, but we've learned a lot, and we've changed a lot over time. As we've gone through our lives, our brain has changed with us to adapt and help us survive.

Let me pause for a second and ask what we talk about when we're talking about people who are not religious. What is it about atheists that is different? Are they different, or are they the same? There is some evidence to suggest there are differences. Some of you may have read a book called The God Gene. It was an interesting study that showed there was a significant, although relatively mild, correlation between a gene that coded for what's called the VMAT-2 receptor, which has to do with serotonin and dopamine, two very important neurotransmitters in the brain, and feelings of self-transcendence. The fact that there's a correlation between the neurotransmitters and some feeling that's related to spirituality is interesting. Maybe there is something physiologically to this.

In our studies, we found -- going back to the thalamus that we talked about earlier -- that people who were long-term practitioners and meditators tended to have a lot more asymmetry: One side of their thalamus was much more active than the other, compared to the normal population of people who are not long-term meditators. I don't know what that means per se, but it seems to suggest that the ways in which we process information about the world might be fundamentally different.

One of the questions we have to ask is, if you are a non-believer or an atheist, is that the result of a lack of having such experiences, or are you having these experiences and then ultimately rejecting them? One of the examples we talked about in our last book was a woman who had a near-death experience. She described it as the full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, "That was my brain dying." That was her interpretation of it, whereas other people have that experience, and they say, "That was me transcending into the next realm; that was my spiritual experience, and it was transformative; it changed who I was."

CROMARTIE: What's the name of that book?

NEWBERG: My book? Why We Believe What We Believe.

CROMARTIE: I'm just into promoting everyone's book, so I wanted to make sure we get that on the table.

NEWBERG: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. (Chuckles.)

So how does this work? Why is it that God doesn't go away? I think religion and spirituality, when we look at these in very broad terms, help us in the same ways that the brain tries to help us, in terms of maintaining ourselves and transcending ourselves. When you look at the vast amount of literature and data that has been collected, we find religion often is extremely supportive of our behaviors: It helps us in terms of our mental health, our ability to cope with various issues and problems, and therefore it tends to be pretty good at helping us maintain ourselves.

It also happens to be pretty good at providing a system by which we transcend ourselves. When you look at most religions, there are a number of points along the way, as you go from birth to adolescence and marriage and ultimately old age, there are approaches and processes in place that enable you to transcend yourself from one moment to the next. The ultimate expression of this self-transcendence may be that we all can achieve some greater being: We can do something a little bit better; we can become better than we are, and transcend ourselves in that way.

So my argument has been that both science and religion become very important in this whole dialogue and that we need to understand the perspectives of what both contribute to this discussion to try to better understand the totality of our universe and the ways in which we make sense of that universe through our belief systems.

Where do we go from here? We have a lot of new data we are working on, and one of the thoughts I've come up with recently is can we create something similar to the human genome -- perhaps we can call it the religionome -- with which we can begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological and social and cultural perspectives as well. This could be an important thing to do now; I don't think we've ever been able to do it before because we just didn't have the methodologies.

Part of that, I think, is to do longitudinal studies. At the moment, we're doing a lot of cross-sectional analyses, where we just take people today and study them. But we're trying now to look at the effects of doing these practices over the long haul. What happens if I started all of you today on a meditation program? Where would your brain be in two weeks, in eight weeks, in six months, a year, 10 years; what would happen? Would all of you be transformed? Would some of you be transformed, and if so, would you be transformed in the same way or different ways? We can look at whether or not this ultimately has health benefits as well as more global, societal benefits.

We've also done some very interesting -- or at least, I hope there's going to be some really interesting work -- with an online survey of people's spiritual experiences, where we're getting both demographic information about who they are, their gender, age, ethnic background, religious background, and information about the spiritual experiences they have had. So we get narratives, and we also get evaluations about how open they are to other people's beliefs, how they respond to other people's beliefs, and I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of data. A lot of this is going to come out in some of our next work. But I just want to point out how many different ways we can try to better understand how God, ultimately, and how religion changes your brain in the long haul.

There are some interesting questions we can ask about this. My colleagues and I have started to ask people what God looks like. We asked them to draw a picture of God. If I asked all of you right now to sit down and draw a picture of God, what would you draw? When we asked an eight-year-old, she drew this,

which is remarkably similar to a 35-year-old gentleman, who -- (Laughter) -- did that:

A great article that came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued that if you look at the outline in the Sistine Chapel painting, doesn't it look remarkably like the human brain? The author even argued that this is the brain stem, and then here is the frontal lobe reaching out to Adam, who's over there.

This was done by a college student, and you can see sometimes people are very literal about how they think about God, and sometimes it becomes a very abstract concept. One of the things we're doing now is culling through about 200 or 300 different pictures of God to see what people are drawing and how it relates to their religious and spiritual ideas. A lot of times people think fundamentalists are very concrete in their ways of thinking about God, and that they tend to think of the old man in the clouds and all that. But as it turns out, that's not always the case, and people get very, very abstract in the ways they think about this concept.

We can also talk about: What does God feel like to you? If you experience God's presence, what is it like? Is it an emotional thing, is it a sensory thing? What is God's personality? We certainly know a lot about God's personality from the Bible; there is the wrathful, vengeful God, but there's also a forgiving God, and there are many different attributes we give to God. I think it is particularly interesting, then, to see how that relates to who we are, what are our personalities, what are our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world, and how do we then imbue that in our ideas about God? Are there certain limitations our brain puts on us, in terms of our ability to think about what God is all about?

