The Science Of Spiritual Experiences: How To Rewire Your Brain For More Happiness & Purpose AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Mel Robbins Podcast

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Episode: The Science Of Spiritual Experiences: How To Rewire Your Brain For More Happiness & Purpose

Author: Mel Robbins
Duration: 01:06:56

Episode Shownotes

In today’s episode, you’re going to learn about the powerful connection between neuroscience and religious experiences.Renowned medical doctor and neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg, MD is here on the podcast today, and you’re going to be amazed at what he shares.Dr. Newberg is a pioneering researcher of “neurotheology,” which is a

field of research that studies the relationship between neuroscience and spirituality. He has spent decades scanning the brains of people during prayer, meditation, and spiritual experiences, and he’s here to share the findings of his huge body of research – and how you can apply it in your life.Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, or an atheist, this episode is for you. You’ll discover practical tools to create daily rituals that cultivate a sense of unity, connectedness, and calm in your daily life — starting right now. For more resources, including links to the studies mentioned in the episode, click here for the podcast episode page. If you liked this episode and would like to know more about about your mind works, listen to this episode next: #1 Neurosurgeon: How to Manifest Anything You Want & Unlock the Unlimited Power of Your MindConnect with Mel: Watch the episodes on YouTubeGet Mel’s new book, The Let Them TheoryFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Sign up for Mel’s personal letter Disclaimer

Summary

In this episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast, Mel Robbins interviews Dr. Andrew Newberg, a leading neuroscientist exploring the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality. They discuss how spiritual practices, including meditation and prayer, activate brain functions that enhance emotional well-being and provide a sense of purpose. Dr. Newberg emphasizes that these experiences are universally accessible and shares insights on defining spirituality. The conversation reveals how rituals can foster feelings of unity and connection, ultimately leading to personal transformation and happiness.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Science Of Spiritual Experiences: How To Rewire Your Brain For More Happiness & Purpose) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. You know, I've always thought that neuroscience and spirituality are two totally different topics. But what if the two were actually deeply connected?

00:00:20 Speaker_01
And what if science and brain scans could prove this connection? Well, today's guest, Dr. Andrew Newberg, is a neuroscientist and medical doctor who has spent decades studying how your brain processes spiritual and religious experiences.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
Dr. Newberg is the first neuroscientist to demonstrate with groundbreaking brain scan research the underlying biological mechanism of spiritual experiences on your brain and body.

00:00:48 Speaker_01
In this episode, you're going to learn how spiritual and religious practices and simple daily actions that you may not even think are spiritual, but they are, can rewire your brain for more joy, connection, clarity, and purpose.

00:01:03 Speaker_01
no matter what you believe or whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, or an atheist. This is a fascinating conversation at the intersection of neuroscience and human spirit and what you may believe or not.

00:01:18 Speaker_01
This mind-blowing science will change the way you see the power of your brain and spiritual practices as a way to awaken it. Hey, it's Mel. I'm so excited that you're here.

00:01:36 Speaker_01
You know, it's always such an honor to be able to spend some time with you and to be together. If you're brand new, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast.

00:01:46 Speaker_01
It tells me that you're the type of person that's interested in deeper questions. and having a deeper and richer experience in life. And I do too.

00:01:56 Speaker_01
And that's why I'm absolutely thrilled that Dr. Andrew Newberg is here in our Boston studios to talk to you and me today and to share his groundbreaking research on the impact of spiritual and religious practices on your brain.

00:02:09 Speaker_01
Dr. Newberg is a renowned neuroscientist and medical doctor. He is the Director of Research for Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is listed as one of the 30 most influential neuroscientists alive today.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
He's published over 250 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. He is also the author of 14 books which share his cutting-edge research. And here's where this gets really interesting.

00:02:36 Speaker_01
Dr. Newberg has been scanning the brains of people during meditation, prayer, and countless religious and spiritual experiences, and what he has found will make you think very differently about the connection between your brain and spirituality.

00:02:51 Speaker_01
So please help me welcome Dr. Andrew Newberg to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

00:02:57 Speaker_00
Thank you for having me on your program.

00:02:58 Speaker_01
Oh, I'm so excited to just learn from you today.

00:03:03 Speaker_01
And I'd love to start by asking you, if you could speak to the person who's listening directly and tell them what they might expect to be different about their life based on what you're going to share and teach us today, what are we going to learn?

00:03:19 Speaker_00
Well, I think one of the most important things for people to learn is how to make their life more spiritual. And that doesn't have to be supernatural. It could be being in nature. It could be connecting to something creative.

00:03:30 Speaker_00
And sometimes it is something truly spiritual. But what we're going to be learning today is about how our brain helps us to be spiritual. And through that process, we'll learn how to actually be more spiritual.

00:03:41 Speaker_00
And I think perhaps one of the most important take-home messages of all of the work that I've done is that we all have a pretty similar kind of brain. So these experiences are available to everyone.

00:03:52 Speaker_00
It's not like there's somebody who could be excluded from this. Everyone who's listening has the potential to find their own paths towards enlightenment and to thinking about their life in a much deeper, more meaningful way.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
How do you define spiritual?

00:04:06 Speaker_00
Well, that's a great question. A lot of this whole field of research is something called neurotheology. And actually, a lot of what I start with is, how do we define our terms? What do we think about them?

00:04:17 Speaker_00
In fact, I challenge all of the listeners to actually go home and write down on a piece of paper, spirituality and religiousness, and try to think about how they would define it. Because each of us defines those terms a little bit differently.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
I think probably one of the most common ways of defining something spiritual is the idea of connecting with something greater than the self. And that's why I say sometimes it can be supernatural. It could be connecting to God.

00:04:41 Speaker_00
It could be connecting to a universal consciousness of some kind. But it can also be connecting to nature, to something creative. It could be connecting to music.

00:04:50 Speaker_00
It can be connecting to humanity and how we take care of each other in a more effective way. So all of those can be ways in which we feel that we ground ourselves and we connect us to something greater than what we are.

00:05:02 Speaker_01
Now, you used two words. You said spiritual and religiousness. Is there a difference?

00:05:07 Speaker_01
And I'm only asking this just so that as we dive into your work and your research and what we can learn from it, we just understand the terminology that you might be talking about. So we have a baseline.

00:05:18 Speaker_00
Well, it's a great question because I think so many people really struggle with what those terms mean, and each person has to kind of think about it for themselves. Obviously, there's a lot of overlap.

00:05:28 Speaker_00
A lot of people will say, oh, you know, I am religious and I am spiritual. In today's world, there's a lot of people who say, I am spiritual, but I don't really follow a particular religion. I'm not Christian, I'm not Jewish, I'm not Buddhist.

00:05:40 Speaker_00
I'm just me. I'm just trying to explore the world. I think that for the most part, both of them are trying to find a connection, trying to find a way in which we connect to something greater than the self.

00:05:52 Speaker_00
Where the typical difference in the definition comes to is usually religions are part of a religious tradition. So there's a group of people who say this is what it means to be Catholic, this is what it means to be Buddhist.

00:06:05 Speaker_00
But again, you know, I've certainly had people who then raise their hands and say, well, wait a minute, I'm part of a spiritual community. And we have our definitions and things that we adhere to and we make as part of our group.

00:06:16 Speaker_00
So there's really a lot of overlap. And that's why I actually wind up using both those words a lot of times together, because it's just to be inclusive. Some people say, oh, that was a deeply religious experience.

00:06:27 Speaker_00
Other people say that was a spiritual experience. And part of what we are trying to figure out is where are the differences and where are the similarities, but there's obviously a lot of similarities.

00:06:35 Speaker_01
I was so excited to talk to you today because I recently became really good friends with somebody who was a pastor and leader of a massive mega church, like charismatic, Christianity, evangelical, which completely surprised me.

