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

Speaker 2 Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Speaker 2 You know, I've always thought that neuroscience and spirituality are two totally different topics.

Speaker 2 But what if the two were actually deeply connected? And what if science and brain scans could prove this connection? Well, today's guest, Dr.

Speaker 2 Andrew Newberg, is a neuroscientist and medical doctor who has spent decades studying how your brain processes spiritual and religious experiences. Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg is the first neuroscientist to demonstrate with groundbreaking brain scan research the underlying biological mechanism of spiritual experiences on your brain and body.

Speaker 2 In this episode, you're going to learn how spiritual and religious practices and simple daily actions that you may not even think are spiritual, but they are, can rewire your brain for more joy, connection, clarity, and purpose.

Speaker 2 No matter what you believe or whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, or an atheist.

Speaker 2 This is a fascinating conversation at the intersection of neuroscience and human spirit and what you may believe or not.

Speaker 2 This mind-blowing science will change the way you see the power of your brain and spiritual practices as a way to awaken it.

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Speaker 2 Hey, it's Mel. I'm so excited that you're here.
You know, it's always such an honor to be able to spend some time with you and to be together.

Speaker 2 If you're brand new, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast.

Speaker 2 It tells me that you're the type of person that's interested in deeper questions and having a deeper and richer experience in life. And I do too.
And that's why I'm absolutely thrilled that Dr.

Speaker 2 Andrew Newberg is here in our Boston studios to talk to you and me today and to share his groundbreaking research on the impact of spiritual and religious practices on your brain. Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg is a renowned neuroscientist and medical doctor. He is the director of research for integrative health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College.

Speaker 2 He is listed as one of the 30 most influential neuroscientists alive today. He's published over 250 peer-reviewed articles and chapters.

Speaker 2 He is also the author of 14 books, which share his cutting-edge research. And here's where this gets really interesting.
Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg has been scanning the brains of people during meditation, prayer, and countless religious and spiritual experiences.

Speaker 2 And what he has found will make you think very differently about the connection between your brain and spirituality. So please help me welcome Dr.
Andrew Newberg to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me on your program. Oh, I'm so excited to just learn from you today.

Speaker 2 And I'd love to start by asking you, if you could speak to the person who's listening directly and tell them what they might expect to be different about their life based on what you're going to share and teach us today.

Speaker 1 What are we going to learn? Well, I think one of the most important things for people to learn is how to make their life more spiritual. And that doesn't have to be supernatural.

Speaker 1 It could be being in nature. It could be connecting to something creative.
And sometimes it is something truly spiritual.

Speaker 1 But what we're going to be learning today is about how our brain helps us to be spiritual. And through that process, we'll learn how to actually be more spiritual.

Speaker 1 And I think perhaps one of the most important take-home messages of all of the work that I've done is that we all have a pretty similar kind of brain. So these experiences are available to everyone.

Speaker 1 It's not like there's somebody who could be excluded from this.

Speaker 1 Everyone who's listening has the potential to find their own paths towards enlightenment and to thinking about their life in a much deeper, more meaningful way.

Speaker 2 How do you define spiritual?

Speaker 1 Well, that's a great question.

Speaker 1 A lot of this whole field of research is something called neurotheology. And actually, a lot of what I start with is how do we define our terms? What do we think about them?

Speaker 1 In fact, I challenge all of the listeners to actually go home and write down on a piece of paper spirituality and religiousness and try to think about how they would define it, because each of us defines those terms a little bit differently.

Speaker 1 I think probably one of the most common ways of defining something spiritual is the idea of connecting with something greater than the self. And that's why I say sometimes it can be a supernatural.

Speaker 1 It could be connecting to God. It could be connecting to a universal consciousness of some kind.
But it can can also be connecting to nature, to something creative. It could be connecting to music.

Speaker 1 It can be connecting to humanity and how we take care of each other in a more effective way.

Speaker 1 So all of those can be ways in which we feel that we ground ourselves and we connect us to something greater than what we are.

Speaker 2 Now, you used two words. You said spiritual and religiousness.
Is there a difference?

Speaker 2 And I'm only asking this just so that as we dive into your work and your research and what we can learn from it, we just understand the terminology that you might be talking about.

Speaker 2 So we have a baseline.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a great question because I think so many people really struggle with what those terms mean. And each person has to kind of think about it for themselves.

Speaker 1 Obviously, there's a lot of overlap. A lot of people will say, oh, you know, I am religious and I am spiritual.

Speaker 1 In today's world, there's a lot of people who say, I am spiritual, but I don't really follow a particular religion. I'm not Christian.
I'm not Jewish. I'm not Buddhist.
I'm just, I'm just me.

