Hard Wired For God

Santa Clara, Calif. - THE HUMAN BRAIN, even at its ancient, primitive core, is less an organ of impulse than a machine of reason. We are built to make sense of things. Our brains restlessly scan the world for patterns in chaos and causes in coincidence.

We crave explanation and, when faced with the ineffable, sometimes we create the answer.

For many people, the answer to the most ineffable question of all - "Why do we exist?" - is God.

Neuroscientist Rhawn Joseph has spent years studying history, myth and biology in his quest to understand the universality of spiritual experience and its evolutionary function.

In his studies of the brains of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns, radiologist Andrew Newberg seeks out the relationship between neural activity and mystical experience.

Both men believe that the connection between the brain and spirituality suggests that there is a physiological basis for religion - that human beings, in essence, are hard-wired for God.

Rhawn Joseph, of Santa Clara, Calif., believes there is a neurological, even genetic, explanation for religious belief and spiritual experience.

Homo sapiens, he theorizes, have evolved the capacity to experience God primarily through the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure buried deep in the brain. The amygdala, along with the hippocampus and hypothalamus, make up the limbic system, the first-formed and most primitive part of the brain, where emotions, sexual pleasure and deeply felt memories arise.

Says Joseph: "These tissues, which become highly activated when we dream, when we pray or when we take drugs such as LSD, enable us to experience those realms of reality normally filtered from consciousness, including the reality of God, the spirit, the soul, and life after death."

Joseph, who has a doctorate in neuropsychology and is the author of a comprehensive textbook called Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Clinical Neuroscience, cites his own clinical and historical research, as well as studies of epileptic patients who have experienced religious hallucinations, as evidence that "spiritual experience is not based on superstition but is instead real, biological and part of our primitive biological drives."

The short, solidly built scientist, 51, is the founder of an independent publishing company in Santa Cruz called University Press. Some of the company's nonfiction books concern astrobiology, the science of consciousness and, in a recent collection of essays, neurotheology - the study of the relationship between brain function and spiritual experience.

There is a maverick, even provocative bent to much of Joseph's writing. He has published a half-dozen books of his own at University Press, including The Transmitter to God: The Limbic System, the Soul and Spirituality, and he continues to research a number of subjects, many of them in evolutionary biology.

For the past 20 years, Joseph has been mining neuroscience, astronomy, history, religion, archeology and anthropology for clues about the meaning of intense religious ecstasy during which a person may see an image of God or hear the voice of an angel. Joseph believes those experiences are the result of hyperstimulation of the amygdala, which releases large quantities of natural opiates. The same opiates are released in response to pain, terror and trauma, as well as social isolation and sensory deprivation.

"Hyperactivation of the amygdala, hippocampus and overlying temporal lobe gives a person the sense that they're floating or flying above their surroundings," says Joseph. "It can trigger memories and hallucinations, create brilliant lights, and at the same time secrete neurotransmitters that induce feelings of euphoria, peace and harmony."

Many religious people might view the cause and effect in reverse - it is the divine inspiration that activates those areas of the brain, instead of the other way around - but to Joseph, the order is irrelevant. For him, the more important question is, "Why?"

"There are creatures living in caves who don't have eyes," he says, "because there's nothing for them to see. But we have a visual cortex and an auditory cortex, because there are things we were made to see and hear. You don't develop a brain structure to help you experience something that doesn't exist." We are hard-wired for God, in other words, because there is a real God to experience.

Matthew Alper, author of The 'God' Part of the Brain, believes this assumption is flawed. "We're capable of repression, of phantom limb pain - our capacity to believe what isn't there is also sometimes helpful."

Joseph acknowledges this but argues there is an equally possible alternative explanation for spiritual experience: evolution.

"Maybe the ability to experience God and the spiritually sublime is an inherited limbic trait. Maybe we evolved these neurons to better cope with the unknown, to perceive and respond to spiritual messages because they would increase the likelihood of our survival."

We became genetically predisposed to spirituality, says Joseph, because belief in a divine being makes us stronger.

Proving the evolution argument, says Massimo Pigliucci, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, is an entirely different matter.

"It is possible that if there is an advantage - that believing in an afterworld or God reduces anxiety or allows you to better navigate the world - that nature selected for that belief. But there's no evidence for that, and not only do we not have any evidence, there is no way to gather the evidence. It is inconceivable that you could do an experiment on survival of people who believe in an afterlife, because human beings in the past evolved in a totally different environment than any of us live in today."

The lack of opportunity for empirical studies does not deter Joseph. He sees similarities across cultures in near-death experiences; beliefs in ghosts, spirits and demons; symbols such as crosses, triangles and circles, as further evidence of the neuro-anatomical basis of spirituality.

"If you're a scientist and you find people having the same experience, coloured by their own cultural differences, all over the world 4,000 years ago and among both children and adults, you have to say, well, there's something there that's worthy of scientific explanation."