I would argue the brain ultimately is a believing machine; it has to be. It's trying to make some sense out of the world, and it puts together a perspective on our world, fills in a lot of gaps, doesn't bother to let us know about it, and yet somehow we use that information to go through our lives as if we know what's going on. So beliefs ultimately affect everything we do, they affect every part of our lives. And as we go through our lives, everything that happens, every person we talk to, affects the way we ultimately believe. So beliefs are the essence of our being, and in a continuing effort to understand our world we will always have spiritual and religious ideas. We will have ideas about the ultimacy of the universe and the ultimacy of who we are and how we relate to that universe. I think as long as that continues to happen, as long as our brain continues to function in the ways that it does, that these ideas of religion and spirituality and God are not going to go away.

Here are a couple of websites if any of you are interested. We have a Center for Spirituality and the Mind that we've started at Penn, which is helping us consolidate a lot of the research. If any of you are interested in that survey I was mentioning you can go to the website, neurotheology.net. I'll be happy to end it there.

CROMARTIE: You all know David well, not only through his columns but his books, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive. David has a new book coming out called How Success Happens. Part of the research on that book, and I'll let David tell us how much, is rooted in brain chemistry and brain research. That's why we thought it would be great to have David respond to Professor Newberg. David?

David Brooks

DAVID BROOKS: Thank you, Michael. I didn't bring any slides but since Andrew had some slides with brain anatomy, I thought I'd actually perform brain surgery -- (Laughter) -- on Michael's brain, sort of pick it apart. And I forgot to bring my bottle opener, if anybody -- (Laughter).

I got into this half ass-backwards. As some of you have noticed, I'm not a brain surgeon, although it doesn't really seem that hard -- (Laughter) -- but I started writing about social mobility and that brought me to learning, and that brought me to this. So for about five or six years I've been reading a fair number of books, although obviously I'm not an expert, and I'll get many scientific things wrong if I wander into that field.

When I was at college, I became a boxing manager for a friend of mine who entered the Golden Gloves, and we decided we'd do boxing the University of Chicago way; we wouldn't actually practice, we'd just read books about boxing. (Laughter.) So I was his manager, and he was the Kosher Killer, and through a series of unfortunate events, we entered the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, and he got passes because people forfeited or got sick or didn't show up -- (Laughter) -- so we made it to the Chicago semifinals. We walk in the locker room, and he was a heavyweight surrounded by huge Polish and African-American guys. It was good match; it lasted 92 seconds. (Laughter.) So it's through this process of reading rather than doing that I've entered this field.

Once you get into it, it is fascinating. It is an addictive field. One of the best ways that's been used to explain how complicated the brain is, is to imagine taking the Rose Bowl, filling it to the brim with spaghetti, and then shrinking it down to three pounds, and that's roughly the complexity of this thing. I always think about that when I see those brain scan pictures. But once you get into the fMRI pictures, the other kinds of pictures, you get these amazing reactions, which I think teach us something.

I've done several brain scans of my friends. E.J. Dionne, whom many of you know, has a Floridian lobe in his brain; if you mention the Florida election returns from 2000, it literally explodes. (Laughter.) Michael's brain actually stopped adapting after he was the Philadelphia 76ers mascot, which is true, he was. I mention that at every single event. (Laughter.) So his brain still thinks he's covered with fur. (Laughter.) My friend Reihan here -- Reihan and I worked together for several years -- if you look at his brain, you get a video of the Iron Man festival. And Hillary Clinton has no limbic system, but she has testicular fortitude. (Laughter.)

But I think the bottom line is there is this incredible revolution going on in brain research. To me, it's a bit like the revolution of psychology or psychiatry that Freud started, except for this time I think it's correct. What interests me is that when Freud happened, it had this tremendous effect on the culture at large, on the way people thought about human nature and politics. The New Republic in the 1950s had a weekly Freud column, where a Freudian analyst would write a column about politics from a Freudian perspective -- so, "The Soviet Union was particularly anal this week," or something. (Laughter.) Freudianism literally had that effect, and I'm convinced -- and I think it's already happening -- that this tremendous revolution in neuroscience and related fields is going to have the same effect on culture and the way we think about human nature and religion and everything else.

That's what I'm going to talk about; not so much the science, but what I think are some of the themes driving the science that will spill out and are spilling out into the general culture. The bottom line of it all is we are now discovering the tremendous power of the unconscious, of the levels of cognition we're not consciously aware of, that shape our thoughts. If you look at behavioral economics, if you look at neuroscience, if you look at psychology, if you look at field after field, in theology, in literary criticism, people are taking this template of unconscious cognitive processes and applying it to how we think.

I'm going to tell this story vis-à-vis religion. In my book, I really don't focus on religion, but you can't help reading this field without seeing religious thinking. I'm going to tell it as a narrative, which is a bit of a simplification, but not a total simplification. I just think it's an easier way to think about how people in this field are affecting the way we think about religion and spirituality.

In 2000 Tom Wolfe published an essay called "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," which criticized some of the hyper-materialism at the core of some of this, especially, I think, as it was years ago. This was the argument that there is no place for the human soul, not in Andrew's work but in general. There's no place for the human soul; we're all just a bunch of material parts that determine who we are. There are diseases or brain conditions, I think there's one called TLE, which leads to the spiritual hallucinations. There's a guy who developed a magnetic helmet that he puts around people's heads, and it's supposed to lead to more spiritual states.