Speaker 1 I'm just trying to explore the world.

Speaker 1 I think that for the most part, both of them are trying to find a connection, trying to find a way in which we connect to something greater than the self, where the typical difference in the definition comes to is usually religions are part of a religious tradition.

Speaker 1 So there's a group of people who say, this is what it means to be Catholic. This is what it means to be Buddhist.

Speaker 1 But again, you know, I've certainly had people who then raise their hands and say, well, wait a minute, I'm part of a spiritual community and we have our definitions and things that we adhere to and we make as part of our group.

Speaker 1 So, there's really a lot of overlap, but sometimes that's why I actually wind up using both those words a lot of times together because it's just to be inclusive.

Speaker 1 Some people say, Oh, that was a deeply religious experience. Other people say that was a spiritual experience.

Speaker 1 And part of what we are trying to figure out is where are the differences and where are the similarities. But there's obviously a lot of similarities.

Speaker 2 I was so excited to talk to you today because I recently became really good friends with somebody who

Speaker 2 was a pastor and leader of a massive megachurch, like charismatic Christianity, evangelical, which completely surprised me.

Speaker 2 But as we've gotten to truly know one another deeply as friends, and we've talked about the bigger things that we believe in, we recently, just a weekend ago, were having this deep conversation about his belief system

Speaker 2 and how it is anchored in what you just described in more of a religious structure, belief

Speaker 2 order, so to speak.

Speaker 2 And my belief system, which is way more in the spiritual lane.

Speaker 2 And at the end of this long conversation, I was like, you know, I never thought we'd end up here, but I think we really are saying the same thing. We have different words to describe it.

Speaker 2 But the feeling that you get from believing what you believe is the exact same feeling that I get from my connection to something greater, to a sense of spirituality in my life.

Speaker 2 And so I'm so happy that as somebody that is studying this, lecturing about it, writing books about it, that your definition

Speaker 2 of being religious versus being spiritual is more of what's in common

Speaker 2 than what's not.

Speaker 1 What I have come to realize, and I know we're going to be talking about brain scans and all that kind of cool stuff in a little bit, but I realized that, you know, if I'm looking at a brain scan of somebody who is religious or spiritual, whatever it is that they're doing, unless I talk to them and know what they're actually thinking about and feeling about on the inside, I don't know what I'm really looking at.

Speaker 1 I mean, I can say, oh, you know, your frontal lobe became more active or something like that.

Speaker 1 But that actually kind of propelled me to do a research project starting about 10 years ago where we did a whole survey of people's. spiritual experiences.
And it was an online survey.

Speaker 1 We got a couple thousand people who talked about their spiritual experience. And we asked them questions about who they were and what their background was.

Speaker 1 But then ultimately we said, here's a box, you know, write to, tell us what you felt and what you experienced.

Speaker 1 And it was an incredible treasure trove of information and data because, you know, on one hand, if we want to know about the definitions or what spirituality is, we can go to the heads of the megachurches.

Speaker 1 We can read what Buddha had to say on it.

Speaker 2 Go to synagogues.

Speaker 2 You can go through lots of Pueblos.

Speaker 1 You can go all over the world.

Speaker 1 But to me, as much as that's important, and it is an important part of it, asking the everyday person, you know, what do you feel when you feel something spiritual?

Speaker 1 What you, oh, you had this spiritual experience. Tell me about what you felt.
What emotions did you have? Did you see a light? Did you hear something? Did you see God? Did you see an ancestor?

Speaker 1 What happened with you?

Speaker 1 And so this treasure trove of data has been actually a very fundamental part of a lot of the work that we do because it helps us to figure out where the commonalities are and where the differences are.

Speaker 1 You know, on one hand, everybody's experience is unique, but there also are a lot of commonalities.

Speaker 1 And I think that becomes important ground for us, both in terms of neuroscience, but also just in terms of helping us to understand each other and to understand, as you were just talking about with your friend, that you have differences, but ultimately there's a common element to that, that you're both trying to strive for the same kind of thing.

Speaker 2 Well, what was fascinating to me is we were using different words,

Speaker 2 but it was very clear that we had the exact same physical, physiological, emotional experience in our bodies when we were feeling the things that we were describing that we believed.

Speaker 2 And that to me was this unbelievable epiphany.

Speaker 2 And, you know, just to give us a little bit of background before we dig into the neuroscience and the connection between spirituality and how it impacts the brain.

Speaker 2 And can you tell me a little bit about what made you want to study? the brain and religious and spiritual experiences.