00:06:55 Speaker_01
But as we've gotten to truly know one another deeply as friends, and we've talked about the bigger things that we believe in, we recently, just a weekend ago, we're having this deep conversation about his belief system and how it is anchored in what you just described in more of a religious structure belief order, so to speak.

00:07:21 Speaker_01
and my belief system, which is way more in the spiritual lane. And at the end of this long conversation, I was like, you know, I never thought we'd end up here, but I think we really are saying the same thing. We have different words to describe it.

00:07:35 Speaker_01
But the feeling that you get from believing what you believe is the exact same feeling that I get from my connection to something greater, to a sense of spirituality in my life.

00:07:49 Speaker_01
And so I'm so happy that as somebody that is studying this, lecturing about it, writing books about it, that your definition of being religious versus being spiritual is more of what's in common than what's not.

00:08:05 Speaker_00
What I've come to realize, and I know we're going to be talking about brain scans and all that kind of cool stuff in a little bit, but I realized that, you know, if I'm looking at a brain scan of somebody who is religious or spiritual, whatever it is that they're doing, unless I talk to them and know what they're actually thinking about and feeling about on the inside, I don't know what I'm really looking at.

00:08:23 Speaker_00
I mean, I can say, oh, you know, your frontal lobe became more active or something like that. But that actually kind of propelled me to do a research project starting about 10 years ago, where we did a whole survey of people's spiritual experiences.

00:08:37 Speaker_00
And it was an online survey. We got a couple thousand people who talked about their spiritual experience. And we asked them questions about who they were and what their background was. But ultimately, we said, here's a box.

00:08:50 Speaker_00
Tell us what you felt and what you experienced. And it was an incredible treasure trove of information and data because

00:08:57 Speaker_00
You know, on one hand, if we want to know about the definitions or what spirituality is, we can go to the heads of the megachurches, we can read what Buddha had to say on it. Go to synagogues, go to mosques, you can go to lots of it.

00:09:08 Speaker_01
Pueblos, you can go all over the world.

00:09:11 Speaker_00
But to me, as much as that's important, and it is an important part of it, asking the everyday person, you know, what do you feel? when you feel something spiritual? Oh, you had this spiritual experience? Tell me about what you felt.

00:09:24 Speaker_00
What emotions did you have? Did you see a light? Did you hear something? Did you see God? Did you see an ancestor? What happened with you?

00:09:33 Speaker_00
And so this treasure trove of data has been actually a very fundamental part of a lot of the work that we do because it helps us to figure out where the commonalities are and where the differences are. On one hand, everybody's experience is unique.

00:09:46 Speaker_00
but there also are a lot of commonalities.

00:09:48 Speaker_00
And I think that becomes important ground for us, both in terms of neuroscience, but also just in terms of helping us to understand each other and to understand, as you were just talking about with your friend, that you have differences, but ultimately there's a common element to that, that you're both trying to strive for the same kind of thing.

00:10:05 Speaker_01
Well, what was fascinating to me is we were using different words, but it was very clear that we had the exact same physical physiological, emotional experience in our bodies when we were feeling the things that we were describing that we believed.

00:10:22 Speaker_01
And that to me was this unbelievable epiphany. And, you know, just to give us a little bit of background before we get into the neuroscience and the connection between spirituality and how it impacts the brain.

00:10:35 Speaker_01
And can you tell me a little bit about what made you want to study the brain and religious and spiritual experiences?

00:10:45 Speaker_00
Well, I started out as a child, as they say. And you know, when I was very young, I distinctly remember kind of being upset by the fact that there were different religions.

00:10:55 Speaker_00
You know, to me, I was like, well, if we're all looking at the same world, then why aren't we all thinking the same way? Why are there different

00:11:02 Speaker_00
religious systems, political parties, moral ideas about the world, shouldn't we all just feel the same way? And clearly we don't. So I thought, all right, well, I've got to figure this out. Somebody's got to figure this out, so it may as well be me.

00:11:15 Speaker_00
And so, you know, I started asking a lot of questions and I've always loved science. So, you know, that to me was kind of a natural thing to do.

00:11:22 Speaker_00
But as I got kind of towards my college years, I began to feel like as wonderful as science is, and I still love science, that there are certain limitations that science has, especially when it comes to things like our subjective experiences, our consciousness, something spiritual, you know, what exactly does all that mean?

00:11:39 Speaker_00
How is our mind and our brain connected to each other? So I started to look into philosophy and theology and religious studies and all these other ways of kind of looking at the world.

00:11:50 Speaker_00
And then finally, a lot of this really came together for me when I was in medical school. I did what I guess in today's lingo would be to take a gap year. I took an extra year. And I connected with two wonderful mentors.

00:12:02 Speaker_00
One of them was in the field of brain imaging. And so I started to research brain imaging. And we studied Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and depression and all these different kinds of things using amazing brain imaging techniques.

00:12:14 Speaker_00
But the other person who I met was actually interested in this discussion about religion and the brain. In fact, he had actually been thinking about this since the 1970s. And he was an anthropologist as well as a psychiatrist by training.

00:12:28 Speaker_00
And we used to have these amazing dinner parties. I would be sitting around the table with literally people who were Nobel Prize winners, people who had basically revolutionized, you know, fields of psychiatry and psychology and so forth.

00:12:42 Speaker_00
And we're doing drinking songs and we're, you know, and one of the things that he loved more than anything were rituals that these sort of pattern behaviors.

00:12:53 Speaker_00
And he ultimately kept thinking about how rituals that are so fundamental to our religious and spiritual selves.

00:13:00 Speaker_00
And, you know, I don't know what conversations you had with your friend, but the things that you do, the things that you repeat, the meditations, the prayers, whatever practices that you do, These are so fundamental to us as human beings.

00:13:11 Speaker_00
And in fact, there's rituals not just in religion and spirituality, but politics, education, sports, everything. But he was an anthropologist. So where did these rituals come from?

00:13:20 Speaker_00
Well, theoretically, if they evolve, they must have come from animal rituals. But one of the interesting things about animal rituals is that they're all men. mating rituals.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
So there was this whole connection between sort of the physiology of our body and our brain and even maybe our sexuality, but how that kind of correlated with the rituals that lead to these incredible experiences, these enlightenment kinds of experiences that change the way we think about everything.

00:13:47 Speaker_00
So there was this whole sort of path and then ultimately the proverbial light bulb in my brain went off and I said, well, wait a minute, if I'm doing brain scans of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, why can't I do brain scans of meditation and prayer?

00:14:00 Speaker_00
And that's really what kind of set off the more formal approach that I began to take. But for me, so much of what I was doing, not only became scientific, but was very contemplative.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
And I really spent a lot of time and still do in a kind of meditation thinking about these questions, you know, what is the nature of reality? How do we get to that reality? What am I thinking about? Why am I thinking about it?

00:14:23 Speaker_00
And within those practices, the ways in which I was trying to approach those questions, I had experiences that sounded like some of these other experiences, mystical experiences and things like that.

00:14:33 Speaker_00
I thought, well, where are the similarities and differences between what other people talk about? And again, all of that kind of came together to propel me into exploring these topics. And I've been doing it ever since.

00:14:43 Speaker_01
So just to give the person listening kind of a sense of how all this research works, because I love this visual of you combining all the brain scans that you've been doing. with this real interest in spiritual and religious and mystical experiences.

00:15:01 Speaker_01
Do you do brain scans on people when they're praying and when they're meditating? How does it work?

00:15:06 Speaker_00
About 30 years ago, we did our very first brain scans of people in meditation. And since then, we've scanned hundreds of people doing all different kinds of practices. And some of them are secularized practices like mindfulness or yoga.