There are neuropeptides, chemicals in the brain that can utterly transform who you are and how you think. One of the most famous is oxytocin, which is this little thing that, if you inject it into prairie voles, you get adulterous prairie voles who suddenly become monogamous. Oxytocin is released after sex, it's released while mothers are nursing, and it changes the way people behave. One of the most famous people in the annals of brain research is Phineas Gage -- do you guys know who Phineas Gage was? He was this guy who was working on a railroad, and a rail spike went up through his brain. Before the accident he was a nice, normal, responsible guy; after the accident, he was a jerk and self-destructive. And so this --

NEWBERG: True story. He lived, and cognitively he was fine.

BROOKS: Right, but I guess you'd say his discipline eroded or --

NEWBERG: Right.

BROOKS: So in some sense the material act of the spike going through his head changed what some would say was his soul and his moral nature.

The second thing that has eroded the sense that we're religious or spiritual creatures is the sector of this community that doesn't believe in free will. I was at UCLA a couple weeks ago, and I asked a scientist what he did research on. He said, "I do research on why we think we possess free will." (Laughter.) And I said, "Is there any doubt about whether we actually maybe do possess free will?" He said, "No, nobody believes that; it's why we confabulate the illusion of free will," and that's what he was studying. He's part of a section of neuroscientists -- but not a small section -- who have dismissed the idea of free will. But I think there's no question this research, taken as a whole, diminishes free will because so much of what happens, happens below the level of awareness.

Third is the reaction against the idea of the blank slate and the idea that we had no genetic programming. There was, especially years ago, and among some people, this hardcore belief that we're all genetic programming, or we're largely genetic programming, and that we're just bigger versions of ants, and that a lot of what's happening has been driven by our genes and that the relationship between a mother and a child has no effect on how that child grows up. There's a book called The Nurture Assumption, which carried that argument to its extreme, and very serious people like Stephen Pinker buy a lot of that.

David Brooks

This was the hardcore materialist impulse, which is an element of this research. But my perception -- again, I'm telling this chronologically -- is that over the last some number of years, this hardcore materialism has eroded, and the field is getting wetter, if you want to put it that way. It's getting mushier. It's getting more open to spirituality. I think there are a whole series of things that have happened, ideas that come out of the field that are permeating the culture, which leave room for spirituality and also explain it.

One is the plasticity of the brain, the incredible adaptiveness, the fire-together, wire-together idea that we're not hardcore driven by material things, that we're wired to adapt to environment and that the nature-nurture distinction is a bogus one, and that therefore, this plasticity makes it a less material, less predetermined organ.

Second, again, is the power of the unconscious, the power of things that happen below reason and rational awareness. Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at the University of Virginia -- well, let me start with another University of Virginia guy named Timothy Wilson, who wrote a book called Strangers to Ourselves. He has a statistic in that book that every moment, the human mind can take in roughly 11 million pieces of information, of which we can be consciously aware of only about 40. All the rest is coming in there and being processed, but we're just not consciously aware of it.

Jonathan Haidt, who's his colleague at Virginia, says think of the brain as a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious part of the mind, the elephant is everything else. The boy is not stronger than the elephant, and if the boy can't control the elephant, the creature in total is going to have a screwed-up life, but if they work together through a series of habits, then they can lead a successful life. But it is the relative strength between the little boy on top of the elephant and all the cognitive processes below the level of awareness that is the elephant.

The third thing that has wetted up the field is the forced-on modesty. People in this field, like the rest of us, do not come by modesty naturally, but as the field has developed, so many unconscious biases have been exposed, so much of the tenuousness Andrew talked about has been revealed, there is so much we get wrong; we are misled so easily that it's hard to think the brain is a simple mechanical thing or that thinking is a mechanical thing. It's tenuous, and it grows out of this mystery of emergence rather than being mechanical, and so that's another thing I think has wetted up the field.

The fourth thing is the power of emotion. The Doctor Spock idea from Star Trek, that reason and emotion are two different things, is completely wrong. Emotion is what we use to assign value to things, and without emotion you can't make decisions. Antonio Damasio is a researcher at the University of Southern California who had a patient named Elliott. Elliott was like Gage, although Elliott's still alive: He was living a perfectly normal life, he suffered a stroke, and it robbed him of the ability to feel or process emotion.

He could look at photos of the most horrific things and know he was supposed to feel something, but was incapable of feeling those things. His life deteriorated similarly to Gage's; he could not focus his attention enough to get any piece of work done. He divorced his wife, he married someone who was completely inappropriate, he invested horribly, he then divorced the second woman, and his life was utterly destroyed because he lost the ability to process emotion. And when you lose that ability, you lose the ability to value, to ask, "What do I want, what don't I want?" And so his life became chaotic.

Another of Damasio's patients was a guy who had also suffered the inability to process emotion, and they had a meeting one time. At the end, Damasio said to him, "When do you want to come back?" And the guy said, "I could come back Monday or Tuesday." Damasio said, "Well, which day would you prefer?" And the guy spent the next 25 minutes describing the pluses and minuses of Monday and the pluses and minuses of Tuesday. He could describe the pluses and minuses, but he was incapable of reaching a decision because he couldn't assign value. Damasio and his colleagues gathered around this guy, as those 25 minutes stretched on, and they said they wanted to beat him up -- (Laughter) -- because he just could not reach a decision. But they were fascinated by it. Finally, Damasio said, "What about Tuesday?" And the guy said, "Fine." (Laughter.) Because he had lost the ability to process emotion, he couldn't process decisions.

Fifth, the incredible power of love and attachment. Andrew mentioned the importance of emotion and memory, the incredible power of love and attachment in forming memories, in forming how neurons wire together. It is the dominant thing that affects our lives, which is never appreciated when we talk about education, especially in Washington. I always say if you went into a congressional committee and talked about love, they would look at you like you were Oprah. But the fact is if you are going to be serious about education and all sorts of mental processes, you are not talking about the real stuff if you are not talking about the emotional engagement.