Speaker 1 Well, I started out as a child, as they say. And, you know, when I was very young, I distinctly remember kind of being upset by the fact that there were different religions.

Speaker 1 I, you know, to me, I was like, well, if we're all looking at the same world, then why aren't we all thinking the same way?

Speaker 1 Why are there different religious systems, political parties, moral ideas about the world? Shouldn't we all just feel the same way? And clearly we don't.

Speaker 1 So I thought, all right, well, I've got to figure this out. Somebody's got to figure this out.
So it may as well be me. And so, you know, I started asking a lot of questions.

Speaker 1 And I've always loved science. So, you know, that to me was kind of a natural thing to do.

Speaker 1 But as I got kind of towards my college years, I began to feel like, as wonderful as science is, and I still love science, that there are certain limitations that science has, especially when it comes to things like our subjective experiences, our consciousness, something spiritual.

Speaker 1 You know, what exactly does all that mean? How is our mind and our brain connected to each other?

Speaker 1 So I started to look into philosophy and theology and religious studies and all these other ways of kind of looking at the world.

Speaker 1 And then finally, a lot of this really came together for me when I was in medical school. I did what I guess in today's lingo would be to take a gap year.
I took an extra year.

Speaker 1 And I connected with two wonderful mentors. One of them was in the field of brain imaging.
And so I started to research brain imaging.

Speaker 1 And we studied Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and depression and all these different kinds of things using amazing brain imaging techniques.

Speaker 1 But the other person who I met was actually interested in this discussion about religion and the brain. In fact, he had actually been thinking about this since the 1970s.

Speaker 1 And he was an anthropologist as well as a psychiatrist by training.

Speaker 1 We used to have these amazing dinner parties.

Speaker 1 I would be sitting around the table with literally people who were Nobel Prize winners, people who had basically revolutionized fields of psychiatry and psychology and so forth, and were doing drinking songs and were, you know, and

Speaker 1 one of the things that he loved more than anything were rituals, that these sort of pattern behaviors.

Speaker 1 And he ultimately kept thinking about how rituals that are so fundamental to our religious and spiritual selves.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I don't know what conversations you had with your friend, but the things that you do, the things that you repeat, the meditations, the prayers, whatever practices that you do, these are so fundamental to us as human beings.

Speaker 1 And in fact, there's rituals not just in religion and spirituality, but politics, education, sports, everything. But he was an anthropologist.
So where do these rituals come from?

Speaker 1 Well, theoretically, if they evolve, they must have come from animal rituals. But one of the interesting things about animal rituals is that they're all mating rituals.

Speaker 1 So there was this whole connection between sort of the physiology of our body and our brain, and even maybe our sexuality, but how that kind of correlated with the rituals that lead to these incredible experiences, these enlightenment kinds of experiences that change the way we think about everything.

Speaker 1 So there was this whole sort of path. And then ultimately the proverbial light bulb in my, you know, in my brain went off.

Speaker 1 And I said, well, wait a minute, you know, if I'm doing brain scans of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, why can't I do brain scans of meditation and prayer?

Speaker 1 And that's really what kind of set off the more formal approach that I began to take. But for me, so much of what I was doing, you know, not only became scientific, but was very contemplative.

Speaker 1 And I really spent a lot of time and still do in a kind of meditation, thinking about these questions. You know, what is the nature of reality? How do we get to that reality? What am I thinking about?

Speaker 1 Why am I thinking about it?

Speaker 1 And within those practices, the ways in which I was trying to approach those questions, I had experiences that sounded like some of these other experiences, mystical experiences and things like that.

Speaker 1 And I thought, well, where are the similarities and differences between what other people talk about? And again, all of that kind of came together to propel me into exploring these topics.

Speaker 1 And I've been doing it ever since.

Speaker 2 So just to give the person listening kind of a sense of how all this research works, because I love this visual of you combining all the brain scans that you've been doing with this real interest in spiritual and religious and mystical experiences.

Speaker 2 Do you do brain scans on people when they're praying and when they're meditating? How does it work?

Speaker 1 About 30 years ago, we did our very first brain scans of people in meditation. And since then, we've scanned hundreds of people doing all different kinds of practices.

Speaker 1 And some of them are secularized practices like mindfulness or yoga. Some of them are deeply meditative, like Buddhist meditation.
And some of them are deeply spiritual.

Speaker 1 We've studied people speaking in tongues. One of my other mentors always said, you know, if you're a good carpenter, you have a lot of tools in your bucket.