00:15:19 Speaker_00
Some of them are deeply meditative, like Buddhist meditation, and some of them are deeply spiritual. We've studied people speaking in tongues.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
One of my other mentors always said, you know, if you're a good carpenter, you have a lot of tools in your bucket. So we have a lot of ways of getting brain scans of people.

00:15:36 Speaker_00
And, you know, for some types of practices, if you can just lie there very quietly and be in a scanner, like an MRI scanner, we can do that.

00:15:43 Speaker_00
We can just sort of shove somebody into a scanner and we can put them in there and say, we want you to go ahead and do your prayer practice.

00:15:50 Speaker_00
And of course, as I always like to joke, for the listeners who have had an MRI scan, they know that sometimes being in an MRI scanner is the perfect place to start praying because it's a pretty challenging place to be.

00:16:00 Speaker_00
For a lot of people, they're able to do that. The other area that I developed a lot of my expertise in is a field of medicine called nuclear medicine.

00:16:09 Speaker_00
And what's interesting about that as a field is that we administer, usually we inject, some kind of radioactive tracer that follows some part of the body or the brain's function.

00:16:20 Speaker_00
And a lot of times we'll inject a tracer that looks at blood flow, which is a really good way of looking at an activity in the brain.

00:16:26 Speaker_00
Or sometimes we'll inject a tracer that has to do with a neurotransmitter like serotonin or dopamine that I know a lot of people have heard of. And what we can do is we can have somebody, they don't even have to be in the scanner.

00:16:37 Speaker_00
They can be outside of the scanner. When we were doing our study of speaking in tongues, they're moving around and they're doing all different kinds of motions and singing and things like that.

00:16:46 Speaker_00
And while they're in the midst of the practice, I go in and I inject them through an intravenous catheter that I put in long before they started, so they don't even know I'm there.

00:16:55 Speaker_00
And then they finish their practice and then I put them into the scanner about 15 or 20 minutes after they're done, but it shows me what their brain was doing at the moment of the practice itself.

00:17:06 Speaker_00
And so it's really capturing a snapshot, if you will, of a person's brain state. And we can do that for other things too.

00:17:12 Speaker_00
for reading and doing math or whatever other things that you want to do, but we use it to study spiritual experiences and practices. And it's been great at giving us as good a picture as possible of what's going on in the brain.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
So Dr. Newberg, what do you see in someone's brain when you pray, meditate, or have a spiritual experience? What's happening?

00:17:34 Speaker_00
Well, the first answer is there's a lot of things that happen. And in fact, you know, for any of the people listening who have had spiritual experiences, they probably know that it's not just one kind of thing that's happening to them.

00:17:47 Speaker_00
It could be emotions, it could be thoughts, it could be feelings, it could be things that you sense. And so if you actually think about

00:17:53 Speaker_00
spiritual and religious experiences, there are so many different aspects of our brain's function that really can potentially get involved.

00:18:02 Speaker_00
There's this whole network of structures in the brain that there's a pattern of activity within that that helps us to have these kinds of experiences. Now there are some areas that I think are particularly relevant.

00:18:13 Speaker_00
So for example, to just name a couple, there's an area in the back of our brain called the parietal lobe.

00:18:19 Speaker_00
And this is an area of our brain that takes a lot of our sensory information and helps us to kind of create a spatial representation of ourselves.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
So if somebody listening to the podcast is walking down the street, their parietal lobe is keeping them on the sidewalk, making sure they don't run into a tree, you know, because it knows where you are.

00:18:35 Speaker_00
And so that's a very important process that it does. Well, when people are deep in meditation or prayer practices, what we have observed is a decrease of activity in this parietal lobe. Now, why would that make sense?

00:18:47 Speaker_00
That's what we thought would happen. So if this area normally turns on to give us our sense of self, what's going to happen when it shuts down?

00:18:55 Speaker_00
We lose our sense of self, and we don't see the boundary between ourself and something that's out there in the world. So we may feel a sense of oneness, a sense of connectedness.

00:19:07 Speaker_00
And this can be a connectedness with God, it could be a connectedness with the universe.

00:19:11 Speaker_00
And in fact, it's interesting because going back to my point earlier about sort of the evolution of all of this, we have a whole continuum of this sort of unitary experience. So you and I right now.

00:19:24 Speaker_00
we have a connection with each other because we're having a discussion and hopefully our brains are in sync and resonating with each other.

00:19:31 Speaker_00
So that's a degree of connection, but that may not be, you know, that's not nearly the same kind of connection as with a truly good friend or with a romantic partner, which really bonds people together.

00:19:42 Speaker_01
That makes a lot of sense because as I was digesting what you were saying, just about that one singular part of the brain, if that part of the brain is what locates you in 3D space, and it gives you a sense of your place in a physical world.

00:19:59 Speaker_01
If that stops being so active, it makes sense that it opens up the door to not processing where you fit within, but actually a deeper connection to all.

00:20:13 Speaker_00
Exactly. That's exactly right. And so there is this kind of continuum where we have sort of our everyday, I'm here, the cars are there, the table's here, to a closer relationship. You and I are having this conversation.

00:20:26 Speaker_00
Our brains are resonating with each other. We feel a sense of connectedness there. But then, you know, we can have our best friends and how we feel connected to them.

00:20:34 Speaker_00
We can have a romantic or sexual partner, which even connects us even further, our children, our families. And then ultimately you have these sort of mystical enlightenment experiences where, you know, everything becomes one.

00:20:47 Speaker_00
And, you know, those to me are some of the most fascinating experiences. And going back to why I got into all of this,

00:20:55 Speaker_00
I've always been particularly fascinated by those experiences because if our question is, well, what is the nature of reality and how do we know that reality?

00:21:02 Speaker_00
It is interesting that in those mystical experiences, that's where people at least say things like, I have experienced the world on a more fundamentally real level than I have ever experienced it before. I have a sense of clarity.

00:21:16 Speaker_00
I have a sense of knowledge and understanding that I never had before. Now, I'm not saying that they're right or they're wrong, but it's interesting that this happens in those experiences.

00:21:26 Speaker_00
And that's also part of why I think it becomes important for us to say, so what's going on in the brain? And so, for example, another area of our brain is the limbic system. And this is an area of our emotions.

00:21:36 Speaker_00
And so when things are very intense, when things hit us, we have a profound sense of joy, a profound sense of awe, love, whatever we feel, our limbic system turns on.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
And we've seen this in our brain scans, that these areas of the brain become very active. And I think that's part of what signals to the person that this is a unique experience. clearly is a differentiation.

00:21:59 Speaker_00
People know that this is the spiritual experience that I had and this is my everyday life, and there is a difference between them. So part of what I think is going on is their limbic system is saying, this is really important.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
And what's also kind of interesting about how the limbic system works is that not only does it help us feel our emotions, but it also writes things into our memory banks. And it makes sense that we would do that.

00:22:21 Speaker_00
We want to remember the things that are emotionally important. So you have this incredible experience, a near-death experience, a psychedelic experience, you know, whatever it is. Not only did it feel real in the moment, but it gets written into your

00:22:33 Speaker_00
brain, it gets written into your memories, it transforms your beliefs, so it changes everything about you. And that's also part of what we have noticed with these experiences about how they are truly transformative in a person's life.

00:22:45 Speaker_01
So do you notice in these scans that there's the same types of outcomes in terms of what happens in your brain, regardless of the spiritual or religious experience and the type of it? I mean, is it all the same stuff that gets stimulated?

00:23:02 Speaker_00
I do think that in some senses the answer to the question is yes, that if you are a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim who all feel that oneness with God, then you're going to see that decrease in the parietal lobe.

00:23:15 Speaker_00
So that will be a certain common element that you'll have. there are then distinctions. So a Christian might feel connected to Jesus, a Muslim might feel connected to Allah, a Buddhist might feel connected to universal consciousness.

00:23:30 Speaker_00
So the particulars start to become a little bit more unique.