The sixth process that has wetted up the field and made it more open to spirituality is the evidence of these elevated states, which Andrew has described.

The seventh is the documented evidence of moral judgment. Haidt, the guy from the University of Virginia, has done some research on that. He argues moral judgment has grown out of the very primordial emotions of disgust, starting with food and then elevating up, and that disgust is something you can actually see and look at in the brain.

The eighth are these moments of self-transcendence. One of the things that surprised me as I started reading about the field is that people in the field really take meditation seriously. I always thought, "That is a bunch of New Age stuff. Who takes that seriously?" But people in the field actually do. So what you have had over these years is hardcore scientific research, guys in labs taking the process of spirituality and religion quite seriously and seeing actual physical evidence of it. That said, if you read the literature, there is, as in much of the scientific community, in some quarters, a fanatically militant atheism, the idea that anybody who believes in God must be completely stupid. That is in the field, especially among the geneticists, in my experience. (Chuckles.)

What I have tried to describe is the hardcore materialism Tom Wolfe worried about, then all these findings, which lead you to think in more spiritual ways, and then finally the question is, does that mean the science is going to support people who are religious? Is it going to lead to a much more religious society as the ideas permeate? The answer here is not that simple, in part because the people who do the work still work within a Darwinian framework, that things survive because they succeed in Darwinian terms, and religions that succeed must serve some evolutionary purpose. That Darwinian framework keeps it different from religious thinking.

Second, there still is a mundane mindset in this research. There is not much room for the majesty of art. They are analyzing people who are stuck in little machines in labs, and it doesn't inspire you. So there is a whole inspiring level of human existence that doesn't exist in the research.

Third, and this is a challenge for a lot of religious people, there is a firm conviction -- and I think with tons of evidence -- that there is no distinction between the spiritual aspect of life and the physical body. If you have some dualistic notion that the soul is separate from the body, this research destroys that.

Finally, and I think this is where the whole field of research will lead us as a society, it recognizes the power and reality of spiritual processes. But I would say in general, the literature treats any specific belief system as completely arbitrary. It knows that we have these beliefs. It knows that the mind is really good at making up stories. Some people in Jerusalem a few thousand years ago made up one story, another guy made up another story, there are still other stories. But it treats all of these stories as completely the same and arbitrary.

I think if you read the research, you will see there is no reason to think one religion is any different or any better than the other. Where the research winds up ultimately is, frankly, at Buddhism, the idea that the self is this dynamic process. There is some generic spirituality that may or may not be tethered to a higher being, and importantly, to the idea that we are social creatures. There is no such thing as one individual brain. Our brains are all merged together in a series of ultimate feedback loops. So I think when you look at this research, which is going to have this effect on society as everybody else pigeons off it, it won't lead to what Tom Wolfe feared. It won't lead to the idea that we are just material creatures and atheism is the answer. It will lead to soft-core Buddhists. (Laughter.) Thank you.

CROMARTIE: Thank you, David.

Kathleen Parker

KATHLEEN PARKER, WASHINGTON POST WRITER'S GROUP: My amygdala is so highly aroused at this moment -- (Laughter) -- that I'm not sure I can formulate a question. (Laughter.)

BROOKS: Quick. We'll put you in the scanner down the street. (Laughter.)

PARKER: It seemed like a good question at the time. (Chuckles.) Way over my head, so to speak. First a comment and then a question for Dr. Newberg. The comment is, what would happen if we all started meditating, and how would that look? I can only give you anecdotal evidence here, but I tried this a few years ago, and I became so at one with my world and so mellow that my editor asked me to stop. (Laughter.) So it would probably be the end of this conference for starters.

But I wanted to get back to the question of beliefs, and you were talking about how much comfort we find in people who share our beliefs, and then how threatened we are when we meet people who believe otherwise. But at the same time, we are fairly contemptuous of people when their beliefs become fluid, when they become, in the political world, flip-floppers. So I am wondering if your scans show any evidence to suggest why that is. It would seem counterintuitive. It seems like we should admire people who are willing to reconsider things and adjust and adapt their beliefs to our own. But instead, we don't like that much.

NEWBERG: No.

PARKER: And is that tied to trust? Is that something that has manifestations within one of those lobes you were pointing to?

NEWBERG: It is a great question. I'll probably speculate more than I will be able to refer to hard science. On one hand, I think all of our brains are in this constant battle, whether it is between conscious and unconscious or a definitive answer versus vagueness and uncertainty or selfishness versus unselfishness. Our brains like both to some degree, but ultimately, I think we probably lean a little bit more strongly toward something we can grasp and that is clear to us. Whenever we have things that are uncertain -- I think the problem with flip-flopping is not so much that we don't respect the possibilities, I think we are okay when people say, "I am really thinking hard about this, and I'm not sure."

PARKER: But even if they come back to our side.

NEWBERG: Yeah.

PARKER: Even if they are changing their mind --

NEWBERG: Because I don't know where they are. I think what happens, whether you want to phrase it in terms of trust or lack of certainty, is that when you don't know exactly where somebody stands, that is very problematic for us because we don't know which way they really think and which way they really feel, and do they really agree with us?

Then we get into the whole issue of when people start to go against our ways of thinking. One of the problems is, as I always like to say, when somebody disagrees with you, your brain has two options. One is that you are wrong and that the other person is right. And that is typically a position the brain doesn't want to be in because that means we don't understand the world as well as we had thought we did. So the far easier option is to think, "They are wrong, and we are right." And if they are wrong, and they keep trying to convince us that they are right, then they are being duplicitous and insincere and maybe just plain evil. If we see somebody go away from us, and then we see them start to come back -- now we really aren't sure. Are they deceiving us? Or are they really being honest?