Speaker 1 So we have a lot of ways of getting brain scans of people. And, you know, for some types of practices, if you can just lie there very quietly and be in a scanner, like an MRI scanner, we can do that.

Speaker 1 We can just sort of shove somebody into a scanner and we can put them in there and say, we want you to go ahead and do your prayer practice.

Speaker 1 And of course, as I always like to joke, for the listeners who have had an MRI scan, they know that sometimes being in an MRI scanner is the perfect place to start praying because it's a pretty challenging place to be.

Speaker 1 For a lot of people, they're able to do that. The other area that I developed a lot of my expertise in is a field of medicine called nuclear medicine.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting about that as a field is that we administer, usually we inject, some kind of radioactive tracer that follows some part of the body or the brain's function.

Speaker 1 And a lot of times we'll inject a tracer that looks at blood flow, which is a really good way of looking at an activity in the brain.

Speaker 1 Or sometimes we'll inject a tracer that has to do with a neurotransmitter like serotonin or dopamine that I know a lot of people have heard of.

Speaker 1 And what we can do is we can have somebody, they don't even have to be in the scanner. They can be outside of the scanner.

Speaker 1 They can, when we were doing our study of speaking in tongues, they're moving around and they're doing all different kinds of motions and singing and things like that.

Speaker 1 And while they're in the midst of the practice, I go in and I inject them through an intravenous catheter that I put in long before they started. So they don't even know I'm there.

Speaker 1 And then they finish their practice and then I put them into the scanner about 15 or 20 minutes after they're done, but it shows me what their brain was doing at the moment of the practice itself.

Speaker 1 And so it's really capturing a snapshot of you, if you will, of a person's brain state. And we can do that for other things too.
We can do it for reading and doing math or

Speaker 1 whatever other things that you want to do, but, but we use it to study spiritual experiences and practices.

Speaker 1 And it's been great at giving us as good a picture as possible of what's going on in the brain. So Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg, what do you see in someone's brain when you pray, meditate, or have a spiritual experience?

Speaker 1 What's happening? Well, The first answer is there's a lot of things that happen.

Speaker 1 And in fact, you know, for any of the people listening who have had spiritual experiences, they probably know that it's not just one kind of thing that's happening to them.

Speaker 1 It could be emotions, it could be thoughts, it could be feelings, it could be things that you sense.

Speaker 1 And so if you actually think about spiritual and religious experiences, there are so many different aspects of our brain's function that really can potentially get involved.

Speaker 1 There's this whole network of structures in the brain that there's a pattern of activity within that that helps us to have these kinds of experiences.

Speaker 1 Now, there are some areas that I think are particularly relevant. So for example, to just name a couple, there's an area in the back of our brain called the parietal lobe.

Speaker 1 And this is an area of our brain that takes a lot of our sensory information and helps us to kind of create a spatial representation of ourselves.

Speaker 1 So if somebody listening to the podcast is walking down the street, their parietal lobe is keeping them on the sidewalk, making sure they don't run into a tree, you know, because it knows where you are.

Speaker 1 And so that's a very important process that it does. Well, when people are deep in meditation or prayer practices, what we have observed is a decrease of activity in this parietal parietal lobe.

Speaker 1 Now, why would that make sense? That's what we thought would happen. So if this area normally turns on to give us our sense of self, what's going to happen when it shuts down?

Speaker 1 We lose our sense of self and we don't see the boundary between ourself and something that's out there in the world. So we may feel a sense of oneness, a sense of connectedness.

Speaker 1 And this can be a connectedness with God. It could be a connectedness with the universe.

Speaker 1 And in fact, it's interesting because going back to my point earlier about sort of the evolution of all of this, we have a whole continuum of this sort of unitary experience.

Speaker 1 So you and I right now, we have a connection with each other because we're having a discussion and hopefully our brains are in sync and resonating with each other.

Speaker 1 So that's a degree of connection, but that may not be, you know, that's not nearly the same kind of connection as with a truly good friend or with a romantic partner, which really bonds people together.

Speaker 2 That makes a lot of sense because as I was digesting what you were saying just about that one singular part of the brain, if that part of the brain is what locates you in 3D space

Speaker 2 and it gives you a sense of your place in a physical world, if that stops being so active, it makes sense that it opens up the door to not processing where you fit within,

Speaker 2 but actually a deeper connection to all.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's exactly right.
And so there is is this kind of continuum where we have sort of our everyday, I'm here, the cars are there, the table's here to a closer relationship.

Speaker 1 You and I are having this conversation. Our brains are resonating with each other.
We feel a sense of connectedness there.

