Religion on the Brain

The hard science of neurobiology is taking a closer look at the ethereal world of the spirit

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By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

Wander down the halls of some neurobiology departments these days and you may catch a few decidedly nonscientific terms floating by in conversations there. Researchers reared in the hard materialism of Western science may well be chatting about Franciscan nuns, the Dalai Lama, the soul, or enduring happiness.

These scholars are part of a small but growing group of metaphysically minded investigators exploring the connections between the brain and spirituality. Some of them are treating religion as just another object to put under the microscope — or inside a brain scanner. But others are breaking the bounds of accepted scientific tradition, raising taboo topics such as whether the mind exists beyond the body or whether basic scientific knowledge must be linked to human values.

"This is a new science that's emerging," says Patrick McNamara, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. "You might call it the cognitive neuroscience of religion. This is definitely a new discipline, and it's poised to make some major new discoveries."

Almost all neuroscientists agree that the mind is a product of the brain, but Mr. McNamara — who is editing Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, a three-volume set due this fall from Praeger Publishers — questions that assumption. "It's absurd for someone to say that consciousness is nothing but a certain set of brain-activation patterns," he posits. He openly wonders whether consciousness has an immaterial aspect, perhaps related to what theologians have traditionally called the soul.

A decade ago, it would have been hard to find any scientist without a Nobel Prize or some similarly bulletproof bona fides willing to voice such a view. But today even some nontenured scientists are opening up their labs — and their theories — to spirituality.

"The dominant paradigm certainly would never in a million years entertain that idea," says Mr. McNamara. "But I think it's thoroughly legitimate to keep it open as one possibility."

As Mr. McNamara predicted, leaders in the neuroscience community scoff at that suggestion. Stephen F. Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience and a professor in the molecular-neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, Calif., echoed many scientists' reactions when he said in an e-mail message, "I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd."

This new challenge to materialism in neurobiology comes at the same time as private sources of money have emerged to support investigations into religion and science. The John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropy run by the financier's evangelical son, John M. Templeton Jr., will spend $36-million this year promoting efforts to bridge the gap between science and religion. And the Mind and Life Institute, in Louisville, Colo., has been providing funds for experiments and conferences that explore the mental activities of Tibetan Buddhist meditators.

Interactions between Buddhist leaders and scientists have led some researchers to break with the materialistic traditions of Western science by tearing down the thick wall separating knowledge from values. Those investigators have resolved that the pursuit of science, even basic research, must promote their own personal growth and the welfare of other people.

"There is a blurring of traditional boundaries," says Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard and co-editor of The Dalai Lama at MIT, due out in September from Harvard University Press. With some neurobiologists pushing at the boundaries separating science from ethics and reappraising the fundamental concept of the mind, they are challenging some of the basic paradigms of science. "In the end," she says, they are wondering, "are our materialistic assumptions right?"

Scanning for Transcendence

At the University of Pennsylvania, Andrew B. Newberg is trying to get at the heart — and mind — of spiritual experiences. Dr. Newberg, an assistant professor of radiology, has been putting nuns and Buddhist meditators into a scanning machine to measure how their brains function during spiritual experiences.

Many traditional forms of brain imaging require a subject to lay down in a claustrophobia-inducing tube inside an extremely loud scanner, a situation not conducive to meditation or prayer, says Dr. Newberg. So he used a method called single-photon-emission computed tomography, or Spect, which can measure how a brain acted prior to the scanning procedure. A radioactive tracer is injected into the subjects while they are meditating or praying, and the active regions of the brain absorb that tracer. Then the subjects enter the scanner, which detects where the tracer has settled.

His studies, although preliminary, suggest that separate areas of the brain became engaged during different forms of religious experience. But both the nuns and the meditators showed heightened activity in their frontal lobes, which are associated in other studies with focused attention.

The experiments cannot determine whether the subjects were actually in the presence of God, says Dr. Newberg. But they do reveal that religious experiences have a reality to the subjects. "There is a biological correlate to them, so there is something that is physiologically happening" in the brain, he says.

Dr. Newberg will be following up those studies as director of Penn's new Center for Spirituality and the Mind, which opened last month. The virtual center draws together researchers from bioethics, medicine, neuroscience, and religious studies — all but one are from Penn — who are exploring different aspects of how spirituality interacts with the mind. Some seed money for the center came from the Templeton Foundation, which has provided $270,000 for a lecture series at the university.

