Andrew Newberg || Your Brain on Enlightenment

to have doctor Andrew Nuberg on the show. Andy is a neuroscientist who studies the relationship between brain function and various mental states. He is a pioneer in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences, a field known as neurothology. His research includes taking brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals, and trans states, and an attempt to better understand the

nature of religious and spiritual practices and attitudes. His latest books are How God Changes Your Brain and How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain. Thanks so much for talking in with me today, Andrew. Oh, thanks Scott, thanks for having me on your program. Wow, you study some pretty hefty topics, you know, have you always sort of thought at this kind of really existential, deep level, like this was a kid that you were you fascinated with these kinds of questions.

I think I really was. You know, it's something that when I was a kid, I was always asking questions, and you know, it was funny. I was very disturbed by the fact that there were people who had different religions or different political you know, different political parties and perspectives. Of course, very relevant today. You know. I felt like, well, if we're all looking at the same world, how can we all haven't come to the same conclusion. Shouldn't there

be some uniform answer that we all come to? And clearly, I mean when you do look at religious traditions and cultures and political parties, you know, not only do they see the world a little differently, it's almost completely dichotomous in terms of how they look at the world. So I started to think about it and I try to understand what was going on and why that would be

the case. And first I thought about, well, it must have something to do with our brain, because that's what helps us to look at the world and figure things out and try to make sense of our world. So that was the first step, and I looked at science, and I looked at what science tell us about the world.

But after a little while, I realized that science is also performed by us as human beings, and so it's still subjected in many ways to our own biases and the ways in which we look at the world and the ways in which we think we can measure the world.

And I started to reflect inwardly about these questions, and it became a much more philosophical process, something that became almost a kind of philosophical meditation, so that I was actually just spending my time thinking about these big questions about the nature of reality and who we are and

how we can understand anything about the world. And as I went through that process, it was really the combination of both these kind of philosophical meditations as well as the scientific pursuits that kept trying to kind of find a way to come together in my own mind. And ultimately I was very fortunate that it came together in

a field, this field of neuro theology. I found two wonderful mentors, one in the world of imaging of the brain, and we did studies of all different kinds of you know, brain states and disorders and so forth, and another colleague who was looking at the same kind of questions about the relationship between religion and the human brain, and kind of going back, we realized that we could actually start to use these brain scans to study this and put

this all together. And that was really what ultimately kind of put the whole idea of neurotheology together for us, and was something that allowed us to go forth and try to explore these questions in a very complex and very rich way. Sure, are you one of the founders of the field of neuro what is it called neuro neurotheology theology? Are you one of the founders? Well, you know,

I don't know if I would say that. Interestingly, the term neuro theology actually originated with Aldus Huxley in a novel he wrote called The Island back in nineteen sixty one, where he just mentioned it as a term. My late mentor Eugene d'quilli was perhaps one of the founders of the idea of neurothology of sort of putting together the

relationship between the brain and religion. And there was also a scholar named James Ashbrook who actually was the first person I'm aware of who actually published an academic article in a peer review journal that carried the title of neurothology. So I don't know if I was the founder, but I certainly hope that I've helped to push the field along and really tried to expand it and get it into many different domains, as I feel it should be

a very multidisciplinary kind of field and field of scholarship. Yeah, and so before you set your sites on enlightenment, you worked with Mark Waldman to study just religious beliefs, Is that right? Yes, So you know, my early work was looking at a variety of practices like meditation and prayer.

We studied people speaking in tongues, and we studied Brazilian mediums and trance states, really trying to get a sense as to what was going on during these practices and the different experiences that they ultimately had as part of those practices. Right, and then when did you start thinking like, Okay, now I want to study like Nirvana. Well, I think part of it came from the fact that that that's

part of what these people often experience. People start to describe for us these incredible experiences, these mystical experiences, and in many ways they're the culmination of these practices we all you know, obviously the you know, we always have this notion of the Buddhist monk who spends you know, forty years of his life and then finally hits enlightenment. So it's through these practices that people have these incredibly

intense experiences. So that was part of it, and part of it also grew out of this growing concern that I had that as we continue to do brain scans, and we've done now over about two hundred and fifty brain scans of people doing all these practices, I kept thinking to myself that, you know, I really don't have

a good handle on the subjective nature of these experiences. So, you know, we've heard of what Buddha had to say about the experience, or what some you know, very learned monks and masters had to say about it, or you know, some of the great Christian mystics or Jewish capitalistic mystics.