Speaker 1 But then, you know, we can have our best friends and how we feel connected to them. We can have a romantic or sexual partner, which even connects us even further, our children, our families.

Speaker 1 And then ultimately, you have these sort of mystical enlightenment experiences where, you know, everything becomes one. And, you know, those to me are some of the most fascinating experiences.

Speaker 1 And going back to why I got into all of this, I've always been particularly fascinated by those experiences because if our question is, well, what is the nature of reality and how do we know that reality?

Speaker 1 It is interesting that in those mystical experiences, that's where people at least say things like, I have experienced the world on a more fundamentally real level than I have ever experienced it before.

Speaker 1 I have a sense of clarity. I have a sense of knowledge and understanding that I never had before.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm not saying that they're right or they're wrong, but it's interesting that this happens in those experiences.

Speaker 1 And that's also part of why I think it becomes important for us to say, so what's going on in the brain? And so, for example, another area of our brain is the limbic system.

Speaker 1 And this is an area of our emotions.

Speaker 1 And so when things are very intense, when things, you know, hit us, we have a profound sense of joy, a profound sense of awe, love, whatever we feel, our limbic system turns on.

Speaker 1 And we've seen this in our brain scans that these areas of the brain become very active. And I think that's part of what signals to the person that this is a unique experience.

Speaker 1 I mean, there clearly is a differentiation. People know that this is the spiritual experience that I had, and this is my everyday life.
And there is a difference between them.

Speaker 1 So part of what I think is going on is their limbic system is saying, this is really important.

Speaker 1 And what's also kind of interesting about how the limbic system works is that not only does it help us feel our emotions, but it also writes things into our memory banks.

Speaker 1 And it makes sense that we would do that. We want to remember the things that are emotionally important.

Speaker 1 So you have this incredible experience, a near-death experience, a psychedelic experience, you know, whatever it is. Not only did it feel real in the moment, but it gets written into your brain.

Speaker 1 It gets written into your memories. It transforms your beliefs.
So it changes everything about you.

Speaker 1 And that's also part of what we have noticed with these experiences about how they are truly transformative in a person's life.

Speaker 2 So do you notice in these scans that there's the same types of outcomes in terms of what happens in your brain,

Speaker 2 regardless of the spiritual or religious experience and the type of it? I mean, is it all the same stuff that gets stimulated?

Speaker 1 I do think that in some senses, the answer to the question is yes, that, you know, if you are a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, who all feel that oneness with God, then you're going to see that decrease in the parietal lobe.

Speaker 1 So, you know, that will be a certain commonale element that you'll have.

Speaker 1 However, there are then distinctions. A Christian might be feel connected to Jesus, a Muslim might feel connected to Allah, a Buddhist might feel connected to universal consciousness.

Speaker 1 So the particulars start to become a little bit more unique.

Speaker 1 So one of the questions that I have is, you know, if you have this experience, if you feel, if one person says, I felt love, and somebody says, I felt energy, and somebody else says, I felt a force, and somebody else says, I felt God.

Speaker 1 Well, are they the same same fundamentally the same experiences that then people just interpret differently because of our backgrounds and the way we think about things?

Speaker 1 Or are they actually different experiences? And again, I think sometimes it depends. If it's feeling love versus feeling God, maybe they are different.

Speaker 2 But from the brain scan and the neuroscience standpoint,

Speaker 2 what you're studying is how these experiences that we describe in very different ways

Speaker 2 actually look the same when you look at the scan or you look at the physiological and neurological and emotional and neurochemical thing that's going on.

Speaker 1 There are definitely similarities that in terms of how they look on the brain scans, but with the brain, there's always another complexity to it.

Speaker 1 The problem is, is that, you know, if I were to say, oh, here's this, you know, area of the brain that lights up, it becomes more active. Well, how many neurons are in that area?

Speaker 1 And if there's 10 million neurons in that area, are they all becoming more active? Is it just 20 of them?

Speaker 1 I think what's very exciting about this research, because while I can try to find the common elements, there is also sort of an embracing of the uniqueness that we each have.

Speaker 1 All of us have a different kind of expression of our religious, spiritual, you know, self.

Speaker 1 And so each person is going to, we have to kind of look at each person as an individual, but also appreciate how it's kind of connected to everybody else as well.

Speaker 2 This is so amazing. I know there's so much more we're going to dig into, but I want to take a quick pause so we can hear a word from our amazing sponsors.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back. I am so thrilled you are still here with us because there is so much more that Dr.
Newberg is going to share with us about the impact of spiritual practices on your brain.

