Fringe-ology (24 page)

By the time Newberg was readying to start his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in 1993, he wanted to study his own holy trinity: consciousness, the brain, and spiritual experience. But like many people with a scientific interest in spiritual matters, he appeared headed for disappointment. There wasn't much, if any, existing research for him to use as a foundation. But there was one man he had become aware of, the since-deceased Dr. Eugene d'Aquili, who had conducted some research on ritual practices and the brain. Newberg asked d'Aquili for a meeting, and a lunch was arranged.

Newberg was in his mid-twenties, just starting his career. D'Aquili, a doctor at Penn, was roughly twice his age and entirely disinterested. “It was obvious he had taken this lunch with me to politely brush me off,” said Newberg. “He didn't have any interest in working with me. And why would he? I had just shown up out of nowhere.”

But Newberg didn't accept this polite no—and d'Aquili, seemingly just to get up and get away from the kid at the table, asked that Newberg look over some papers he had written. “Read those,” he said. “Then tell me if you're still interested.”

The papers were tough, tangled thickets. Newberg read every word. D'Aquili struck him as a creative researcher and a formidable thinker; and when d'Aquili found out that this kid got through the papers and absorbed them, he felt similarly predisposed toward his new protégé. The pair worked together till d'Aquili's death in 1998, and d'Aquili helped design and conduct Newberg's early studies on Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns.

For Newberg, the game was on.

“The connection between religious faith and mental disorder is, from the viewpoint of the tolerant and the ‘multicultural' both very obvious and highly unmentionable,” writes Christopher Hitchens.

Newberg's whole career was first animated by putting this long-voiced atheistic idea to the test: Would some sort of
mal
function show up that explained the spiritual experience? Or would he somehow get a glimpse of God as a kind of ghost in the machine? In his pursuit of an answer, Newberg has become a curator of human spiritual life—taking snapshots of various transcendent states and hanging them on the walls.

For his class, he played some video from one of his most controversial studies, in which he conducted brain scans of a woman awash in the ecstasy of speaking in tongues. Known more formally as
glossolalia
, speaking in tongues is one of the world's most heavily derided mystical practices: skeptics snort at it, and even most religious groups find the act of speaking in tongues aberrant at best, abhorrent at worst.

Among believers, the speaker is said to give himself over to the Holy Spirit, which takes control of his voice. Practitioners shout and whoop till sputtering flumes of syllables finally come pouring from their mouths. And this noise, they say, is the tongue of angels. Most famously, the R&B singer Al Green is a Pentecostal minister, where tongues remain a staple of spiritual life. When a filmmaker produced a documentary about Green's religious conversion, he withheld all images of Green speaking in tongues until the very end. But the film reaches its emotional climax with a clip of the singer, eyes closed, spouting a torrent of random syllables into the air.

Newberg's video is even more intimate than that. The woman stands before a home video camera, rocking back and forth, her words coming slowly at first, as no doubt she chooses them, until she starts hitting on multisyllabic riffs that sound more spontaneous. Then, finally, she reaches a vibrant, stunning peak—the syllables gushing out of her like water from a hydrant, forceful and uncontainable, moans and shouts. An ecstasy of sound. The kids in Newberg's class settled and resettled in their seats, some visibly wincing as this lady on the screen exulted. I felt a bit uncomfortable myself, in mixed company amid the youth of America, because it felt a bit like watching religious pornography—the sight of a fully clothed woman bringing herself to a spiritual orgasm. Perhaps sensing this, Newberg cut the video short, while the woman still wailed.

Like other religious activity, glossolalia has long been linked by some to mental illness. But a 1979 study in the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, along with a 2003 study in the religious journal
Pastoral Psychology
, found no connection between speaking in tongues and mental illness. Newberg's research turned up something even more remarkable. “I know that can be a little difficult to watch,” he told his class. “Because it's so unusual if you've never seen that before. But when we looked at her blood flow, in a SPECT scan, we found that she is describing her
experience
perfectly.”

As Newberg explained, the woman admitted that in the early stages of speaking in tongues she herself chooses syllables randomly. But at some point she no longer feels as if she is doing the choosing. The sounds just pour from her mouth, unbidden. “That's what we found looking at her brain,” said Newberg. “When she reached this involuntary stage, the parts of the brain that mediate and control speech were inactive.”

Of course, some might argue, strenuously, with the woman's spiritual interpretation of the experience. They might even call her crazy. But as Newberg told his class, this is a state the woman chooses to enter, a state she achieves in minutes, that does not come upon her at inappropriate times, “in the grocery store or when her children need her,” as do the unwanted voices or visions of the schizophrenic. “I happen to know this particular subject,” said Newberg. “And she has a normal life. She is a reliable person. And this practice gives her great joy and provides a lot of meaning.”

Newberg's research has led him to publicly endorse an “operational view” of spiritual experience: when a practice seems to
work
for the people engaged in it, and brings no discernible harm to those around them, then that practice seems to be one that society can and should tolerate. My guess is that most people agree with Newberg—“most people” being in the middle. But it also seems to me that Newberg's messages of tolerance for belief, and the need for more scientific exploration, are often either lost in the din or purposefully excised from media accounts of his work. Newberg has, in fact, appeared in two films: one,
What the Bleep Do We Know?
, endorsed an extremely mystical view of the world; while the other,
Religulous
, produced by the comedian Bill Maher, endorsed atheism. In each case, Newberg himself appears almost as a different person, a product of each film's editing.