But what do people feel? And so part of what ultimately led us to exploring the concept of enlightenment was an online survey that we ran where we asked people about their most intense spiritual experiences, their most intense enlightenment experiences, and we actually ran it when I started at the University of Pennsylvania. I was on faculty there, and we

started to get all kinds of day. We got data on almost two thousand people who gave narratives about the experiences that they have told us about who they were, their religious and spiritual tradition, their background, what they believe, what medications they were on, mental and physical illnesses they may have had. So we got all of this data, which is really a treasure show of data and we're still working through it today. That told us a lot

about the subjective nature of these enlightenment experiences. And then by using that information, we could then go back to the brain scans and say, oh, okay, well, when people say that they have this incredible feeling of joy, of overwhelming joy and love, what's going on in the brain.

And then we find that when people have that kind of an experience through a practice such as for example, loving kindness meditation, then what we see are changes of activity going on in the emotional centers of the brain and the reward centers of the brain, those areas of the brain that make us feel really really good, make us feel very very positively in terms of our emotions, and so again we started to put all of that together,

which led to the discussion about how enlightenment changes your brain. So do you think we were designed by evolution to find spiritual experiences rewarding? Well, I think that ultimately the answer to that is yes. I mean, when you think about how these experiences come about, how they help human beings to function and understand the world in very very intense ways, I think it does make some sense that

these experiences would evolve within us. Now, part of what was also an important part of our approach to neurothology, which was based on my late colleague Genedquilli's work in anthropology, was the notion that to some degree, these experiences are built upon our brain and what our brain is trying to do for us in general, and part of that process has to do with various rituals, and in particular

mating rituals. And so the idea that the conclusion of the mating ritual, of the sexual orgasm, for example, which is this incredible ecstatic experience, it's not surprising that religious and spiritual rituals will ultimately kind of access some of those same basic feelings and lead to ecstatic experiences. I mean, it's very interesting to me how the most intense spiritual experiences and sexual experiences are described using a lot of

very similar terms. So whether or not these processes evolved in our brain for mating and for creating cohesive societies, which ultimately led to these experiences, and then once these experiences happen, we developed into these wound up having our brain evolve even more to be able to have those experiences.

It's not totally clear exactly what led to what, but certainly the idea that through the evolutionary processes that allow our brain to help us to survive, to help us to basically move from one stage of being, one stage of life to the next, religious and spiritual experience seemed to fit very well into that whole process. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense that we're pulaying off these drives that we share with other animals. So let's step back a second. I want to ask you, like,

what is enlightenment. Well, that's a great question, and you know, when we first started to think about this as a topic, we kind of came at it as Okay, it's you know, the Buddhist monk who has this incredible experience. But as we as we got into it. First of all, just historically, what's interesting is that enlightenment has meant different things, even on a historical level. So for the religious and spiritual, enlightenment meant the idea of truly understanding God and being

intimately connect to God. In fact, perhaps even becoming one with God, as people have described in some of the mystical sects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In the Buddhist and Hindu perspective, enlightenment actually didn't involve God so much as it involved the ability for us to connect to some greater universal consciousness, as you mentioned, sort of that nirvana experience, becoming one with everything, becoming one with the universe.

But interestingly, if you go back to the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds, the age of Enlightenment actually was in

many ways completely the opposite of this. The idea was to actually go away from religion and to turn to rational thought and science and investigation of the natural world as the process that led to a kind of intellectual enlightenment and the idea of getting beyond these archaic concepts of religion and spirituality, which were actually shrouding us in darkness and trying to come into the light through rational thought processes. So I mean, and that is ultimately what

enlightenment means is to bring light to something. So for the religious or spiritual person who feels that they're kind of in the dark and then they become you know, they enter into the light of God, that's their perspective of enlightenment. For the individual who believes in science, it has more of a scientific connotation. Now, when we looked at our survey and we looked at all the different words that people used, what we ultimately came away with