Speaker 1 So, Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg, you know, earlier when we were talking, you mentioned this study that you did and how it was a treasure trove of spiritual experiences for people.

Speaker 2 Could you tell the person that's listening just a list of what are the top

Speaker 2 things that people reported as spiritual experiences just to give the person that's with us in this conversation a way to think more broadly about what spiritual and religious experiences can include?

Speaker 1 What we did is that we took all of the narratives that people provided and all the answers that people provided and we basically ran them through some very complex, you know, computer analyses to try to figure out what was going on.

Speaker 1 And it is interesting because you can start to group certain things. You can group, if somebody says, I felt connected, I felt at one, I felt unified, we can start to put those together.

Speaker 1 And as you mentioned, we were able to come up with five core elements that virtually every person talks about in these experiences.

Speaker 1 So I hope this does resonate with everyone out there who's listening, who has had this kind of an experience.

Speaker 1 So one of them is we've we've already talked about a little bit, the feeling of unity or oneness. So, the person feels connected, connected to God, connected to the universe, connected to humanity.

Speaker 1 And we think that this has something to do with the parietal lobe, as we mentioned. So, this is the kind of thing almost everyone talks about that element of the experience.

Speaker 1 And again, it could be, it could be a supernatural connection, it could be a not, you know, just connecting to nature. So, the sense of unity is a very, very important part of these experiences.

Speaker 1 A next element of these experiences is a feeling of intensity.

Speaker 1 And so, there is something about these experiences that it's whatever they're describing, it's the most. It's the greatest feeling of love they've ever had.

Speaker 1 It was the most beautiful light that they've ever seen.

Speaker 1 It was an infinitely powerful, you know, what all these kinds of words that are just superlatives that tell you that for this person, it was more than anything else that they have ever experienced before.

Speaker 1 So, intensity is a second element. The third element is a sense of clarity.
And what that means is that people, when they have these experiences, they're like,

Speaker 1 I've got it. I now understand the world in a way that I never had before.
It's, you know, the proverbial veil being thrown off and being able to see the world in a way that they never had before.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it can be a profound religious revelation. Okay, now I know what religion I need to pursue.
Sometimes it's scientific. Okay, I get it.

Speaker 1 You know, the world is this incredible physical place and I'm connected to the stuff of the stars, whatever it is, but is this sense of clarity?

Speaker 1 And this one is a little bit more intriguing when we get into the brain piece because part of what's happening here is that it's kind of changing the whole way this person's brain functions. How?

Speaker 1 Well, part of the answer is we don't fully know because it's almost impossible to capture the moment of those experiences.

Speaker 1 However, there's a couple of really important things that we have found in some of our brain scans.

Speaker 1 So one area that we have found that also seems to change in a lot of these practices is a very core structure called the thalamus. It's right in the middle of our brain.

Speaker 1 And the reason it's important is that it connects different parts of the brain to each other. And it also brings sensory information, particularly from vision and hearing, into our brain.

Speaker 1 So it is relevant to like our whole perspective of reality. And we see very significant shifts in the activity of this.

Speaker 1 thalamus in people who have had these experiences versus people who have not had these experiences.

Speaker 1 So part of my speculation is, you know, there's something that happens that kind of opens up a new way of thinking. Clearly, there are kind of new connections that are forming in the brain.

Speaker 1 And that leads to another study that we did where we did a study of people going through a very intense, immersive retreat.

Speaker 1 And in this case, it was actually a retreat based on the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius. So, it does have a bit of a Christian perspective to it.

Speaker 1 But I think it holds for anybody who decides to go on some really, really intense, long you know meaning days weeks maybe months and what we did in this case was we did a scan of their brain not just looking at activity but looking at neurotransmitters and so for the people out there who you know part of how our brain ultimately connects with you know the different neurons connect there's these chemicals that get released dopamine serotonin are probably things that people have heard of and they tell the other neurons what to do So what we found was when we scanned their brain before and after this retreat, that their brain had become more sensitive to the effects of serotonin and dopamine.

Speaker 1 And that's very important because dopamine is often referred to as the feel-good molecule. It makes us feel happy.
It makes us feel euphoric if there's enough of it.

Speaker 1 So it sort of changes our attitude about the world, that we now look at the world in a very positive way, as opposed to maybe kind of a down way.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, if you really think about it, if you've ever had a spiritual experience, which everybody has at some level, if you've ever been on a retreat, if you've ever had some sort of mystical thing happen or even gone to a religious service that was just deeply moving right or a musical concert where you just were and at one and it was unbelievable there is an afterglow effect right which probably based on the science comes from the fact that you're more sensitive to the dopamine exactly exactly that's so cool that is cool and and serotonin as well and and serotonin is very important because first of all drugs that help us with depression go to the serotonin system and help to sort of augment it so these practices are making us more sensitive to serotonin.