00:23:34 Speaker_00
So one of the questions that I have is, if you have this experience, if one person says, I felt love, and somebody says, I felt energy, and somebody else says, I felt a force, and somebody else says, I felt God,

00:23:44 Speaker_00
Well, are they the same, fundamentally the same experiences that then people just interpret differently because of our backgrounds and the way we think about things? Or are they actually different experiences?

00:23:54 Speaker_00
And again, I think sometimes it depends if it's feeling love versus feeling God, maybe they are different.

00:24:00 Speaker_01
But from the brain scan and the neuroscience standpoint, what you're studying is how these experiences that we describe in very different ways,

00:24:10 Speaker_01
actually look the same when you look at the scan or you look at the physiological and neurological and emotional and neurochemical thing that's going on?

00:24:23 Speaker_00
There are definitely similarities in terms of how they look on the brain scans, but with the brain, there's always another complexity to it.

00:24:30 Speaker_00
The problem is that if I were to say, oh, here's this area of the brain that lights up, it becomes more active. Well, how many neurons are in that area? And if there's 10 million neurons in that area, are they all becoming more active?

00:24:43 Speaker_00
Is it just 20 of them? I think what's very exciting about this research because while I can try to find the common elements, there is also sort of an embracing of the uniqueness that we each have.

00:24:55 Speaker_00
All of us have a different kind of expression of our religious, spiritual, you know, self.

00:25:00 Speaker_00
And so each person is going to, we have to kind of look at each person as an individual, but also appreciate how it's kind of connected to everybody else as well.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
This is so amazing. I know there's so much more we're going to dig into, but I want to take a quick pause so we can hear a word from our amazing sponsors.

00:25:16 Speaker_01
Do not go anywhere because there is so much more that we're going to dig into when Dr. Newberg and I return after a short break. So stay with us. Welcome back.

00:25:33 Speaker_01
I am so thrilled you are still here with us because there is so much more that Dr. Newberg is gonna share with us about the impact of spiritual practices on your brain.

00:25:42 Speaker_01
So Dr. Newberg, you know, earlier when we were talking, you mentioned this study that you did and how it was a treasure trove of spiritual experiences for people. Could you tell the person that's listening just a list of what are the top

00:26:00 Speaker_01
things that people reported as spiritual experiences just to give the person that's with us in this conversation a way to think more broadly about what spiritual and religious experiences can include.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
What we did is that we took all of the narratives that people provided and all the answers that people provided, and we basically ran them through some very complex, you know, computer analyses to try to figure out what was going on.

00:26:27 Speaker_00
And it is interesting because you can start to group certain things. group, if somebody says, I felt connected, I felt at one, I felt unified, we can start to put those together.

00:26:37 Speaker_00
And as you mentioned, we were able to come up with five core elements that virtually every person talks about in these experiences. So I hope this does resonate with everyone out there who's listening, who has had this kind of an experience.

00:26:49 Speaker_00
So one of them is, we've already talked about a little bit, the feeling of unity or oneness. So the person feels connected, connected to God, connected to the universe, connected to humanity.

00:27:01 Speaker_00
And we think that this has something to do with the parietal lobe, as we mentioned. So this is the kind of thing almost everyone talks about, that element of the experience.

00:27:10 Speaker_00
And again, it could be a supernatural connection, it could be just connecting to nature. So, the sense of unity is a very, very important part of these experiences. A next element of these experiences is a feeling of intensity.

00:27:25 Speaker_00
And so, there is something about these experiences that whatever they're describing, it's the most. It's the greatest feeling of love they've ever had. It was the most beautiful light that they've ever seen.

00:27:38 Speaker_00
infinitely powerful, all these kinds of words that are just superlatives that tell you that for this person, it was more than anything else that they have ever experienced before. So intensity is a second element.

00:27:52 Speaker_00
The third element is a sense of clarity. And what that means is that people, when they have these experiences, they're like, I've got, I now understand the world in a way that I never had before.

00:28:04 Speaker_00
It's, you know, the proverbial veil being thrown off and being able to see the world in a way that they never had before. Sometimes it can be a profound religious revelation. Okay, now I know what religion I need to pursue. Sometimes it's scientific.

00:28:19 Speaker_00
Okay, I get it. You know, the world is this incredible physical place and I'm connected to the stuff of the stars, whatever it is, but is this sense of clarity.

00:28:29 Speaker_00
And this one is a little bit more intriguing when you get into the brain piece because part of what's happening here is that it's kind of changing the whole way this person's brain functions. How?

00:28:40 Speaker_00
Well, part of the answer is we don't fully know because it's almost impossible to capture the moment of those experiences. However, there's a couple of really important things that we have found in some of our brain scans.

00:28:52 Speaker_00
So one area that we have found that also seems to change in a lot of these practices is a very core structure called the thalamus. It's right in the middle of our brain.

00:29:01 Speaker_00
And the reason it's important is that it connects different parts of the brain to each other. And it also brings sensory information, particularly from vision and hearing, into our brain. So it is relevant to like our whole perspective of reality.

00:29:13 Speaker_00
And we see very significant shifts in the activity of this thalamus in people who have had these experiences versus people who have not had these experiences.

00:29:21 Speaker_00
So part of my speculation is, you know, there's something that happens that kind of opens up a new way of thinking. Clearly, there are kind of new connections that are forming in the brain. And that leads to another study that we did

00:29:34 Speaker_00
where we did a study of people going through a very intense immersive retreat. And in this case, it was actually a retreat based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.

00:29:44 Speaker_00
So it does have a bit of a Christian perspective to it, but I think it holds for anybody who decides to go on some really, really intense, long, you know, meaning days, weeks, maybe months.

00:29:56 Speaker_00
And what we did in this case was we did a scan of their brain, not just looking at activity, but looking at neurotransmitters.

00:30:03 Speaker_00
And so for the people out there, part of how our brain ultimately connects with the different neurons connect, there's these chemicals that get released.

00:30:10 Speaker_00
Dopamine, serotonin are probably things that people have heard of, and they tell the other neurons what to do.

00:30:16 Speaker_00
So what we found was when we scan their brain before and after this retreat, that their brain had become more sensitive to the effects of serotonin and dopamine.

00:30:25 Speaker_00
And that's very important because dopamine is often referred to as the feel-good molecule. It makes us feel happy. It makes us feel euphoric, if there's enough of it.

00:30:32 Speaker_00
So it sort of changes our attitude about the world, that we now look at the world in a very positive way, as opposed to maybe kind of a down way.

00:30:41 Speaker_01
Well, you know, if you really think about it, if you've ever had a spiritual experience, which everybody has at some level, if you've ever been on a retreat, if you've ever had some sort of mystical thing happen, or even gone to a religious service,

00:30:54 Speaker_01
that was just deeply moving. Right. Or a musical concert where you just were and at one and it was unbelievable. There is an afterglow effect. Right. Which probably based on the science comes from the fact that you're more sensitive to the dopamine.

00:31:09 Speaker_00
Exactly. Exactly.

00:31:10 Speaker_01
That's so cool.

00:31:11 Speaker_00
That is cool. And serotonin as well. And serotonin is very important because, first of all, drugs that help us with depression go to the serotonin system and help to sort of augment it. So these practices are making us more sensitive to serotonin.

00:31:25 Speaker_00
So this is all part of that feeling of clarity. Now there's two other core elements. So one of them is a feeling of surrender. What seems to happen, whether a person is trying to get to this experience through, you know,

00:31:36 Speaker_00
years of meditation or prayer or going to church or something like that, whether it happens to them spontaneously, whatever is going on, at some point, our purposefulness kind of gets taken over.