were five basic elements of the enlightenment experience. So let me just I'll go through them briefly. One of them is a profound sense of intensity, the idea that this is the most intense experience that a person has ever had. So sometimes it's the most intense feeling of love, or it's the most beautiful music they ever hear, whatever it is, it's something that is just beyond the most intense thing

that they have ever experienced. Another aspect is a sense of clarity, And this is the notion so many people say that when they have this experience, is that they get it for the first time, they understand what the world is all about, what they're all about, and what they're supposed to do in life. So that sense of clarity is also a very fundamental concept and a very

fundamental part of these experiences. The sense of unity is another critical piece of these experiences, the sense of becoming one with God, with the universe, with some type of universal consciousness, and that is again another core component of these kinds of experiences. And the fourth core component, at least in terms of the experience itself, is a slightly different concept, which is the notion of surrender, the notion that they themselves are not making this experience happen, but

it's basically something that's happening to them. They are going along for the ride, and they essentially have to surrender themselves to that entire process. The fifth element of the enlightenment experience is not so much an experience so much as the result, which is the permanency of it and the radical transformation that occurs as part of the experience. So for people who have enlightenment, they go from one way of looking at the world to a fundamentally different

way of looking at it. So maybe they thought, you know, whatever they thought was important before. Now they know what's important, and it's something completely different, and it changes the way they think about their lives, about their health, about their well being, about their relationships, about their job, and ultimately

about their religious and spiritual beliefs. But all of those things seemed to change in literally moments, and that, to me is also a very fascinating aspect of these experiences, not only because from the perspective of the experience itself, but also from the perspective of the human brain and how it seems to change so radically as a result of these experiences. Yeah, I found it's so fascinating reading the stories some people described you know, in the layment

feeling more real than everyday reality. I don't really know what that means, though. Well, that was actually one of the things that was very important to me because that had to do going back to your very first question about you know, was I always asking these kind of existential questions, and part of what I felt was so

essential is how do we know what's real? And when we start to think about that from a brain perspective, ultimately we're sort of trapped within our brain and we're always looking out on the world, and our brain is interpreting the world around us and trying to make some sense out of that. And so how do we assess what is real and what is not? And I think the best example of that is if that everybody can

relate to is the dream state. So when you're having a dream, and I'm sure everyone has had this experience where the dream feels incredibly real whatever it is, you know, whether you're you know, vacationing in Paris, whether you're being chased by some monster, whatever it is. When you're in that dream, it feels incredibly real and your body and your or at least your mind is reacting to whatever it is. If there's a guy with a gun who's chasing you, at least in the dream, you're running, and

you're running as if that person is real. Now, when you wake up, the very first thing that we say is, oh, that was just a dream. We immediately recognize the dream state as a kind of inferior form of reality, and by whatever characteristics we apply to it, we say no, no, no, This everyday reality is the real reality, and that dream

state is no longer the real reality. Now, when people have these enlightenment experiences, they look at the everyday reality in much of the way we look at the dream state. So suddenly they feel like now they get it, They really understand the real reality and the way that we normally think about reality in our everyday world that's not really that real. It's you know, there's elements of it

that are real. But just like our dream states don't feel real, suddenly our everyday reality doesn't feel as real. And so people do describe it as being a more intensely real state. And that's part of why they feel like it's intense. They feel that they deprive clarity, and usually part of that unbelievable sense of realness is associated with that sense of unity of becoming part of that realness as part of the experience. Yeah, and they're clearly

different paths to that same experience. And you know what

about drug induced and malignment. You know, Abraham Maso used to call those unearned peak experiences, right, Well, you know, there's a lot of very interesting information that comes out of those experiences for us, and people are stuck trying to study them more and more, and even you know, we've looked at them into the context of our survey, there's some really interesting aspects to come out about it, both in terms of the biological as well as the spiritual.