Speaker 1 So, this is all part of that feeling of clarity. Now, there's two other core elements.
So, one of them is a feeling of surrender.

Speaker 1 What seems to happen, whether a person is trying to get to this experience through, you know, years of meditation or prayer or going to church or something like that, whether it happens to them spontaneously, whatever is going on, at some point,

Speaker 1 our purposefulness kind of gets taken over.

Speaker 1 The experience kind of pulls us along and we let go, surrender. You know, people use different terms, but it is this feeling of surrender.

Speaker 1 And in fact, going back to the discussion about sexuality, that is also what happens. You know, at some point, we're just going along for the ride at that point and it's just going to happen.

Speaker 1 It's our body's natural process. And what's interesting about this feeling of surrender is that, again, there's an area of our brain that I think is very relevant here.

Speaker 1 So our frontal lobes, which are located behind our forehead, when we are purposeful, when we are doing our actions, when we're concentrating on a meditation, concentrating on a prayer, our frontal lobes become more active.

Speaker 1 And that's what our brain scan studies have shown. But when the person gets to those profound experiences, the frontal lobe shuts down and quiets down.

Speaker 1 So we see a lot of common themes biologically that are helping us to understand this feeling of surrendering to the experience and the feeling of oneness and unity.

Speaker 1 So, you know, it's all kind of coming together. And the last core element is basically a feeling of transformation that, you know, it really changes a person and changes them.

Speaker 1 It could be a conversion experience. It could be a near-death experience, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 And it's like that experience, whether they had it when they were eight years old or 20 years old or 80 years old.

Speaker 1 it carries with it a sense of realness and a sense of i am now a different person you know between that before and after i am a completely different person and uh whether or not there's a complete rewiring whether it's the sensitivity to dopamine and and you know in our survey we asked people how did it change you And, you know, 90%, 95% of people, it changed for the positive and it changed their perspective on their relationships, on their job.

Speaker 1 They no longer feared death and certainly on their sense of religious and spiritual beliefs. So it changes like every aspect of a person.

Speaker 1 And that's why these are these big enlightenment kind of experiences that radically change everything about the person. Well, you

Speaker 2 have been referring to big experiences, but when I look at the list you just gave us, a feeling of unity, an intensity of the experience, clarity, surrender, and transformation,

Speaker 2 I can think of very small experiences.

Speaker 2 So I think about the experience of going for a hike in the mountains in Vermont. And while it's not the most crazy intense experience,

Speaker 1 there's something about the quiet of it.

Speaker 2 that is intense compared to the noise of my day-to-day life.

Speaker 2 And I feel all those things.

Speaker 2 If I go to a beautiful religious service, even though it's just another Saturday, another Sunday, regardless of the denomination or the type of practice that I'm in, I could feel all those things.

Speaker 2 You know, there are those experiences where you might hold your grandchild for the first time.

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2 So, could you talk a little bit about the

Speaker 1 big versus the small spiritual experiences that are available to all of us.

Speaker 2 And give us some examples of those and why they matter in terms of your brain and your nervous system and the quality of your life.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 those are really important questions. And one of the key conclusions that I have come to in a lot of the work that I've done is that we don't have a separate brain that becomes spirit.

Speaker 1 You know, it's not like when you work, walk into a house of worship, suddenly some other part of your brain that doesn't do anything for you otherwise turns on.

Speaker 1 We're using all of the same basic areas of our brain. So So as you extremely well pointed out, there's a lot of small experiences, so to speak, you know, that are part of that continuum.

Speaker 1 And I think what's good about that is that one, it helps us to understand how we get to the really big experiences.

Speaker 1 But as you also mentioned, I think they're very important for everyone to realize that those small experiences are not so small. I mean, they can be very important.
They can be very meaningful.

Speaker 1 And so when we call them small, you know, that's not a negative.

Speaker 1 People can, you know, just walking into some amazing place or hiking in the woods or something like that can create all kinds of feelings and all kinds of experiences that have those characteristics.

Speaker 1 And you have a little bit of a feeling of unity, a little bit of a feeling of intensity.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, there seems to be something where there's that kind of quantum leap that we get to these profound mystical or enlightenment experiences.

Speaker 1 But before we get to that, all of these other experiences are extremely valuable to people. They provide a lot of meaning.