That triggers those alarms because we like the consistency of a particular approach. It is very hard on our brain when we lose consistency. The only data I have that may address your particular question is that in this last book, we talk about the scan results we did. We had atheists come in to our lab, and we asked them to meditate on God. Their frontal lobes in different directions. It was almost like you were seeing cognitive dissonance, like they were trying to focus on something they really didn't want to focus on. That creates problems for us. The parts of our brain that want to help us to focus on something and grab something have trouble with it. That sets off the emotional alarms, and then we start to reject it, so --

It would be very interesting to see how people respond when they are looking at individuals. There are several interesting brain-imaging studies where you get people to play games where if you cooperate, you get a certain response. If you don't cooperate, you can really screw the other person, which may be really good for you, but then you could actually lose if they don't cooperate with you. You could probably set something up where you try to find how people respond when somebody does not always respond in a consistent way and whether or not that becomes more problematic than people who you know are going to be for you or against you. I haven't seen any studies of that, but that would be really interesting.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

BRADLEY HAGERTY: I have a lot of questions, but I just want to make sure I heard David correctly. Did you say that the science shows there is no distinction between soul and body?

BROOKS: The most famous writer on this is, again, Antonio Damasio. He wrote a book called Descartes' Error. I think his work is pretty widely accepted that -- Another way to put it is, as William James said -- let's see if I get this right -- we don't fear the bear and then run away in the woods, we run away in the woods and then fear the bear, that our physical response to fear precedes the emotion of fear. If you are driving and you nearly get in an accident, you slam on the brakes, and then you're sitting in your car, and then the wave of emotion hits you. I think that would be the general way it would be described.

BRADLEY HAGERTY: I'm curious, Andy, is everyone universal on this issue because that is a materialistic, reductionist view --

NEWBERG: It destroys the idea that the soul is separate from the body.

BRADLEY HAGERTY: Right. Is it your understanding that pretty much all mainstream scientists believe that? Also, would it be true to say that pretty much all scientists believe there is nothing more than this material world? We are getting into the issue of otherness, God, all of that. But has science made a -- I mean, is there disagreement?

NEWBERG: I think there is a fair amount of disagreement. Some of the Gallup polls -- I'm not sure if it is Gallup, but I have seen a few polls of scientists at various times. Certainly relative to the general public, there are a lot more scientists who look at the world from a pretty materialistic perspective. That being said, I think there are still a lot of scientists who aren't -- who are struggling with this. In fact, you mentioned genetics, and we just had Francis Collins talk at Penn.

I'm sure most of you know who he is, but he is the head of the Human Genome Project. He has pretty much gone completely to the religious perspective, understanding the genome as a way of proving God's existence. Now, he has probably gone a little bit more extreme than most others, but there are a lot of people, I think, who the more we investigate -- and whether it is through biology, or physics, especially as you get up across some of these boundary questions about consciousness and the origins of the universe and all that, it becomes a much more philosophical issue. While they may not necessarily go over to a religious understanding, I think they tend to feel they can't exclude the possibility that there is this other dimension. The point is well taken that there are a lot of scientists and a lot of non-scientists who believe, almost, in what we talk about, like scientism, that it is just the material world, and science is going to answer everything that we need to know about it.

But there also are, I think, a growing number of people who are acutely aware of the problems with that. While they may not necessarily be willing to go over to the religious side, they are at least somewhat open to the possible perspective --

BROOKS: Mystery.

NEWBERG: To the mystery and to exploring it. I think that it is growing. If you go back 15 or 20 years, then I think a huge number -- I don't know if we could have even done this research 10 or 15 years ago -- but there has been growth. One other aspect I think has led to this is the healthcare side, because when you interview cancer patients and hospice patients, and you find out how important religion is in their lives. All of these biomedical scientists who can't do anything else for the patient have realized how important that spiritual side is for helping them at least heal or cope with themselves in the face of this end-of-life catastrophe. So it is very important.

BROOKS: I just wanted to add one other very important moment in the intellectual history of this gigantic consciousness debate. Scientists have no clue how to explain how the mind emerges from matter. There are gigantic conferences, thousands of books, and it is humbling. Some of them think, "Oh, we will get there eventually." But I think it has been a humbling process because people have no clue. And for some of the militant atheists, the people who believe in God have the straightforward narrative of how mind emerges from matter -- God did this; it's a very simple story -- and they have no story. So I think it has been a humbling experience, which, again, has opened more room for spirituality.

NEWBERG: To me, one of the most important questions I always want to look at, and part of why I got into all of this, is this issue -- We are talking about beliefs. We are saying the brain is processing all this information. So that means whatever we think about the world is basically an interpretation. Given that, how do we know if what we think in here is commensurate with what is out there? If you think about it, the only way to prove that from a scientific or philosophical perspective is to somehow get outside of your brain and look and say, "This is what I think inside, this is what is out there. And this is what matches up or doesn't match up."

Again, when you look to the consciousness debate, the big problem is there is no way to do that, or at least that we can tell from a scientific perspective. But what is fascinating is that when people enter into these mystical states, they say they are outside of themselves. They have that oneness. They feel intimately connected with the universe, and their self, their ego self, their biological self is not really there, so to speak. Now, for those of us who haven't had those experiences, which includes me, I don't know what that means. And I certainly don't know if that means they are really able to do that. But I think if this is the only place where anybody has ever described that, we really have to study this because it may be the only way to answer those big questions. At least that has been my feeling: that it may be the only way we can tap into what reality actually is, and whether what we experience is what really is out there.