So from a biological perspective, part of what's important is is that we know where these drugs go. I mean, we know certain drugs like LSD go to the serotonin system and affect different chemicals in the brain, and that that's part of what leads to that kind of very intense experience for that individual. So that's part of it, which it tells us a little bit about what parts

of our brain are involved in these experiences. But the other thing is is that when people have these experiences, even though you know, I think our Western perspective is that they're not real, when people have those experiences, they do recollect them, and they do feel that they represent some very fundamental perspective on reality and something which often can transform them and change their lives in many the same ways that a more natural enlightenment experience can actually

do that. And some of the work that I've been doing with David Yaden, who's been one of my students and colleagues, you know, he's looked at how these experiences are described and found that they're every bit as real, as intense, as spiritual as the more naturally occurring ones, so to speak. And yet you know, obviously they're part

of this drug induced experience. Some of the work that's been done by another colleague of mine down at Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths, has found similar things by actually inducing these experiences in people and finding that they represent these perhaps

the most intense experiences that these people have had. And the one other piece that I'll add to this, which to me is always important because it gets back to the realness piece, is that you know, there are many shamanic cultures around the world that use different use mushrooms and peyote and all that to induce these kinds of states, and for them, these are the windows into that spiritual realm. And the analogy that I always thought about for myself is,

you know, I have very poor vision. So when I wake up in the morning, the world is a very blurry place, and I put my glasses on and suddenly I see the world clearly. Well, the world hasn't changed, and I haven't changed, it's just that I am now seeing the world better. And so one might make the argument that by taking one of these drugs that you're allowing your brain to see the world in a more accurate and more real kind of way. Wow, So you know, it's not that it's a fake vision of the world.

It's just that you've now allowed your brain to get to some level of activity that can perceive the world in a way that it's really meant to be perceived. So there's different perspectives that people could take on it. Did you do a lot of LSD in your day?

I actually have never done ELIS, And you know, again, part of the reason why I actually haven't is the notion that I don't know if that perspective on reality necessarily is based on everything that we understand about how our brain works, if we're always trapped within our brain, than any experience we have of reality, whether it's a dream state, a drug induced state, a near death experience, a mystical experience, these are all experiences that we have

of reality. So even though they might give us a new perspective, they don't necessarily get us any closer to answering the question about what is the true nature of reality? And so to me, that's still part of my kind of larger philosophical, spiritual, and scientific journey that is looking into that kind of a question and hopefully someday I might find an answer, but at the moment I haven't. As I always tell everybody, if I ever figured it

all out, I'll certainly let everybody know. But I think that the only way that we're going to get to those kinds of answers is through some type of very multidisciplinary, integrated roach, which I think neurotheology may have the best option or the best opportunity for us to figure out how to answer those questions. Whether it will or not, I don't know, but I'm going with that for the moment.

Cool what's the difference between big eie and literally? So well, the biggie and literally when it comes to enlightenment is a way that we were thinking about it to help people understand the variety of Enlightenment experiences and also to give people a little bit of a sense of what enlightenment is. The literally experiences or experiences that all of

us have had. They can be those little aha moments where we suddenly figure something out in life, where we suddenly know what job to take, what person to marry, a new way of thinking about the world in some particular way. So those are those little, aha, little Eureka moments. They have different terms that we all have had. You know, maybe some more than others, but we've all had at least a few of them in our lives, and they give you that little taste of what an enlightenment experience

is about. You get that moment where you suddenly get something, you feel something a little bit more intense, a little bit more emotional, a little bit more connected to the world in some way, a little bit more clarity that comes out of it, and it changes the way you think about things. The difference is is in the big e Enlightenment the sort of the truer Enlightenment experiences, These are experiences that aren't changing the way you think about

the world. They're changing basically everything that you know and understand about the world and about yourself. So you know, in many ways, these experiences are the most intense kind of experiences that we can have, and they are the experiences that we really kind of typically think of when we think about the Enlightenment experience, and that's why we refer to them as the big eie experiences, the ones that really change and transform a person's life in a

person's way of thinking about things. Yeah, it sounds good. I want to get the big E. Well, that would be always the ultimate goal, I would think. But you argue there's kind of like a spectrum of human awareness, that there are various levels of awareness or levels of reality along the way to enlightenment. Can you tell me

what the what lies on that spectrum? Well, yes, I mean the spectrum of awareness has to do a lot with our consciousness, and it really does range from the very kind of basic ways of looking at the world and responding to the world, and almost an instinctual kind of way all the way through the more how we sort of make decisions and think ourselves through kind of what we talk about like intentionality and a way of sort of planning for our world, which is kind of