Huddled inside a shoe box of an office buried deep inside the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Andrew Newberg is also looking for God. Though he believes the limbic system is important in explaining religious phenomena, he does not think it is solely responsible. The complexity and diversity of those experiences, he says, must involve other higher brain structures, specifically the autonomic system.

Newberg's day job is radiology. Three days a week, he takes pictures of kidneys, lungs and hearts, looking for signs of disease. Two days a week, when he has willing subjects, he takes pictures of the brains of deeply religious people, looking for signs of God.

Newberg, 36, is conducting brain-imaging experiments trying to identify those areas where neural activity is linked to religious experience. In so doing, Newberg is taking Joseph's theories about the relationship between the limbic system and spirituality one step further.

A dozen times over five years, Newberg has brought in men and women, Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns, to peer into their brains as they meditate and pray.

In the first experiment, involving a Tibetan monk, Newberg attached an intravenous line to the subject's arm and had him meditate inside a small, darkened laboratory on the third floor of the hospital. When the monk was deep into meditation, Newberg injected a chemical tracer into the IV line.

A minute later, the monk was placed on an inclined table, his head directly beneath three rotating lenses of a massive, high-imaging machine known as a single photon emission computed tomography camera.

The images from the SPECT scans were filled with pools of neon green and red. The patterns represented increased and decreased blood flows to various parts of the brain, especially the lobes. Newberg found areas of increased blood flow in the frontal lobes, where higher thinking takes place, and decreased blood flow in the back or parietal lobes, where spatial orientation takes place.

Newberg said the frontal lobe activity might be an indication of heightened activity in the amygdala, as Joseph theorizes, although better imaging techniques would be needed to prove it.

"We believe that we were seeing colourful evidence on the SPECT's computer screen of the brain's capacity to make spiritual experience real. We saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is," Newberg says in Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, one of the two books he wrote with the late psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili.

The son of Reform Jewish parents, Newberg practices Judaism but has an affinity for Eastern religions as well.

In medical school, Newberg realized a lot of his interests kept leading him back to the brain. Radiology - taking pictures of the inside of a person's body and especially the brain - seemed a good fit. Research in dementia and Alzheimer's led Newberg to reading psychiatry bulletins, which in turn led the young doctor to d'Aquili, then an associate professor of psychiatry at Penn's medical school and a pioneer in the neurological research of religion.

By the time he finished medical school in 1993, Newberg had teamed with d'Aquili.

"We came up with a very detailed model about what we thought was going on in the brain" during intense spiritual experiences, Newberg said. "So we started working toward testing those hypotheses by doing imaging studies."

The imaging studies revealed that two specific areas of the brain, the posterior superior parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, play a critical role in intense spiritual experiences. In their books, Newberg and d'Aquili refer to these two brain structures as the areas of orientation and attention, respectively.

The "orientation association area" is responsible for creating the mental experience of personal physical boundaries and for providing a kind of spatial, three-dimensional matrix in which the body locates and orients itself.

The "attention association area" is critical in organizing all goal-directed behaviour and actions.

The SPECT scans of Newberg's subjects during deep meditation revealed two things: that there was increased activity in the attention association area, and decreased activity in the orientation association area.

"We believe part of the reason the attention association area is activated during spiritual practices such as meditation is because it is heavily involved in emotional responses - and religious experiences are usually highly emotional," write Newberg and d'Aquili in Why God Won't Go Away.

Newberg asked himself: What if the orientation area was working as hard as ever but the incoming flow of sensory information had somehow been blocked? With no information flowing in from the senses, the orientation association area wouldn't be able to find any boundaries. What would the brain make of that?

Using the evidence of his meditating monks and praying nuns, Newberg says he now believes the brain has no choice but "to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses," and that this perception, to those in the midst of an intense spiritual experience, feels "utterly and unquestionably real."

The University of Tennessee's Pigliucci believes Newberg's experiments are "well-done and interesting," but he takes exception to Newberg's interpretation of the results:

"Suppose we wanted to investigate some paranormal phenomenon, such as telepathy, and you claim that your brain behaves in a particular way when you do telepathy. So we do a brain scan, and we see that the pattern of neural activity will change because you are trying to concentrate on doing telepathy.

"The scan will obviously be different from your brain at rest, but does it show that telepathy is going on? No. The brain is always working. . . . You go to the movies, you eat a piece of chocolate, you dream - your brain patterns will change."

Newberg acknowledges that at some fundamental level, the question of the existence of God will forever remain unanswered. "You can't throw open that veil of the brain and get outside of your own brain and see what's going on in the objective external world."

Even if science can't pry open that door, Newberg remains sanguine.

"Regardless of the perspective you take, the idea of God doesn't go away. I don't think we would ever say we could prove or disprove God just on the basis of our imaging studies. . . .

"What we're really talking about is that, regardless of whether God truly exists or not, in some sense it's not even a relevant issue. Human beings are always going to have this sense of connection to God, defining God broadly, whether we create it ourselves or whether there really is a God."

Distributed by the New York Times news service.