The other thing that comes along with those experiences, which always blows my mind and makes the hairs on the back of my neck always stand up, is that their experience of reality, when they have that experience, is greater than our experience of reality right now. The best way I can explain that is to say when you have a dream, and no matter how real that dream feels, you wake up, and what is the first thing you say? "Oh, it was a dream," which automatically relegates it to an inferior level of reality. When people have a mystical experience, they do the same thing, except instead of the dream being the not-so-real, it is this reality that seems unreal. And of course this reality is where science is. So what do you do with that? It is a real problem.

Eve Conant

EVE CONANT, NEWSWEEK: I have a Jeremiah Wright question. (Laughter.)

NEWBERG: I don't know him myself. (Chuckles.) You want me to scan his brain?

CONANT: Similar to what we asked Michael Gerson, though, obviously for a supporter of Obama, seeing what Wright is saying repeatedly would be, as was mentioned before, an attack on the amygdala. With the press repeating it and with him repeating it, you are getting the use-it-or-lose-it problem with neurons and molecular messengers. So from a neurological point of view, what in terms of outreach and faith outreach and general message, what could the Obama campaign do to lessen that blow to the amygdalas of all of Obama's supporters?

NEWBERG: Right. It is a very relevant question. I have to think about this. What we do seem to see in how the brain works, and some of the research nowadays is looking at these mirror neurons in the brain, and how we reflect what other people are thinking and feeling. So if I got up right now and started spewing out a lot of negative angry talk about whatever, it would get a lot of you riled up.

CROMARTIE: Especially the moderator.

NEWBERG: Especially the moderator. (Chuckles.) So to some degree, part it is the repetition of a different perspective -- That is how all campaign ads go. You keep harping on the negative of the opposing candidate and hopefully the positive of your candidate. Again, it works in both ways because when you bring up a negative about somebody, our brain automatically associates the negative with that person, whether or not it has any basis in reality or not, and it is harder to shake that.

From the Obama campaign perspective, what they would need to do is, one, try to somehow diffuse the emotional content of what is going on. In other words, if people are getting riled up, if people are experiencing that amygdala response, then you have to head toward a calming of emotions, a more measured response, and that would hopefully suppress some of the things people are thinking. But then you also have the ideological issue of how do you deal with that particular -- One of the questions that came up to me, which I think has to be dealt with in some way, is if Wright has been talking to Obama for 20 years, what has that done to Obama's brain? How has that affected his neurons and so forth? (Laughter.) Even though he doesn't talk like that, it goes back to what is in the unconscious.

Now, it is unfair to hold somebody accountable for their unconscious. But on the other hand, what do you do with that? I think some of that stuff needs to be addressed. I think that is part of what we all unconsciously think about. How does he get this out of his system, so to speak?

BROOKS: There is an incipient little Jeremiah Wright sitting in the brain.

NEWBERG: Yeah, right, exactly. (Laughter.)

BROOKS: Maybe if we activated the Manchurian candidates. (Laughter.)

Jonathan Martin

JONATHAN MARTIN, THE POLITICO: This is kind of off-topic, but David mentioned it earlier, and I wanted to follow up before I forgot it. Could you expound on your view about McCain being a "pre-Christian" candidate?

BROOKS: (Chuckles.) Well, this is a little off-topic, but I'll just do it in --

MARTIN: But you're right here, and we have you here so --

BROOKS: I think McCain has an extremely acute moral sensitivity, but it is aroused by a sense of dishonor. It grows through his military experience, but comes out of a stoic approach of honor, loyalty and a code of excellence that, when violated, unwraps the universe and must be attacked. He once took me gambling at a casino, and he taught me how to shoot craps. I did very well, because he told me where to put the chips, until we got to the moment where we were going to cash in our winnings. And because he is incapable of waiting in line, he made me leave the casino with $500 worth of chips I couldn't cash in.

But I asked him as we were walking --

CROMARTIE: This is on the record, right? (Laughter.)

BROOKS: For part of it, there was a New Yorker reporter there, too. So I feel that could be on the record.

But I asked him, "This is not going to be friendly with a lot of social conservatives." And we had a little discussion about how he sees morality. He doesn't think a little craps is going to violate his honor. I do think that is a pretty traditional stoic belief in self-control. I think that is what motivates him. Can I say one thing about the last exchange here --

CROMARTIE: Yes, please.

BROOKS: -- while I have the microphone, and I won't blame you if you don't give it back to me. One of the things I worry about is getting the sense that there is this beastly side of human nature, which is the emotional side, and then the cool, reasonable side. And that is not true. Emotions are involved in the cool, reasonable side. I say that because there was an extremely stupid book by a guy named Drew Westen that came out last year called The Political Brain.

CHRIS LEHMANN, CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY: I reviewed it.

BROOKS: (Chuckles.) One of the things he said was Republicans are really good at emotion; Democrats are too rational and too reasonable. He had a bunch of scripts John Kerry should have used to attack George Bush. In two cases, the script involved Kerry at a debate saying, "Bush, you are a drunk. When you were drunk, you could have run over our kids. You're a drunk, you're a drunk, you're a drunk." (Laughter.) And he thinks that would have aroused the American people and their amygdalas would have kicked in, and they would have all voted Democratic. But that is a misreading -- (Laughter) -- of how emotion works. And so I don't know --

NEWBERG: It is certainly very complicated.

Mike Allen

MIKE ALLEN, THE POLITICO: Professor Newberg, you are a fantastic presenter. Thank you very much.