in our everyday reality, our everyday mindsets, and then ultimately up to the more creative ways of thinking about the world. And that's almost where you're getting to that higher consciousness, that notion of creating something new, coming up with something

different than has ever been thought of before. You know, that's like a slightly higher level of awareness and perceptions about consciousness and then ultimately all the way up to this sort of more transcendent nature of consciousness where we actually get beyond our ego self, that we get beyond how we actually normally think about the world and feel this incredible sense of connectedness and oneness of our consciousness with the consciousness of everyone else, or perhaps even a

universal consciousness, as certain traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism have actually suggested. So there's this kind of transition that goes all the way through these different stages, and as with all of the things that we've been talking about, we can start to relate these back to different brain processes. So you know, when you talk about our instinctual processes, you're talking about our sensory areas of our brain and

our very basic emotional responses. When you start talking about the way we think about things through sort of a conscious intention and decision making, we're talking about our frontal lobes and our temporal lobes that help us to sort of think through things and concentrate on things. And then when we get into these mysticals types of states where consciousness changes into this other kind of altered state of

consciousness and this sense of oneness. Then we're talking about changes going on at the level of our parietal lobes that help us with our sense of self, and also our frontal lobes in terms of how they begin to actually shut down as we kind of surrender to the experience itself. So we can get into a lot of how our brain is working as we start to think about the subjective nature of these different aspects and the experiences that we have. Yeah, there's a lot of information

they just gave everyone, and it's super fascinating. My friend Daniel Bora wrote a delightful book, The Ravenous Brain. I'm arguing that that frontal parietal brain network is kind of the seat of consciousness, is the strongest correlative consciousness because it allows you to hold patterns in working memory and everything is chunking. Basically, in his model, we chunk the world down, and that the frontal pridal lobe is very important for holding that kind of information in a working

memory state. It's a technical book, but it's also a really interesting book. But it seems to me like what's kind of confusing to me is you're saying like the highest level of enoyment involves deactivation of literally the frontal priedal network. And yet you're also saying it's like higher levels of consciousness. So how can that brain network that seems to be the most strongest corela of consciousness, the more deactivated is the more ennoyant we are. Do you

see what I'm saying, I'm trying to understand that. Well, yeah, I mean it. The short answer is, we're not totally short, you know. The more complex answer is that, you know, the brain is always dynamic, it's always changing, and part of what we think is going on is that as you get to sort of higher and higher levels of consciousness, you do kind of ramp up the activity in the

frontal lobe for example. And in fact, the analogy that we're using is that you know, if you were to climb up a step and jump off, not much happens to you. If you climb up a ladder and jump to the ground, well, you know you'll feel that. You know, you might be okay, but you'll feel that. But if you climb all the way up a ladder and then you jump up into an emptied swimming pool and you fall you another ten feet down, you're probably going to

get hurt. I mean, there's something pretty significant is now going to happen to you. And so part of what we think happens is is that there are many different states of consciousness, and so some levels of consciousness do involve an increase in that frontal lobe activity as we concentrate, as we focus our mind on whatever it is that

we're consciously aware of. But then when we get to a point where our ego consciousness actually seems to disappear, then it seems to be associated with a profound drop of activity in this frontal lobe area. And we've seen evidence for that on some of our brain scan studies where people have that kind of an experience. But it does raise some very interesting questions about where exactly is consciousness.

And I appreciate one model being the idea of the frontal parietal connection as being part of it, but there are lots of other parts of our brain that may have something to do with our awareness of the world. The thalamus, for example, which is a very central structure that brings in our sensory information and relays it up to the frontal and the parietal lobes. So that may be part of our awareness and part of our consciousness.