00:31:48 Speaker_00
The experience kind of pulls us along and we let go, surrender, you know, people use different terms, but it is this feeling of surrender. And in fact, going back to the discussion about sexuality, that is also what happens, you know, at some point,

00:32:04 Speaker_00
We're just going along for the ride at that point, and it's just going to happen. It's our body's natural process. And what's interesting about this feeling of surrender is that, again, there's an area of our brain that I think is very relevant here.

00:32:16 Speaker_00
So our frontal lobes, which are located behind our forehead, When we are purposeful, when we are doing our actions, when we are concentrating on a meditation, concentrating on a prayer, our frontal lobes become more active.

00:32:27 Speaker_00
That's what our brain scan studies have shown. But when the person gets to those profound experiences, the frontal lobe shuts down and quiets down.

00:32:36 Speaker_00
So we see a lot of common themes biologically that are helping us to understand this feeling of surrendering to the experience and the feeling of oneness and unity. So, you know, it's all kind of coming together.

00:32:48 Speaker_00
And the last core element is basically a feeling of transformation that, you know, it really changes a person and changes them It could be a conversion experience, it could be a near-death experience, whatever it is.

00:32:59 Speaker_00
And it's like, that experience, whether they had it when they were eight years old or 20 years old or 80 years old, it carries with it a sense of realness and a sense of, I am now a different person.

00:33:10 Speaker_00
Between that before and after, I am a completely different person. And whether or not there's a complete rewiring, whether it's the sensitivity to dopamine. And in our survey, we asked people, how did it change you?

00:33:23 Speaker_00
90%, 95% of people, it changed for the positive and it changed their perspective on their relationships, on their job, they no longer fear death, and certainly on their sense of religious and spiritual beliefs.

00:33:35 Speaker_00
So it changes like every aspect of a person and that's why these are these big enlightenment kind of experiences that radically change everything about the person.

00:33:44 Speaker_01
Well, you have been referring to big experiences, but when I look at the list you just gave us, a feeling of unity, an intensity of the experience, clarity, surrender, and transformation, I can think of very small experiences. Right.

00:34:01 Speaker_01
So I think about the experience of going for a hike in the mountains in Vermont. And while it's not the most crazy intense experience, there's something about the quiet of it that is intense compared to the noise of my day-to-day life.

00:34:21 Speaker_00
Right.

00:34:22 Speaker_01
And I feel all those things. If I go to a beautiful religious service, even though it's just another Saturday, another Sunday, regardless of the denomination or the type of practice that I'm in, I could feel all those things.

00:34:35 Speaker_00
Right.

00:34:36 Speaker_01
You know, there are those experiences where you might hold your grandchild for the first time.

00:34:40 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely.

00:34:41 Speaker_01
So could you talk a little bit about the big versus the small spiritual experiences that are available to all of us and give us some examples of those and why they matter in terms of your brain and your nervous system and the quality of your life?

00:35:01 Speaker_00
Well, those are really important questions. And one of the key conclusions that I have come to in a lot of the work that I've done is that we don't have a separate brain that becomes spirit.

00:35:11 Speaker_00
You know, it's not like when you walk into a house of worship, suddenly some other part of your brain that doesn't do anything for you otherwise turns on. We're using all the same basic areas of our brain. So as you extremely well pointed out,

00:35:24 Speaker_00
There's a lot of small experiences, so to speak, that are part of that continuum. And I think what's good about that is that one, it helps us to understand how we get to the really big experiences.

00:35:36 Speaker_00
But as you also mentioned, I think they're very important for everyone to realize that those small experiences are not so small. I mean, they can be very important. They can be very meaningful.

00:35:47 Speaker_00
And so when we call them small, you know, that's not a negative.

00:35:50 Speaker_00
People can, you know, just walking into some amazing place or hiking in the woods or something like that can create all kinds of feelings and all kinds of experiences that have those characteristics.

00:36:01 Speaker_00
And you have a little bit of a feeling of unity, a little bit of a feeling of intensity. But ultimately, there seems to be something where there's that kind of quantum leap that we get to these profound mystical or enlightenment experiences.

00:36:14 Speaker_00
But before we get to that, all of these other experiences are extremely valuable to people. They provide a lot of meaning.

00:36:20 Speaker_00
And the evidence also suggests that they do help people ultimately progressing down their own spiritual paths, their own paths towards meaning and purpose in their life. It could be looking at a beautiful sunrise or sunset.

00:36:35 Speaker_00
It can be walking in the woods. It can be listening to a wonderful Mozart concerto. As you mentioned, it could be holding your child or your grandchild or something like that.

00:36:43 Speaker_00
So all of these smaller experiences, these are the everyday experiences that everyone can potentially have. And I think it is wonderful to be able to try to engage those experiences.

00:36:55 Speaker_00
One of the things that is interesting is that when we talk about the big enlightenment experiences, people who have been enlightened realize that life is about the small experiences.

00:37:05 Speaker_00
And in fact, you know, it doesn't really matter whether you are, you know, the CEO of, you know, whatever the biggest company in the world, Microsoft or whatever, or whether you're, you know, an Uber driver or something like

00:37:18 Speaker_00
You can do anything in life, but it's how you engage it and how you find your meaning and how you find these experiences.

00:37:25 Speaker_00
When I think about this, I always think about when I was in medical school, there was this one intersection and there was a police officer who would direct the traffic. And I've never seen anybody so into what he was doing.

00:37:36 Speaker_00
And he's dancing around and waving his arms and motioning and blowing his whistle with different rhythms and things like that. And I'm like, that's an enlightened being. It doesn't have to be doing something amazing.

00:37:47 Speaker_00
It can be all the everyday things that we all do, but how do we engage them? How do we try to make our connection with having breakfast in the morning, with walking down the street to our work?

00:38:00 Speaker_00
All of those can be deeply meaningful, deeply spiritual, because you can help yourself to feel that connectedness. And when people do come to me and say, how do I get there? Yeah. And which is a very valid question.

00:38:12 Speaker_00
And part of what I say is, is that you have to take some stock in yourself. What are you trying to get to? You know, do you want to feel less anxious? Is that your basic goal? You want to feel less anxious or less stressed?

00:38:22 Speaker_00
Sometimes it might be to connect with humanity. It might be something more religious, whatever it is. But it's important to think about what you're really looking for first and to sit down, think about it, write it down.

00:38:34 Speaker_00
And then from there, you then want to look for avenues that lead you down those paths. So we know that there are thousands of different kinds of practices that are out there, meditations and yogas and prayer and all that kind of thing.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
So you have to do a little bit of homework. What are the things, what are the approaches that are consistent with your goals and that you feel comfortable with? And that to me is always very relevant. There is never a one size fits all.

00:38:59 Speaker_00
Each person has to kind of find the paths that work best for them. And then ultimately, you know, it's reasonable to try things that are well known.

00:39:06 Speaker_00
So if you, and especially if you came from a religious background and you feel somewhat strongly about it, then trying to pursue the religious background may be a good way to go.

00:39:15 Speaker_00
But for somebody who isn't, maybe mindfulness or yoga or, you know, a hundred other different kinds of practices. And then ultimately you have to try it and see where it takes you.

00:39:24 Speaker_00
If it feels good and natural and you're starting to feel these kinds of intense and emotional and good feelings and feelings of connectedness, then you keep going with that.

00:39:34 Speaker_00
If it feels uncomfortable or it's not taking you down paths that seem to be appropriate for you, then it's time to go in another direction. And so, you know, each of us can kind of find that path. It's definitely not, you know, a straight line.

00:39:47 Speaker_00
And there's going to be a lot of zigging and zagging. But I think if people stay with it, each person can find that path, can find the key to the lock, so to speak. But each person has a different lock and a different key.

00:39:58 Speaker_01
Oh, I'm just loving everything that you're sharing that I really don't want to stop, but I need to hit pause because we got to hear a word from our amazing sponsors.

