part three: the quest for a new paradigm

As my train surfaced just west of Penn Station, the light snow that had been with me since I left Massachusetts early that morning seemed to have picked up the pace. Settling in for the last two hours of my journey to Philadelphia, I pulled out the new issue of Time I had picked up at the newsstand. It was a “special Mind and Body issue” on “The Science of Happiness,” and as I started flipping through it, I almost immediately landed on a two-page spread featuring a large color photo of a meditating Buddhist monk with electrodes attached to his head. Fixing the electrodes to his shaven scalp was psychiatrist Richard Davidson, the “king of happiness research,” who observes the brain activity of meditators in an effort to understand the connection between meditative bliss and our prefrontal lobes. The article, entitled “The Biology of Joy,” was only the latest in a series of reports that have hit the popular press in recent years documenting the efforts of neuroscientists to understand the relationship between spiritual experience and the brain. The first, and certainly most memorable, was a Newsweek cover story in May of 2001: “God and the Brain: How We're Wired for Spirituality.” It was in that article that I first learned about the work of the man I was now on my way to Philadelphia to meet, the renowned meditation researcher Andrew Newberg.

A radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Newberg earned his fame by conducting brain imaging studies on meditators in the late nineties. His findings, published in two books, The Mystical Mind and Why God Won't Go Away (cowritten with his research partner, the late Eugene D'Aquili), were some of the first to capture on film the distinct changes that occur in the brain during spiritual experience. Since that time, he has made the rounds of the progressive talk show circuit, been featured in nearly every relevant magazine, been inundated with speaking requests from churches and medical schools alike, and appeared in the recent science-meets-spirit cult film What the Bleep Do We Know!?—all of which points to just how much public interest (or fear) there is regarding the possibility that even spirituality may have its roots in our cranium.

After meeting me in the hospital lobby and escorting me through a labyrinth of hallways to a small windowless office in the radiology department, Newberg turned his computer monitor toward me and said, “This is what I wanted to show you.” On the screen were two colorful images of what I assumed was a human brain. “The picture on the left,” he explained, “is the image of the subject's brain before meditation. On the right is what it looks like during meditation. In this case, the meditator was a Tibetan Buddhist, or, rather, an American Buddhist practicing a Tibetan form of meditation.”

In their initial studies, Newberg and D'Aquili worked with two main groups, one comprising eight American Buddhists doing a concentrative form of meditation and another made up of three Franciscan nuns practicing contemplative prayer. Although the results of their studies varied somewhat between the two groups, the overall picture was remarkably consistent. Not surprisingly, Newberg and D'Aquili found that during meditation or prayer, there was an increase in activity in the prefrontal lobes, a region responsible for such higher faculties as intention, will, and the ability to focus our attention. But it was another one of their findings, in particular, that seemed to create all the stir.

“If you look here at this area at the back of the brain,” Newberg said, pointing with his pen to a bright yellow blob of color, “you can see that it is much less pronounced during the meditation session than before. This is the posterior parietal lobe, what I call the orientation-association area. It's the part of the brain that allows us to orient ourselves in space, that gives us a sense of boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. What we hypothesized was that the sense of unity, or oneness, that people experience during meditative practice would be correlated with a reduction of activity in this area. And this is exactly what the neuroimaging shows.”

Hearing that the exalted mystical experience of oneness (what Newberg calls “absolute unitary being”) comes about through the reduction of activity in a specific part of the brain is the sort of thing that could, as they say, take all the fun out of it, and fast. So far, though, Newberg seemed too good-hearted to be angling for the ultimate reductionist coup. To make sure, I hit him with my big question straight up: “Do you think your research shows that religious experience is completely reducible to brain activity? Is God all in my head?”

By his expression, I could tell he was ready for this one. “It might seem that way,” he began, “but I don't think the research necessarily points to that conclusion. This may be a simplistic way of looking at it, but if I were to take a brain scan of somebody who is looking at a piece of apple pie, I can tell you what their brain is doing when they have the experience of seeing that apple pie. But I can't tell you whether or not that piece of apple pie exists in reality based on the scan. Likewise, if I take a brain scan of a Franciscan nun who has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what her brain is doing during the experience but I can't tell you whether or not God was really there, whether the experience represented a true reality. Neuroscience can't answer that epistemological question.”