You know, there's our emotional centers, which may have something to do with our memory and our ability to think about things and feel about things. And the other piece of this, and we've talked about this a little earlier about sort of the animal world and animal models of this, is that when you think about it, I mean, animals have a certain level of conscious awareness as well, and even animals that almost don't even seem to have a brain, I mean ants, you know, they don't eat themselves, they

eleite something else. So there's some sense of self, some sense of awareness of the self, and the relationship between that self and the world that seems to kind of keep growing and changing as it goes through different animal species all the way up into human beings. So my guess is that it's very complex, and again I hope that more research in neurothology will able be able to

help us to truly understand what these relationships are. Maybe if we take those individuals, those Buddhist meditators who are perhaps the most adept at modifying their consciousness, maybe we can get a better feel for what's going on in the parietal lobe, in the in the frontal lobe and how that varies and changes as an individual goes through life, as they go through meditation, as they go through enlightenment, and really try to get a sense as to how

these different brain areas are ultimately related. But consciousness is certainly a huge, huge question. There's you know, obviously there's a whole field of consciousness studies, and I think neurotheology bumps up to that very very well in a very interesting ways, because there's a lot of interesting implications not only for the brain and consciousness, but for our religious and spiritual selves as well. Oh no, I definitely agree.

There's just a lot of unanswered questions about this. Like you know, you find in the intelligence literature that for those who with low IQ scores when they take an IQ test, you see an awful lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex, right, But for those with very very high IQs you actually see reduce bus activity because it's an efficiency issue exactly. Now. I wonder how much of what you're finding as an artifact of you know, expert meditators are kind of just becoming more efficient in their

usage of the prefrontal cortex. Well, that very well may be. I mean, we actually did one study that was kind of interesting in regard to that, which was our study of Brazilian mediums. What was interesting about that study is we had ten different individuals come up from Brazil to study them, and after we when we looked at all of the information, we scanned them while they were in this intense trance state, and then we scan them while

they were in just kind of a regular state. And what we found was was that we didn't see very much changing when people were in the trans state. We couldn't figure out what was going on, and so we said, well, are there differences between these people? And it came out in our discussion with them that there were five individuals who were highly adept and highly practiced and been doing this for years and years, and then there were about five people who were relatively new at it, pretty novice

at it. And when we divided that into looking at the areas of the brain that that we thought would be involved, like the frontal lobe and the parietalobe, we saw a very interesting dichotomy between these two groups of individuals. Those individuals who were very adept at it kind of what you were just saying with regard to intelligence, they're the areas of the brain, like the frontallobe and the parietallobe during the trance state actually decreased in activay, whereas

in the in the novices it actually increased. And I think you know that. To me, one of the best maybe analogies to that is playing the piano, as I learned to play the piano when I was a kid. You know, when you first start out and you're playing Twinkle Twink a Little Star, you have to concentrate on

every note that you're playing. So you're going to increase the frontal lobe activity once you ultimately develop enough skill that you can kind of play the piano even without thinking about it, you know, certainly like a concert pianist, you know, they don't have to think about it, and so not only is it an efficiency aspect, but it becomes so natural for them that their frontal lobe activity and some of the their motor activity actually can decrease

as part of the pro especially when they become very creative in the process. So I think that we're ultimately talking about some very complex dynamics in terms of how the brain works, how it changes and shifts depending on what we're doing, depending on how we have learned and trained our brain to do these different tasks and to engage these different experiences. And so I definitely think that there is a kind of training process that is part

of it that does change the brain. And there's other data that certainly support that as well, that those people who are long term meditators, who've been meditating for fifteen plus years on a daily basis, they have fundamentally different brains than people who are non meditators, and it includes changes in the frontal lobe, changes in the thalamus, and so we are able to see where those changes occur and understand that these changes occur as the result of

these practices. Yeah, so what makes you so sure about the brain is giving you useful information here? I mean, you could imagine a really spiritual person who believes in God, a rare religious person would say that, like, you know, this kind of stuff flies outside the realm of brain activations, that you're getting in touch directly with some sort of higher being that is not going to be reflected by

brain scans. How do you respond to that sort of thing? Well, actually, I mean, as I have said before, to me, the thing that would actually excite me more than anything is for somebody to say to me, I had the most amazing spiritual experience I've ever had, and when I look at their brain, nothing's changed, because then maybe I really

would have captured something spiritual. But short of that, you know, what I usually say to people is that even if there is something that's spiritual outside of the brain, which I have no problem with, I mean, you know, from a neurotheological perspective, I think neurotheology has to be open to both sides, and we have to be open to