00:40:08 Speaker_01
And if your mind is spinning just like mine is, I feel like I'm having some sort of awakening right now. Share this with people that you care about. Everybody deserves to experience the profound nature of his research.

00:40:20 Speaker_01
And don't go anywhere because Dr. Newberg and I are going to be waiting for you after a very short break. And we're just getting started. Stay with us. Welcome back.

00:40:36 Speaker_01
Today, you and I are getting to spend time with Dr. Newberg, who has dedicated his research to scanning brains and understanding the impact of spiritual and religious experiences on your mind and body. So, Dr. Newberg, as a neuroscientist who studies

00:40:53 Speaker_01
the brain and the intersection of the brain with spirituality, religion, mystical experiences. What do you do every day?

00:41:01 Speaker_00
Well, you know, for me, it goes back to my questioning. For me, everything that I do has really been part of my life's path. And to me, I think it is a combination of a kind of scientific and spiritual pursuit. I love to look for data.

00:41:18 Speaker_00
I like to look for knowledge and information. I like to use systematic ways of exploring information, like getting narratives from people who've had these experiences. But it also is very contemplative for me.

00:41:29 Speaker_00
And so while I don't do a formal kind of meditation, this has really arisen out of a whole contemplative process that I continue to do to this day. I'm trying to figure out the answers to the questions.

00:41:43 Speaker_01
Are there things that you do, Dr. Newberg, like when you wake up?

00:41:47 Speaker_01
Are there practices that you have in your own life that help you bring this science into your life and make your own experience of your day-to-day life on the smaller level more spiritual or mystical or enlightened?

00:42:03 Speaker_00
It really comes down to the joy of asking questions. And to me, it's always like, well, how do we think about this? And how do we try to explore this? And what should I think about next? And asking people around me, what do you think?

00:42:17 Speaker_00
I think one of the real problems in our world today is that we've all, with the whole social media, we all get into our own echo chambers, as everybody says, and we just get fed information that is relevant to us. And to me, it's like,

00:42:30 Speaker_00
I want to break out of that. I'm always trying to, what is your path? What are you doing? How are you thinking about things? What practices have you tried? I love meeting people who are from different cultural backgrounds, religious backgrounds, ages.

00:42:46 Speaker_00
They all have a story. They all have something that they want to share. And I think that the answers are

00:42:51 Speaker_00
within all of us and in a way that the more we kind of bring all of us together and try to help us to answer those big questions, I think that's the best way to do it.

00:42:59 Speaker_00
So for me, it is just, you know, every day I wake up and think about what's the next question that I have to ask and how am I going to try to answer it?

00:43:06 Speaker_00
And then once I get to some answer, I realized that's only 10 more questions that I now have to work on. So it's always, to me, it's about exploring the world, really.

00:43:15 Speaker_01
You were describing this police officer that was directing traffic in a way that made you say, that's an enlightened human being.

00:43:25 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:43:26 Speaker_01
What does that mean? That an enlightened human being?

00:43:29 Speaker_00
For me, it is. It's about feeling that connection. It's about truly understanding and having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life, and how you want to live that life, and how to fully engage it.

00:43:42 Speaker_00
That means I'm thinking about things, I'm feeling about things, and it's sort of how you decide to look at each of these things that to me is how we try to think about defining someone.

00:43:52 Speaker_00
as being enlightened or not and I don't know if anyone can ever say you know you are enlightened or you're not and I don't know you know there is no magic I can't do a brain scan say okay well there's the enlightened pattern this person is enlightened again for each person it's kind of their own way of looking at the world but I

00:44:09 Speaker_00
I think for me, at least, it does have to do with sort of how we embrace ourselves and how we embrace the world as best as possible.

00:44:16 Speaker_00
And there are these different practices and whether it's meditation, prayer, something more spiritual, something with nature, something with humanity. You mentioned hiking in Vermont. I go hiking in Colorado.

00:44:26 Speaker_00
And to me, the analogy is we're all sort of trying to get to the top. But there's lots of paths, you know, so.

00:44:33 Speaker_01
And there's also a beautiful view.

00:44:35 Speaker_00
And there's beautiful views all along the way.

00:44:37 Speaker_01
And a lot to hear and see every step of the way.

00:44:40 Speaker_00
You take in every part of it.

00:44:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think and that's it. You take in every part of it. The person that listens to this is somebody who is really interested in seeing a bigger possibility for their life and knowing what I can do.

00:44:57 Speaker_01
And as I've been listening to you, I can't help but reflect on the fact that probably I'd say top three issue that people write in about from around the world is this feeling of being stuck. This feeling of not knowing what my purpose is.

00:45:17 Speaker_01
And I have a hunch that based on your field of research, you have a point of view about what feeling stuck actually is in the context of your body, your brain, spirituality, enlightenment.

00:45:38 Speaker_01
So what would you say to somebody who's listening that's like, I just feel stuck. I just feel like I don't have a sense of purpose and how they can use this research to re-engage in their life.

00:45:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's a very important thing for everyone who's listening that, you know, when you feel stuck, and I doubt that there's been a specific research study to try to identify that.

00:45:56 Speaker_00
But, you know, in terms of how we think about the brain, the brain has billions and billions of neurons that are all interconnected with each other. And I think when people are stuck, what's happened is, is that the connections that we

00:46:09 Speaker_00
have going on in our brain are the only ones we're using. And so, you know, there's a cute phrase, the neurons that fire together wire together. And that's a great thing. I mean, that can be good. So, I mean, that's how we learn how to play the piano.

00:46:25 Speaker_00
It's how we learn how to play a sport. It's how we learn how to think about something spiritual or religious. The more we do it, that's why meditation practices work so well. The more you do it, the more those neural connections form in your brain.

00:46:37 Speaker_00
And that can be good. But the problem is, is that because those are the neural connections that form, it can sometimes also close you off to other things and other options and other ideas. And so if it's working for somebody, that can be great.

00:46:52 Speaker_00
But if it's not working, then, you know, part of the stuck feeling, now this gets into the emotional responses that we have, that a person is not feeling happy. And as I mentioned, we talked about the autonomic nervous system.

00:47:04 Speaker_00
So not only are they thinking it, but they're feeling it. They feel it in their body itself. Their body becomes less motivated. They're not able to engage the world as we were talking about a moment ago as fully as possible.

00:47:17 Speaker_00
So the problem is, which is not an insurmountable one, but the problem is that to break those neural connections requires energy. It's not always easy to find that energy, especially when you feel stuck.

00:47:31 Speaker_00
So part of what we've talked about in some of our work has been that you actually have to make some kind of conscious, purposeful effort to at least just break out of where you are

00:47:43 Speaker_00
and then hope from there that you can start to find these other pathways. And that's just not like kind of casting your lot to the wind here.

00:47:53 Speaker_00
If you have some ideas about where you would like to go, you would like to find meaning, you would like to engage the world in certain ways, then you can look for those other avenues because they are out there and people have talked about lots of different avenues and some of them are well-known, going down a religious path.

00:48:10 Speaker_00
Others are less, more esoteric or more subtle. But people can find those ways, but you have to purposely want to change and to think that you need to try to get out of that stuckness.

00:48:21 Speaker_00
And then I think, and this goes back to our discussion about rituals, is that rituals are also a way of one, in training the brain, but also helping to get the brain out and shifting the brain's focus.

00:48:33 Speaker_00
The goal is then to find a new ritual, to find a new practice, a new way of doing things, and then begin to do that, and then hopefully that will carry the rest of the brain and the rest of the person's life along.

00:48:45 Speaker_01
That makes so much sense, especially the visual of if you feel stuck, you are likely stuck in patterns of thinking, your commute,

00:48:54 Speaker_01
They're the same people, the same habit, the same way you move through your day, and that's part of what keeps you trapped. And you gave us these five points that are very common in terms of uniting these spiritual or religious experiences.