As part of the center's work, researchers will explore the nature of the mind, with both the objective methods of science and the subjective approaches of philosophy and spirituality. "One of the things that's made my own personal research a little unique is I hold open the possibility that this is really a two-way street," says Dr. Newberg, referring to his unorthodox views of the mind.

The reigning paradigm among researchers reduces every mental experience to the level of cross talk between neurons in our brains. From the perspective of mainstream science, the electrical and chemical communication among nerve cells gives rise to every thought, whether we are savoring a cup of coffee or contemplating the ineffable.

'No Matter, Never Mind'

But some researchers, including Dr. Newberg, question that materialistic presumption.

"Is the mind really just a part of the construction of our brain's functions, or is there more to it than that?" he asks. "Is consciousness something that exists out there, whatever that means, as many religious traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism might consider?"

Other scientists are asking similarly heretical questions. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a research professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been treating people with obsessive-compulsive disorders to counter their urges through focused attention of the mind. Scans of his patients' brains reveal that such mental therapy can alter the behavior of their brains, something that could not happen if the mind emerged entirely from the brain, he says.

He and colleagues have developed a theory that the effects of quantum mechanics — which normally are obvious only at the atomic scale or smaller — provide a way for mental experiences, such as conscious effort, to alter the brain. By extension, he says, the same laws of physics — if they are correct — lead to the metaphysical conclusion that "awareness can exist without bodies and human beings."

"It is a tragedy of history that materialism became the regnant paradigm," says Dr. Schwartz, who rails against the contemporary norms that divide science and religion (see related story, Page A18). There are a growing number of scientists, he says, who "believe that this separation of science from religion is a cultural artifice."

Last year Dr. Schwartz and two colleagues published a paper on their quantum theory in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. They are not the first to try linking quantum mechanics to concepts of consciousness, but such efforts have failed to win over either physicists or neuroscientists, who discount the role that quantum effects would play at the size and temperature of the human brain. In discussions of consciousness, "the only reason people involve quantum mechanics is because of pure mysticism," says Christof Koch, a professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology.

Mr. Koch collaborated for nearly two decades with the late Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, to produce a framework for understanding consciousness. The key, he says, is to look for the neural correlates of consciousness — the specific patterns of brain activity that correspond to particular conscious perceptions. Like Crick, Mr. Koch follows a strictly materialist paradigm that nerve interactions are responsible for mental states. In other words, he says, "no matter, never mind."

Crick summed up the materialist theory in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner, 1994). He described that hypothesis as the idea that "your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

But Dr. Schwartz is not alone in taking aim at that hypothesis. Donald D. Price, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Florida, is well known for his research on the placebo effect. He has collaborated with Dr. Schwartz on a study of how people's expectations can alter their perception of pain.

Mr. Price also questions the reigning materialist concept of the mind, asking, "Why say that consciousness exists only inside a body?" Regarding subjective experience, he wonders, "Are we talking about some organ inside our skull, or are we talking about our connection with something outside ourselves? That connection outside ourselves can include a spiritual connection."

Despite the growing numbers of religious and nonreligious researchers who support this view, they remain at the fringe of science. Michael S. Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a leading neuroscientist who serves on President Bush's Council on Bioethics, says that essentially all brain biologists accept the materialist view of the mind. "I would say that 98 or 99 percent of people in the business think that," he says.

The Dalai Lama in the Lab

For several neurobiologists, Tibetan Buddhism has served as a catalyst, forcing them to confront other materialist traditions and to expand their notions of science. The interest in Tibetan practices stems from a series of meetings called the Mind and Life dialogues, which has brought the Dalai Lama together with top neurobiologists and other researchers for a series of meetings since the 1980s, culminating in the high-profile talk he gave last November at the Society for Neuroscience conference.

Richard J. Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has coordinated several of those meetings and has collaborated with Buddhist leaders in studying the brains of highly trained Tibetan meditators. In 2004 he and his colleagues reported that the electrical recordings revealed some extraordinary changes in the brains of the meditators.

The researchers placed electrodes around the scalps of the meditators to tune into the activity of different parts of the brain. Those electroencephalograms, or EEG's, showed a high level of synchronization among neurons, particularly in a certain frequency of electrical pulses. These were the highest ever reported for healthy humans, according to the researchers, who published their report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The observation "reflects the stabilization of the mind that can be achieved with mental training," says Mr. Davidson. Practicing meditation over many years can produce lasting changes in the brain and measurably improve a person's attention, suggest the researchers.