God's existence to the spiritual realm. That doesn't mean, you know, that's the ultimate conclusion that we wind up taking, but we have to be open to what those different perspectives are about. And but irrespective of whether or not you know, a nun is literally in God's presence or a Buddhist is literally connect to a universal consciousness that we can't measure, what we can say is well, but how did that affect their brain? How did they ultimately make some sense

out of it, make meaning out of it? How did it change the way they felt, the way they thought, the way they understood the world. So there's always still that more cognitive emotional experiential element that can be looked at in the context of the human brain. But you know, for somebody making that argument there, it is a valid argument. And the question ultimately is the analogy I always think about is is you know, a boat on the ocean,

So am I looking at the boat itself? Or am I just looking at the wake that the boat leaves? And you know, we don't know for sure. Neurotheology may ultimately, by continuing to give us data and information about the subjective nature of those experiences as well as the biological elements associated with them, may ultimately lead to an answer that they could address both sides of the equation. But we do have to be careful, and of course, you know,

I always warn people of that that. You know, so many times when some of my researchers out, you know, the religious people say, ah, you know, you see there, that's where God has there has his influence in our brain. And then you know, the atheist would say, aha, you know, it's purely produced by the brain. And I always try to say, well, you know, it could be either of those explanations. We have to be a little bit more cautious about how we interpret what these studies and what

these scans ultimately mean. Yeah, but your scans are showing that this state of enlightenment certainly involves. When people say they're experiencing these common set of characteristics that resemble enlightenment, it seems like it's a fundamental shift in or suspension of their ordinary view of the world. Well, I think so. And again, I mean that is something that happens subjectively, and it also makes sense in the context of that frontal lobe change that we were talking about a few

moments ago. You know, our funnel lobes, among many of their functions, you know, basically help to keep all of our ideas in their proper place. It's sort of the big, you know, filing system in our brain that you know, the funnelip sort of helps us maintain that index and make sure we know where everything is. So we when we meet our friend, we know that their name is Scott.

When we meet our mother, we know her name. You know, we know who these people are, We know our ideas, and the funnel up kind of keeps all of that very well organized for us. However, when the funneloe suddenly shuts down, it's almost as if you take those file cabinets, throw all the folders up into the air and then quickly rearrange them back into the file cabins, and suddenly we don't think about the world anywhere near the same

way that we did a few moments before. So I think it is part of that whole process about how we utilize our brain to help us understand the world, and how that can be radically changed by the nature of these experiences. Yeah, and there's lots of different as you say, there are lots of different ways to get to these experiences. Maybe one can listen to music and feel this kind of great sense of all our transformation, or maybe a medium could do so you've studied mediums

right in the brain scanner. Yeah, so you know, we have looked at many different kinds of practices and in our survey, as you mentioned, you know, I was fascinated by this incredible variety of ways in which people getting into these experiences, and as you mentioned, some through music and creativity, some through drug induced experiences, some through near death experiences. Some one of my favorite ones was the guy who basically was driving his truck down the street

and it just hit him. So, you know that doesn't happen very often, but it can, and so one never really knows exactly how or when or where these experiences will come about. You know, part of what we talk about in our book is the ability to try to

prime the brain, if you will, towards having those experiences. Obviously, one can never guarantee enlightenment in any way, but the idea of pursuing these kinds of practices and sort of consciously and purposely exploring these questions and these you know, and trying to explore these experiences is something that virtually everyone can do. So while enlightenment may not happen may

not happen to everyone, everyone can ultimately experience it. But you know, we ultimately have to see as we go forward how well people ultimately can get to those kinds of experiences. Well, let's talk about how anyone could prime the brain to have more of these kinds of experiences. You have this kind of multi step program, so to speak,

how to do that? Can you give some advice? Sure? Well, I think that there's a couple of very basic things that almost anybody can do, and people can literally start, you know, today down the path. And I think the first thing is basically to understand what enlightenment means to you, you know, what the person is looking for as far as that experience goes. And I think also to sort

of prepare themselves for that experience. You know, even though it is an incredible experience, to radically change who you are is a scary thing, and so that there's a certain degree of preparation that you have to be kind of willfully interested and be consciously approaching that kind of process, and you have to be kind of prepared and ready for that kind of process. So that's part of it.