As Newberg spoke further about epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—it became clear that for him, coming to grips with the philosophical and spiritual implications of his findings is at least as important as the findings themselves. “Let's say we were to take the materialist position that the only way we experience anything is through the brain. This means that the only way we can tell whether something is real is through our brain. The brain is the organ that discerns what is real. Okay, now this presents a slight problem for the materialist position because when people have mystical experiences, they universally report that they have experienced something that is more real than our everyday material reality. Which means that the brain perceives God, or pure consciousness, to be more real than anything else. So if the brain is what determines what is real and what isn't, and this is a universal experience of human brains across cultures, where does that leave us?”

In the course of our conversation, Newberg went to great lengths to make it clear that he is, in many ways, still agnostic on the big questions. But he also didn't hide the fact that the work he is doing is only the latest incarnation of a spiritual search that began in his youth—a fact that may account for his surprisingly nonmaterialistic interpretation of his own research. Although he acknowledged that his findings could easily be used to support a reductionist position, he feels that by experimentally demonstrating the reality of mystical experience, he is actually doing spirituality a service, perhaps even forcing science to take mysticism seriously for the first time. Indeed, what probably intrigued me most about Newberg was his conviction that mystical experience itself may have something to offer science that it desperately needs—the possibility of breaking the bounds of subjectivity and opening the door to a truly objective perspective.

“One of the limitations of science is the problem of subjective awareness,” he said at one point while giving me a tour of the scanning equipment used to conduct the research on the meditators. “Even with regard to our scientific studies and scientific measurements, science still has the problem of never really being able to get outside of our brain to truly know what is out there in reality. One of the reasons I've been so intrigued with spiritual experience is that it's the only state where one at least hears a description where a person claims to have broken the bounds of their own human self-consciousness and gotten into intimate contact with ultimate reality. And I think if that's the case, then as scientists, we have to look at that experience very, very carefully because that may be the only way of solving the problem of getting outside of the subjective mind.”

As he escorted me back out to the hospital lobby, I told Newberg more about the questions that had sparked my own recent inquiry into brain science. To my surprise, he said he wasn't particularly troubled by the mind/body problem or by the mounting neuroscientific evidence for materialism. “The belief that matter is primary provides a good basis for explaining the material world,” he said, “but it can give no clear answer as to where consciousness comes from. On the other hand, if we take a religious perspective and say that consciousness is primary, it's not so easy to explain the existence of matter. My own feeling is that perhaps consciousness and matter are two ways of looking at the same thing. But I think the bottom line is that we really don't know yet.”

My encounter with Newberg opened my mind in ways I hadn't expected. Whereas I had gone to him bracing myself for yet another piece of seemingly irrefutable evidence for the brain as the sole source of experience, I left with some new perspectives on the terrain and with a renewed confidence that our humanity can withstand the challenges of brain science. As a reputable neuroscientist, clearly Newberg was familiar with all the data I had come across, and no doubt a lot more. The fact that his own spiritual convictions hadn't been fazed and had even been bolstered by his studies of the brain seemed to suggest that there must be more to the story than the neuroscientific mainstream would have us believe.

As he reminded me, for all the evidence neuroscience seems to present for the case that the brain creates the mind, the reality is that nobody has yet been able to explain, let alone demonstrate, how it could actually do such a thing. The mind/body problem is as enigmatic as ever. And although this doesn't seem to be persuading the neuroscientific community at large to question its materialistic assumptions, as I would learn over the months that followed, there are a number of scientists on whom the implications of this fact have not been lost.

Emerging from the frontiers of a variety of scientific fields, there is a growing movement of pioneers who are seeking to counter the reductionist tendency in biology in general, and in brain science in particular. Convinced that the real problem of consciousness lies in the very way it is being approached, these new thinkers aim to root out the materialistic assumptions that are guiding the bulk of neuroscientific inquiry and replace them with a larger, more holistic paradigm capable of embracing the full complexity of human experience. Some are doing so by weaving elaborate alternative theories to account for the same data. Others are pushing the scientific edge with their own experiments attempting to demonstrate the existence of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by materialism. What they all have in common is a passion for preserving our humanity in the face of the mechanistic worldview, and a willingness to fiercely critique the dogmatic tendencies of scientific orthodoxy.