00:49:11 Speaker_01
Unity, a sense of intensity in the experience, clarity, surrender, transformation. Even if you're stuck, I would imagine if you look backwards, you can locate a moment in your life where you had a feeling of those things.

00:49:28 Speaker_01
And that provides the clue to you in terms of what you can just insert now. I am thinking about my sister-in-law, who's also our chief operating officer. And like a year ago, she was just talking about how, I think I'm gonna go back to church.

00:49:45 Speaker_01
I really think I'm gonna go back to church because like so many people, you have kids, you get busy at work, travel, sports start. All of a sudden, yeah, nobody's going to church. And she just felt this sense.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
I don't know that she would use the word stuck, but that something was missing.

00:50:01 Speaker_01
And so she looked back into her experience and said, when in my life did I feel a little bit more fulfilled, a little bit more connected, a little bit more optimistic, a little bit more, whatever you want to fill it in. Yes.

00:50:16 Speaker_01
And it's made a huge difference in our life. And so I do think your own life offers clues and you've given us almost this five points of data to really look at and say, I've experienced this. I know for me, if I don't get outside for a walk in nature.

00:50:33 Speaker_00
Right.

00:50:34 Speaker_01
I feel different. It's a part of what makes me feel connected to something deeper. You talked about the nervous system and how I think a lot of people have rituals of either religious practices or meditation or walking or other things that you do.

00:50:52 Speaker_01
I light a particular type of incense every morning and even just the ritual of lighting it and smelling it there is something that allows me to drop in to a deeper connection and presence in life.

00:51:07 Speaker_01
And if you could tell the person listening, what is the benefit to being proactive and conscious about creating a more spiritual, mystical, enlightened, or religious, whatever word you want to use, experience in your day-to-day life?

00:51:27 Speaker_01
What's the benefit of this?

00:51:29 Speaker_00
I'll answer the question in two ways. I'll answer it from the doctor perspective and I'll answer it from a personal perspective.

00:51:35 Speaker_00
So from the doctor perspective, what a lot of the data, including our research shows, is that when you engage that spiritual side of yourself, it really does have an impact on your biology, on your psyche. It really affects your entire person.

00:51:50 Speaker_00
And the data are pretty clear that it helps you to manage stress better, it helps you reduce stress, it helps to reduce anxiety, depression.

00:51:57 Speaker_00
And because those are also all then physiologically connected to our heart and our lungs and through our autonomic nervous system, It helps our immune system work better. It helps us to combat diseases like cancer, heart disease, and so forth.

00:52:13 Speaker_00
So there are really a lot of health benefits from trying to engage that spiritual side of yourself. Again, how you decide to do it is up to you. But doing it, all the data points to physiological changes in the brain, in the body.

00:52:27 Speaker_00
And maybe the one last thing to say, at least as far as that goes, is that We did a study where we looked at older individuals who started to do a meditation practice and their brain changes.

00:52:37 Speaker_00
So whether you're 85 or 5, you can change your brain and you can change your brain in positive ways. So from a clinical medical kind of perspective, that's the answer to your question about the benefit.

00:52:49 Speaker_00
But to me personally, and what I hope is also something that everyone wants to find, is that way to embrace the world, that way to embrace ourselves, that way to find a kind of enlightenment that makes us

00:53:04 Speaker_00
better about ourselves, feel better about the world, have a feeling of meaning and purpose, have a feeling of optimism, and a feeling of compassion, not just for everyone, but for ourselves as well.

00:53:15 Speaker_00
And that's what often these kinds of experiences lead to. Again, in our survey, 95% of people talk about these experiences as leading to

00:53:23 Speaker_00
positive feelings about their relationships and their jobs and all the different ways in which they think about their lives. So to me, trying to find that path is very important.

00:53:33 Speaker_00
And maybe the last thing to say is that people need to be patient with themselves, because it's not like you just say, oh, OK, I just got to I just got to find that feeling of unity.

00:53:41 Speaker_00
I just got to take that walk in the woods and boom, I'm going to be enlightened. Doesn't work that way. There is no guarantee. But as we were also saying in our analogy, as you're trying to walk up that mountain,

00:53:52 Speaker_00
take a look around, because there's a lot of things that you can learn, there's a lot of things that you can sense, and there's a lot of ways that you can appreciate life.

00:54:00 Speaker_00
And for me, in this world of neurotheology and doing all these brain scans, it's great, we found all these wonderful findings that we've talked about and all that, but The questions are more than the answers.

00:54:11 Speaker_00
And I have learned so much more just from doing this whole process because I've learned from all the people who have come in about their beliefs and how genuine they feel and how important they feel.

00:54:24 Speaker_00
And it's given me a great sense of appreciation and compassion for all the beliefs that people have. Even for people who believe things that aren't the way I believe things, that's okay. And in our divisive world,

00:54:36 Speaker_00
I hope that this kind of new way of thinking about things and a new enlightenment for the individual as well as for the society is something that can be useful both here and around the world. And I hope that's where we get.

00:54:48 Speaker_00
I'm an idealistic person and I hope that's what this all leads to.

00:54:51 Speaker_01
Do you think your work could prove or disprove the existence of religious experiences?

00:55:00 Speaker_00
I don't know if it will ever do that. I'm a never-say-never person, so anything is possible. But I think it's far more likely that it's going to enrich our perspectives of what it means to be spiritual.

00:55:13 Speaker_00
I come from this world of integrative medicine, and we talk about how we understand the person. We have four dimensions. We have our biological, which is what the medical world normally tries to take care of and gives us an antibiotic or

00:55:25 Speaker_00
fixes a leg or whatever, but there's a psychological, a social, and a spiritual part of who we are.

00:55:31 Speaker_00
And the way we are best healed and the way we are best healthy and have our greatest sense of well-being is when all those four dimensions are working together.

00:55:38 Speaker_00
And so for me, I think that, is it possible that we might find some paradigm-shifting results someday? Yeah, you know, we might. I have a colleague who's studying near-death experiences because there's a really unique opportunity there.

00:55:53 Speaker_00
If we can document and prove that somehow our mind or our consciousness or our soul, whatever that is, gets outside of ourselves, that changes a lot. in terms of how we think about who we are as human beings.

00:56:05 Speaker_00
Now, whether we will do that, I don't know, but that's why, to me, the whole field of neurotheology is so valuable because it gives us an opportunity to look at all of these big questions, theological questions, philosophical questions, questions about the nature of reality and so forth.

00:56:21 Speaker_00
I hope we will find some answers, but I hope that they will be answers that will be useful for everyone.

00:56:26 Speaker_01
You just said something that I wanted to have you unpack further, which was, There are four, from a medical perspective, there are four aspects to a human being.

00:56:36 Speaker_00
Yeah. The medical world has really focused, and appropriately so, on the biological part of who we are. So if we get COVID, we take an antiviral, or we take medicines to reduce inflammation, and we take care of the biology.

00:56:51 Speaker_00
Now that's great, and it's been very successful, but But for someone who's dealing with chronic illnesses, for example, like cancer or heart disease, well, it affects their person. It may make them depressed. It may make them anxious.

00:57:06 Speaker_00
They have a fear of death. They have bad dreams. They have, you know, all these different things. So that now is affecting the psychology of who they are, and it's a reciprocal interrelationship.

00:57:16 Speaker_00
You know, if you have some kind of illness or problem, it's going to affect your psyche. And if your psychological status, if you're depressed, you're more likely to have heart disease and cancer and so forth. So those two reciprocally fit together.

00:57:29 Speaker_00
Yes. Then you get to your social interactions. Well,

00:57:32 Speaker_00
If you've got cancer and you're in chemotherapy and you can't get to your pickleball game or your card game or whatever, and you see your friends or you can't go to church because you're stuck in a hospital, well, now your social environment goes away.