I think the most important from the perspective of the individual is to find that exact approach, find the ritual, as we talk about it, and maybe more than one, but to find that ritual or rituals that will ultimately lead you as an individual down the path towards those experiences. And whether that is something that's creative, whether it is through questioning things, whether it is through meditation, whether it is through the church, whether you know, whatever it is

for that individual or some combination of things. Finding that individual process, if you will, is the key, and that is always obviously the biggest challenge. But to start down a path to keep moving down that path, to be open and aware of other paths and keep an open mind to the different experiences and different paths that might be out there. All of that is part of that process.

And then ultimately surrendering oneself to that process, I think is very key that ultimately you kind of even though you're purposely trying to get to something, there has to be this moment where you kind of release yourself and allow yourself to just have that experience and then ultimately to kind of reflect back on what these experiences are and how they ultimately are something that can be incorporated into your life and what it means to be so

to speak, and enlightened being how you use that information in terms of your relationships, in terms of your job, in terms of your sense of spirituality, Those to me are all very very critical parts of the process. And again, I mean it's obviously never a guarantee, but there are ways in which people can do that and kind of purposely do that, and those are some of the easy steps to take right off the bat, you know, just going home and writing down what you think enlightenment means

and thinking about the paths that you might take. What are the rituals that you might pursue. What are those things that you do now and or the things that you might try and continue to explore. And I think that's ultimately, you know, to me, that's the fundamental basis of neurotheology. Is this sort of what I call a passion for inquiry, that the idea that we just keep asking questions, that we keep pursuing the answers to those questions. And I think that that's part of neurotheology. I think

it's part of spirituality. I think it's part of science. I think it's part of enlightenment. I mean, this is such this really gets a kind of the heart of human existence and what makes us feel purposeful and meaningful in life. As you know that the state is intimately tied with meaning, and so it seems almost like enlightenment is so individualized per person, depending on their own source of unique source of meaning and the interpretations they make

of what they're viewing in the world. Is that right? Well, yeah, you know, And again it's interesting because when we look at these couple thousand people's experiences and how they wrote the narratives about them. On one hand, we can get to those certain core elements that sense of unity and clarity and so forth, But each of them also has a profound uniqueness to them, and so yes, I mean

no one actually has the same exact enlightenment experience. And it also raises some interesting neurotheological questions too, which is, you know, if somebody in the midst of that experience feels a force, and someone feels God, and someone feels loved, are they the same experience that is then interpreted in three different ways or are they fundamentally different experiences that are simply all labeled as enlightenment. And those are some

big questions that neurotheology has yet to figure out. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about some of the benefits of What are some of the outcomes you find from people who go through this process? Well, when we do, when we question people about what happened to them afterwards, what we do typically find is that many aspects, many facets of their life have changed, and almost always uniformly

for the better. So their sense of meaning and purpose in life is enhanced and grows, their sense of spirituality is enhanced and grows, their sense the sense of their relationships and the importance of relationships in their lives and how their relationships go improves, their ideas about their job and vocation improved, And it's really pretty dramatic. I mean, only about a couple of percent, three or four percent at most in any of those categories actually describe a

worsening as the result of these experience. So you know, over ninety percent in general found some kind of improvement in their life as the result of these experiences. So they are incredibly powerful and to some degree, you know, and I know I'm biased because of the work that I've done, but it seems to me, like you know, and I think you said this too, is that it's the kind of experience that virtually everyone should want to try to find a way to get, and I think

that the data suggests that anyone can have it. I mean, again, these couple thousand people, These are not the Buddhas of the world, These are not the you know, Saint Teresi's

these these are just everyday people. And so I think one of the big take home messages of our book and of this work is the notion that we it's within all of us, all of our brains, have the potential ability to have these experiences and whether we, you know, purposely try to get to them, whether we take the easier way out, perhaps through a drug induced experience, whether it happens in a near death experience, whatever it is is, we all are capable of getting to those experiences, and

that's what I think the data bears out. And I think that, to me is very exciting because it ultimately can lead all of humanity to an enlightened state, an enlightened sense of our species, and I think that would be wonderful. We certainly need to get to something a little bit better than where we are right now. Agreed, that would be wonderful. Thanks for chatting with me today and for the incredible work that you've done in your long career and the work that you're continuing to do. Yes,

thank you so much. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com.