“I am glad to have been in
Religulous
,” Newberg told his class. “It was fun to do. But they took out everything I said that expressed any compassion or support for religious belief, and made it look like I had said all spiritual experience was just this trick of the brain.”

Though it is disappointing, it isn't surprising that people want to interpret Newberg's work as they see fit. It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self
-
identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions. And so it follows that nonbelievers might self-identify with the statement “God is a myth,” while believers will find themselves reflected in the statement “God is real.”

This emotion, this
self
-identification, rather than our faculty for logical reasoning, is why so many interpret Newberg's agnostic data as confirmation of their own worldviews. Emotion also explains why so many engage themselves in the tit-for-tat debates between devout believers and no less committed atheists. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens all mine the lessons of history to attribute a vast body count to religion; and in retort, unsurprisingly, the Christian author Dinesh D'Souza, among others, notes the number of people killed by secular or atheist regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.

With emotion siphoned from the debate, it seems no group, secular or religious, can claim supremacy on morality—and that both sides often mistake correlation for causation. Consider the suicide bomber, often cited as evidence of the inherent destructiveness of religion in general, and Islam in particular. We tend to associate suicide bombings with religious fanaticism. But ironically, in this, not even correlation is truly present. In his book
Dying to Win
, Robert A. Pape drew on a database of 384 suicide bombers, with known religious or ideological affiliations, who acted between the early 1980s, when the practice was first adopted, and 2003. He found that 57 percent of the bombers represented secular groups. In fact, the Tamil Tigers first perfected the tactic of suicide bombing in Sri Lanka—and they are a Marxist, secular group. Pape further released
Cutting the Fuse
in 2010, which draws on a far larger database of suicide attackers and further extends and supports his thesis that issues of nationalism and foreign occupation are the real motivation for suicide bombing—not religious belief. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, has studied Islamic suicide bombers in Palestine and Kashmir, among other places, and found that the reasons they engage in suicide bombing are independent of religious belief—that belief itself is neutral and only channeled, along with more important desires for companionship and self-esteem, into a violent act.

Atran himself happens to be an avowed atheist. But according to the New Atheists, he just isn't critical enough of organized religion. Engaging in an ongoing debate with his colleagues, he fought back and admonished the most outspoken of his fellow atheists for having left science behind: “[They] ignored the vast body of empirical data and analysis of terrorism—a phenomenon they presented as a natural outgrowth of religion,” he writes. “The avowedly certain but uncritical arguments they made about the moral power of science and the moral bankruptcy of religion involved no science at all. Some good scientists stepped out of their field of expertise, leaving science behind for the unreflective sort of faith-based thinking they railed against. Sadly, in this regard, even good scientists join other people in unreason.”

The most damning aspect of Atran's critique is that the New Atheists don't have any data. Can the scientific field of endeavor, which produces people capable of building atomic bombs and chemical weapons, claim moral authority over religion? “The point is not that some scientists do bad things and some religious believers do good things,” writes Atran. “The issue is whether or not there are reliable data to support the claim that religion engages more people who do bad than good, whereas science engages more people who do good than bad. One study might compare, say, standards of reason or tolerance or compassion among British scientists versus British clergy. My own intuition has it a wash, but even I wouldn't trust my own intuitions, and neither should you.”

What Atran seems to be suggesting is that the common fiber running through humanity's good and evil acts isn't God or Godlessness—it's us. The source of all our behaviors, good and bad, is multifaceted and rooted in what it means to be human.

Viewed from this perspective, the ongoing debate between believers and unbelievers seems counterproductive—two groups letting their emotions get the best of them. And Newberg's attempt to reconcile science and religion in the field of neurotheology suddenly seems all the more poignant—a way, finally, of uniting humanity's two most dramatic attempts to understand and ameliorate the human condition: the cool rationalism of science and the ecstatic experience of spirituality.

“YOU GUYS ALL RIGHT?”
Newberg asked. “Are there any questions?”

Newberg asked his class how they were doing, a lot. And he wasn't just talking about class assignments and homework. Sometime in the middle of the semester, in fact, I realized he wasn't only, or even primarily, teaching his students about God and the brain. He was teaching his students how to get along with people who hold different beliefs, teaching them how to live more fulfilling lives, and teaching them to understand and appreciate the limits of human perception and cognition. In his class, “You guys all right?” was a question with philosophical, neurological, theological, and psychological undertones.

Newberg's students had by now been loaded up with information on the workings of their brains. “All my life I have meditated and wondered,” one Indian student announced, “why does meditation make me feel so peaceful? Now I know.”

Newberg asked if this learning had any impact on the student's thoughts about religion.

“No,” he replied, serenely.

“That's good,” said Newberg, then caught himself, suddenly. “But it would also be fine if you were changing your opinions,” he added.

Newberg took such pains to be respectful that sometimes, like right then, he and his students burst out laughing. His continual assurances, his commitment to respecting every point of view, took a lot of work. “The point is,” he continued, chuckling, “you don't have to give up one to have the other. Science and religion can be compatible. They're different ways of looking at, and different ways of trying to understand, the world around us.”

What Newberg stressed to his class, however, is that certainty in any of these matters can be very difficult to come by. The religious, no doubt, should accept this—ascribing their belief in a higher power to faith. But even our most basic perceptual and cognitive operations are subject to doubt. Some of Newberg's most entertaining talks, in fact, revolved around the limitations of our ability to understand the world. “The brain receives literally millions of bits of information every second, from all our senses,” Newberg told his class. “But we can only be consciously aware of a few bits, a really small proportion, of any of that information, at a given time.”