00:57:48 Speaker_00
And your social environment has been shown to be absolutely essential for health, well-being, and even mortality outcomes.

00:57:55 Speaker_00
sometimes for practical purposes, getting somebody to the hospital, making sure they take their medicines, but just having that personal interaction.

00:58:01 Speaker_00
That's why so many of the kids and so many people became depressed and anxious during COVID, because we couldn't have our social supports. It was horrible from that perspective.

00:58:10 Speaker_00
And finally, there's the spiritual side, which kind of wraps all of that up. How we feel, who we are as a person, how does our existence have meaning, and how do we feel about who we are?

00:58:23 Speaker_00
That then spills back over to, are we optimistic about dealing with our health problems? Are we optimistic about our social interactions, about how we feel psychologically? And there was a big study that showed that optimism is

00:58:36 Speaker_00
fun, you know, really correlated with a longer life and less disease. So all of these things are very interconnected and they all can be affected by each other.

00:58:45 Speaker_00
So as an integrative medicine doctor, our goal is always to try to find ways of helping people with each of those dimensions.

00:58:52 Speaker_00
and to really ask the questions about them because sometimes people are reluctant to talk about the spiritual side of things or the social side of things.

00:58:59 Speaker_00
And we know so many people who come into our offices and they have headaches and they're chronic fatigue and then finally they get divorced from their spouse or whatever and they feel a lot better because that was giving them so much psychological stress or they get out of a job or something like that.

00:59:14 Speaker_01
What's the difference from a medical perspective between the psychological aspect of your life and the spiritual aspect of your life?

00:59:22 Speaker_00
There's a lot of overlap. We have trouble distinguishing them. If you have a spiritual experience, I say, well, what did you feel? Well, you might say, I felt joy, I felt love, I felt calm.

00:59:33 Speaker_00
Well, those are psychological terms as well as potentially spiritual terms. So what was it that made you say it was a spiritual experience and that it just wasn't something that psychologically you felt better?

00:59:47 Speaker_00
These are some of the bigger questions that we don't really have a complete answer to because there does seem to be something about all those other elements that we talked about, the unity and so forth, the intensity, that makes it feel spiritual that is a little bit different than just the psychological.

01:00:02 Speaker_00
do you want us to think about it?

01:00:03 Speaker_01
Because I'm sitting here grappling with it right now and I'm going, okay, well, psychological, I'm thinking about my mood, I'm thinking about my mindset, I'm thinking about focus, attention, I'm thinking about my core beliefs or the thinking errors that I engage in.

01:00:23 Speaker_01
Spirituality feels like a deeper issue, an anchor that impacts psychology to me, almost like the relationship between where your social connections are and your actual biological health.

01:00:46 Speaker_00
There's definitely an interconnectedness between them. Again, for each person, they have to kind of figure out and tease that out to a certain extent. But there's going to be a lot of overlap.

01:00:56 Speaker_00
And so many times we know that people hit that spiritual perspective because they have psychological issues. They've hit that proverbial rock bottom, whether it's depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or whatever.

01:01:11 Speaker_00
And they feel like, I've got to turn this around. And many times the turnaround is something spiritual. So there's definitely an interrelationship. But And that is part of what we're trying to understand.

01:01:21 Speaker_00
Again, part of the problem has to do with the language that we use.

01:01:24 Speaker_00
I mean, ultimately, it's always a little amusing to me because mystical experiences are, by definition, undefinable or, you know, they're ineffable, as they would say, they can't be described.

01:01:35 Speaker_00
But I've had so many people said, I had this indescribable experience, but let me describe it to you. And so, but we wind up being stuck with some of the words.

01:01:43 Speaker_00
And that's why it's funny to me sometimes when I look at the narratives, because they'll like make certain words in capitals, because it's infinitely more real or something like that, because they don't know how to describe it, you know?

01:01:54 Speaker_00
And that is part of it too, I think, which is the sort of the inability to describe.

01:01:59 Speaker_00
But it makes sense because these areas of the brain, when they're shutting down, that kind of takes them away from our ability to then interpret them from a language perspective. Like, there's all these pieces of how we start to think about it.

01:02:10 Speaker_01
Fascinating. Dr. Newberg, what are your parting words?

01:02:14 Speaker_00
Well, I think, first of all, I hope people have learned a lot about the brain and spirituality and sexuality as well. You know, I hope that everybody has realized some important things.

01:02:25 Speaker_00
I think people need to realize that within all of us, we have a brain that is capable of finding these paths. It doesn't mean it's going to be an easy pursuit, but it can happen to everyone and it can happen to anyone.

01:02:37 Speaker_00
And I think as long as people are pushing themselves, are asking questions, are striving for something a little bit greater than who they are, trying to make that connection to something greater than who they are, I certainly hope that people will use this information to realize that, to strive for that kind of a goal, and hopefully they will find the right pathway for them, maybe some of the pathways that we've talked about.

01:03:00 Speaker_01
Well, Dr. Newberg, I am blown away by our conversation. I absolutely loved every minute of it. It's almost like a lot of what you talked about based on personal experience, I just know is true.

01:03:16 Speaker_01
But it's so cool that you've been scanning people's brains and can explain the science behind what we're experiencing, regardless of the words that we use to explain it.

01:03:30 Speaker_01
and just validating from a medical standpoint and a neuroscience standpoint why this is so important to be deliberate about bringing into your life.

01:03:42 Speaker_00
Right, absolutely. Well, and I agree. I mean, I think having the science does give that added perspective. It doesn't eliminate, as we said, you know, it doesn't eliminate the spiritual, it doesn't eliminate the religious.

01:03:54 Speaker_00
But it gives us this new perspective to look at things and to think about things in ways that we haven't done before. And hopefully it gives us some practical information.

01:04:03 Speaker_00
People love to have that piece of data that they can say, OK, well, you know, yeah, that makes sense. It's my frontal lobe or it's this or it's that. But again, you know, ultimately, it's all you know, it's our whole being.

01:04:13 Speaker_00
And that to me is what's the most exciting, but it's great to be able to study it. And it's been wonderful to do this work, but we've just scratched the surface and there's so much more left for us to explore and hopefully we'll all do it together.

01:04:25 Speaker_01
Well, Dr. Newberg, I am blown away by our conversation and I am so excited that you have shared all of your amazing research and insights with me and the person that's listening today. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I also wanna thank you.

01:04:41 Speaker_01
I wanna thank you for listening all the way to this moment, for really taking in what Dr. Newberg shared with you today.

01:04:50 Speaker_01
And in case no one else tells you, I wanna be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life.

01:04:57 Speaker_01
And based on these brain scans and everything that Dr. Newberg just explained about the research, there's no doubt in my mind that one aspect of living a better life is having spiritual experiences be a part of your day-to-day life.

01:05:14 Speaker_01
So I hope you feel inspired to try out some of the things that you heard about today, because I know it's gonna make a huge difference in your life, and I really want that for you. Alrighty, I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode.

01:05:38 Speaker_01
Okay, great. Okay, I do too. Ooh, mystical. Make sure you have the like, ooh, kinda. What's been interesting as an experience is just... what it feels like to live in an area that feels deeply spiritual and quiet. And having your nervous system, yes.

01:06:00 Speaker_00
One of my, I love, you know, when we go hiking out in Colorado and many times on our hike, just like, wait, just listen to that. And it's just nothing. Yeah, it's amazing. It's an amazing feeling, yeah. Yeah, totally.

01:06:10 Speaker_01
All righty.

01:06:11 Speaker_00
Thank you. That was fantastic.

01:06:17 Speaker_01
Oh, and one more thing, and no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

01:06:33 Speaker_01
I'm just your friend, I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.

01:06:52 Speaker_01
Stitcher.