NEWBERG: Thank you.

ALLEN: We were entranced by the part where you were talking about speaking in tongues. I was interested in what you said about pausing to inject the radioactive --

NEWBERG: You want me to explain that better? (Chuckles.)

ALLEN: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the methodology. Second, I wonder if you could tell us, as specifically as you can, what you concluded happens physically when people are speaking in tongues. And I'm going to ask a quick question of David.

Do you mind just briefly elaborating on the point you made when you were talking about Darwinism, about religions that survive? I thought that was fascinating.

NEWBERG: One of the interesting things about methodologies is we talk a lot about several different ways of studying the brain. I mentioned SPECT imaging, which is what we use for a number of our studies. There is functional MRI. There is PET imaging. There are several other types. And they all have their advantages and disadvantages, especially in the context of studying religious phenomena. An fMRI is a great technique for doing a lot of stuff, but you have to be in the scanner while you are doing whatever it is you are doing. So it would be very hard to have somebody dancing in an MRI scanner. It is not feasible. You are lying on your back, first of all, and two, you can't --

BROOKS: There is not a lot of room in there.

NEWBERG: If you move at all, you really mess things up.

BROOKS: It could work for an Episcopalian. (Laughter.)

NEWBERG: It could work for an Episcopalian. (Laughter.) Wait, let me write that down. But it actually would be good for meditation, for example, where you are lying still. In fact, I just read an article by a person who was studying sitting meditation in an MRI. In the first thing I thought was, "I think it is a lousy paper because how can you do sitting meditation in an MRI?"

But anyway, with the speaking in tongues: When we use SPECT imaging, we start off the study by putting a small IV catheter is somebody's arm. This is before they do anything. Then we run a long line that comes from this catheter. The idea is that when you infuse a material -- We wind up infusing a small amount of a radioactive material into them, which is what allows our camera to pick up the pictures. This material follows some part of the brain's physiology. In this case, it follows blood flow. At the moment you give the injection, after a minute or two, it circulates in the body, gets up into the brain, and for all intents and purposes, gets locked into the brain.

For example, if I were to inject somebody here right now, and then we finished and I flew you up to Philadelphia, and I put you in the scanner, it would tell me what your brain was doing right now. So it is a very elegant method for getting a snapshot of a particular state. Because you already have the IV set up ahead of time, when I actually inject the material, you don't feel it. In fact, we have them with music, and we have them with their eyes closed. For a number of our studies, I'm not even in the room with the person. I can just be outside of the room, or I can come in behind them. I don't disturb them, don't affect them. I just give the material, then they keep doing what they are doing for the next 10, 15 minutes, and then we bring them back into the scanner. But it tells you what they were doing at that moment of that particular practice: meditation, prayer, or speaking in tongues. So it works very nicely to capture a particular moment.

Then when we looked at the scans -- to the second part of your question -- we saw a lot of different things going on. To me, one of the most important -- Going back to the fact that the frontal lobes go down: Normally they are active when we are purposely making speech, when we are purposely in control of our behaviors. So the fact that it was lower during the speaking in tongues, I think, is consistent with their subjective description of what happens. This sound, this vocalization coming out of them is not under their control, per se. They just allow themselves to have this thing happen, and then blam, out it comes.

That is consistent with their experience. It is a very emotional experience, which I think has something to do with some of the changes we saw. Barbara mentioned the basal ganglia, which are part of our emotional responses, so the limbic system changed to some degree. Also, the thalamus got very active, suggesting it is a pretty active state for them. Of course, when you see them afterwards, and they're exhausted, you can understand why that has such an impact on them.

In all the studies I do, I primarily focus on what are the physiological changes and are they associated with what the person is describing? To just pick up on what David said, part of what has separated us somewhat from others who are more atheistic is my ultimate conclusion that it's not the brain that's creating the experience. That may be the case. But it also may be the case that this is the way God interacts with us.

There's no way to tell just on the basis of the brain scan what exactly is the reality of the experience. I think it enables us to explore that. I think it may provide more information for that. But we have a long way to go before we can say something more definitive.

BROOKS: The one thing that strikes me reading all this is how there is an entire Darwinian mindset, which carries the obvious theory of evolution with it. But it also carries a whole approach to human nature and human life. It's based on the assumption that we are deeply shaped by the past and that what happened in the Pleistocene Era 10,000 years ago profoundly shapes the way we behave today. We've got little Pleistocene men and women trapped inside us just because so much of human history was based on that.

One of the things that leads to this, just in general parlance, is a clear concept that there is human nature. There is a universal human nature that can get pretty specific. This is something that would have been regarded, I think, as outrageous even 20 to 30 years ago. It was politically incorrect to say there is this immutable human nature.

But there are scientists who have now gone around and counted how many traits have existed in all human cultures at all times. I think I saw one list of 311 things. People all have the same reactions to emotions. They all smile the same way. Blind babies smile even though they've never seen smiling. There are all these things that have been handed down through the ages through this Darwinian process.

But the Darwinian mindset also says that everything that exists must exist for a reason. It must serve some purpose. That itself is a moral belief. So what exists must be good in some way. They haven't done the male nipple yet, but I'm sure they have a reason. (Laughter.)

But the other moral precept in this is a very measured view of human nature. We're not exactly next to the gods. The human mind -- especially the human mind -- is this jerry-rigged creature with very old things and a few new things built on top of it. It's a very imperfect little organ. And so, it leads to a very problematic human condition because nature has this old stuff; it doesn't need to invent something new and efficient; it just piles the new stuff on top of the old stuff.