An exposure to Asian spiritual traditions can also have a lasting effect on the scientists who are studying it. Mr. Davidson has been practicing meditation since 1974 and he serves on the board of the Mind and Life Institute. But until recently, he did not try to measure meditators or publish in science journals about Buddhism.

Mr. Davidson and his colleagues are following up their previous work by studying people who engage in relatively short but intense training — meditating for 10 to 12 hours a day for several months. The team will be looking at how brain behavior and hormone levels change over that time.

Scientists at Harvard, Princeton, and the Universities of California at Davis and at Los Angeles are also conducting separate studies on the effects of meditation. Some of them are explicitly testing whether meditation practices can help students, even in elementary school.

Paul Ekman, a prominent professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, has only recently grown interested in Buddhism. After he attended a Mind and Life meeting in 2000 with the Dalai Lama, Mr. Davidson, and others, Mr. Ekman started collaborating with Buddhist leaders on an experiment that tests whether Buddhist training could help teachers control negative emotions.

Last year Mr. Ekman, Mr. Davidson, and two Buddhist contemplatives published an unusual paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. It was basically a primer on Buddhism, designed to spark more interest among psychologists. One section of the paper starts with the title "Achieving Enduring Happiness," and describes the concept of sukha, a genuine and enduring happiness.

The researchers urge psychologists to pay more attention to the lessons of Buddhism. "Conceptually, they raise issues that have been ignored by many psychologists," the authors write. On one level, Buddhist practices would help scientists understand emotional experiences and the internal mental states of individuals. At the same time, the scientists and Buddhist leaders argue that Buddhist practices can help improve the lives of all people.

Mixing Values and Science

The themes they stressed dovetail with some that emerged during a large conference of scientists and Buddhists in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The forthcoming book about that meeting, The Dalai Lama at MIT, was edited by Ms. Harrington, of Harvard, and Arthur G. Zajonc, a professor of physics at Amherst College.

According to Ms. Harrington, some researchers at the conference came away with the revelation that the Western tradition has artificially separated science and human values. While "softer sciences" such as social psychology have long been concerned with improving people's lives, she says, "the brain sciences have not tended to be oriented that way."

Neuroscientists have hewn more closely to the empirical tradition of objectivity without worrying about their own emotional well-being or the overall human condition. But Buddhism "doesn't recognize those boundaries," says Ms. Harrington. According to Tibetan philosophy, she says, "the point of knowledge is to ultimately refine one's ethical stance in the world or act in the world to increase compassion and so on."

Many scientists at the meeting argued for tearing down the divisions between science and moral considerations. It may be, says Ms. Harrington, that the brain sciences are "developing a conscience."

According to Mr. Zajonc, "the knowledge-value divide is the idea that human beings can be factored out completely, that knowledge can stand on its own, decontextualized. That's not a position that can be defended."

It might seem odd that some neurobiologists have looked across the world to Tibet to develop a conversation with religious leaders, but the Eastern mystique has a unique pull for brain scientists, especially those who came of age in the 1960s and 70s when American society at large started exploring meditation and Eastern spiritual traditions, says Ms. Harrington. The Tibetan connection has helped researchers "feel kind of liberated to take risks in ways that they might not otherwise," she says.

A number of these scientists, such as Mr. Davidson and Mr. Zajonc, have had a longstanding interest in meditation, while others are starting to experiment with contemplative practices now, perhaps tapping into latent memories of the Transcendental Meditation movement.

Attacks on the value-knowledge divide are also coming on other fronts, including from some members of Christian Neuroscience Society, a group that usually meets when the Society for Neuroscience holds its annual conference.

Kenneth J. Dormer, a professor of physiology at the University of Oklahoma and the co-inventor of the cochlear implant, founded the group a decade ago and says scientific research cannot be separated from larger human issues. "How is it applicable to the big picture of why am I here?" he asks.

This summer 125 scientists and Tibetan Buddhist leaders will gather to discuss some of those concerns at a weeklong symposium. In a renovated monastery overlooking the Hudson River, the two communities will talk about research and contemplative practices, mixing in a couple of meditation sessions each day.

The change in attitude, says Mr. Zajonc, is a substantial one from when he started his career and scientists dared not talk about spirituality and values, or meet with religious leaders like the Dalai Lama. "I think that 30 years ago, you do this and your career is at an end."

Now some young neurobiologists are feeling emboldened enough to break the boundaries of their science. When it comes to religion and the brain, they say they're keeping their minds open.