That carries over into the social belief that every religion that exists must have served some purpose. So you have these theories of spiritual selection, that there were all these thousands of religions, and the ones that died off must have done so because they were ineffective, and the ones that survived, like Islam or Judaism or Christianity, must serve a purpose. They must be superior.

I'm not sure that's actually testable. But that's taken on faith because of the power of the Darwinian mindset.

NEWBERG: Can I just add something to that real fast? For my own personal approach to this, we did used to talk a lot more about the evolutionary basis of religion. As I've heard more and more of those arguments, I find they become less and less tenable because there's -- People say, "Religion came into play because it was a way of dealing with the environment. It was a way of bringing people together." And to some extent, that's true. But I think it becomes very hard to perceive how we evolved with that ahead-of-time in mind. It becomes a much harder argument to make.

One of the things I think, though, about the major religions is that while they may not necessarily -- I agree with David that they may not necessarily have been the best one or whatever. But they must have something in them that resonates with large numbers of people.

There is something about many different aspects of our society. You look at music. There are thousands of different kinds of music. But everybody seems to like Mozart. Everybody likes the Beatles or something like that. There are very few people those types of music don't affect. So there's something special about those types that seem to resonate with people. Now, whether they had some preordained or greater philosophical meaning or not, I have no idea. But there is something about what's here now that seems to resonate a lot with the way people think and with the way our brain works.

BROOKS: But is there a large section of humanity that is not religious? Are there any societies that don't have religion?

NEWBERG: Well, certainly, when you get into Europe.

(Cross talk.)

BROOKS: I meant historically.

NEWBERG: It's existed in some form or another in many different cultures. One thing that will be interesting to see is where the differences are, whether or not it really becomes cultural or not. I think we were talking about this at lunch. But one thing that has to be asked -- and this comes back to what was talked about in the first session today -- is how do you define these issues? The fact that most people in -- let's say -- Germany or England say they're atheist, does that mean they have no spiritual sense, that they have no feelings of being connected to our environment, connected to our world, or whatever? I don't know. We may need to better define those terms.

Will Saletan

WILL SALETAN, SLATE: I want to pick up again on David's point about the Darwinist explanation of religion and try to pull together some of the science and the politics of this. When I hear this analysis of religion, first of all, it makes tremendous sense to me because I'm a Buddhist type. It's fine. It fits the science, right? It fits my belief system. It's great for me.

It doesn't fit some other people's ideas about religion. I'm not sure how many of those people there are and how they're going to swallow this stuff. The case I'm thinking of is actually a different Obama thing, not Jeremiah Wright but the comment about bitterness. There were many things that grated people about it. But I think one of them was the idea that religion was somehow derivative or epiphenomenal or an opiate of the -- There were many things about it, but the idea that it wasn't quite real.

And then, Obama, in trying to explain it, says, "Oh no, religion is very important to people. It helps them to --." It's like he was still doing a functional analysis of religion. So my question is, is the reality of religion as a psychological phenomenon, even if it's universal, even if it's grounded in human nature -- How many people who consider themselves religious in this country and the world generally are going to be able to reconcile this way of talking and thinking about religion with their belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that that is the ultimate reality? Whether I exist is not -- it's not like Jesus is something in my head. He's the real thing and I could be here or not.

NEWBERG: I think it depends a lot on the perspective of both the scientist who is doing whatever study is coming out and then the people themselves who are looking at it. I agree with what David said earlier, that part of the problem right now is that a lot of people who are studying -- You mentioned the guy who made the helmet that induces religious experiences and so forth. He's a very fairly staunch atheist. I think when you have somebody who says, "Here is the brain scan when somebody is meditating or praying or whatever. It's all in your head, and there is no God," that's not going to be met very well by people from a lot of different faiths.

I've tended to try to take -- and hopefully have done so successfully -- a different perspective, which is to say that regardless of whether you believe in God or not, we're here to ask, how is this affecting you? When I have talked to people who are fairly fundamentalist in their religious beliefs, they don't really -- I haven't come across people having too much trouble with what we've been saying, because all we're saying is that if you pray or if you have a belief in God or whatever, this is what happens inside of you.

But I think you're absolutely right, the problem -- and I have this discussion with my colleagues -- is the causal relationship. Is it causing it, and religion is just derivative, or is religion this other thing, and we're just trying to do our best to understand it and to provide a new perspective? I think if you take that view, then people of a lot of different religions don't have too much trouble with it. But if you take the other view that religion becomes derivative of our biology, then people will take exception to it.

I think it's a very important point because too often people -- I mean, when you listen to me talk about all these brain scans, it starts to sound reductionistic. And I don't think it has to be. But a lot of people do take it that way.

BROOKS: There's a guy named Malcolm Jeeves who writes about this constantly, who I recommend.

CROMARTIE: The psychiatrist.

BROOKS: One could easily say what Andrew is describing is the mechanism God uses. I mean, we have a mechanism for going up and getting a bar mitzvah. It's your arms and legs. So that's the physical mechanism. But God is responsible for it. So a lot of it doesn't necessarily conflict with religious belief.

I think the specific themes that come out of the research do make a lot of things more problematic for secular people, and the permanent nature of men and women being different is one of the ways this, as E.O. Wilson has found, crashes into a lot of popular belief. I think the diminution of free will is going to be a fundamental problem.

On the other hand, I think the incredible emphasis on emotion and love is going to be something a lot of people will welcome and find solace in and support for, some fundamental religious ways of looking at the world. But I don't think it determines one way or the other. You can just say God created this process.

NEWBERG: If we do brain scans of everybody thinking about their loved one -- I can show you that your amygdale lights u