Speaker 1 And the evidence also suggests that they do help people ultimately progressing down their own spiritual paths, their own paths towards meaning and purpose in their life.

Speaker 1 It could be looking at a beautiful sunrise or sunset. It can be walking in the woods.
It can be listening to a wonderful Mozart concerto.

Speaker 1 As you mentioned, it could be holding your child or your grandchild or something like that.

Speaker 1 So all of these smaller experiences,

Speaker 1 these are the everyday experiences that everyone can potentially have. And I think it is wonderful to be able to try to engage those experiences.

Speaker 1 One of the things that is interesting is that when we talk about the big enlightenment experiences, people who have been enlightened realize that life is about the small experiences.

Speaker 1 And in fact, you know, it doesn't really matter whether you are the CEO of

Speaker 1 whatever, the biggest company in the world, Microsoft or whatever, or whether you're an Uber driver. driver or something like

Speaker 1 you can do anything in life but it's how you engage it and how you find your meaning and how you find these experiences.

Speaker 1 When I think about this, I always think about when I was in medical school, there was this one intersection and there was a police officer who would direct the traffic.

Speaker 1 And I've never seen anybody so into what he was doing. And he's dancing around and waving his arms and motioning and blowing his whistle with different rhythms and things like that.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, that's an enlightened being, you know, like it doesn't, it doesn't have to be doing something amazing.

Speaker 1 It can be all the everyday things that we all do, but how do we, how do we engage them?

Speaker 1 How do we try to make our connection with having breakfast in the morning, with walking down the street to our work?

Speaker 1 All of those can be deeply meaningful, deeply spiritual, because you can help yourself to feel that connectedness. And when people do come to me and say, how do I get there? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And which is a very valid question. And part of what I say is, is that you have to take some stock in yourself.
What are you trying to get to? You know, do you want to feel less anxious?

Speaker 1 Is that your basic goal? You want to feel less anxious or or less stressed? Sometimes it might be to connect with humanity. Some it might be something more religious, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 But it's important to think about what you're really looking for first and to sit down, think about it, write it down. And then from there,

Speaker 1 you then want to look for avenues that lead you down those paths.

Speaker 1 So we know that there are thousands of different kinds of practices that are out there, meditations and yogas and prayer and all that kind of thing. So you have to do a little bit of homework.

Speaker 1 What are the things? What are the approaches that are consistent with your goals and that you feel comfortable with? And that to me is always very relevant. There is never a one size fits all.

Speaker 1 Each person has to kind of find the paths that work best for them. And then ultimately, you know, it's reasonable to try things that are well known.

Speaker 1 So if you, and especially if you came from a religious background and you feel somewhat strongly about it, then trying to pursue the religious background may be a good way to go.

Speaker 1 But for somebody who isn't, maybe mindfulness or yoga or, you know, a hundred other different kinds of practices. And then ultimately, ultimately, you have to try it and see where it takes you.

Speaker 1 If it feels good and natural and you're starting to feel these kinds of intense and emotional and good feelings and feelings of connectedness, then you keep going with that.

Speaker 1 If it feels uncomfortable or it's not taking you down paths that seem to be appropriate for you, then it's time to go in another direction. And so, you know, each of us can kind of find that path.

Speaker 1 It's definitely not, you know, a straight line and there's going to be a lot of zigging and zagging.

Speaker 1 But I think if people stay with it, each person can find that path, can find the key to the lock, so to speak. But each person has a different lock and a different key.

Speaker 2 Oh, I'm just loving everything that you're sharing that I really don't want to stop, but I need to hit pause because we got to hear a word from our amazing sponsors.

Speaker 2 And if your mind is spinning, just like mine is, I feel like I'm having some sort of awakening right now. Share this with people that you care about.

Speaker 2 Everybody deserves to experience the profound nature of his research and don't go anywhere because Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg and I are going to be waiting for you after a very short break and we're just getting started.

Speaker 1 Stay with us.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back. Today, you and I are getting to spend time with Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg, who has dedicated his research to scanning brains and understanding the impact of spiritual and religious experiences on your mind and body. So, Dr.

Speaker 2 Newberg, as a neuroscientist who studies the brain and the intersection of the brain with spirituality, religion, mystical experiences, what do you do every day?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, for me,

Speaker 1 It goes back to my questioning. For me, this, everything that I do has really been part of my life's path.
And to me, I think it is a combination of a kind of scientific and spiritual pursuit.

Speaker 1 I love to look for data. I like to look for knowledge and information.
I like to use systematic ways of exploring information, like getting narratives from people who've had these experiences.

Speaker 1 But it also is very contemplative for me. And so while I don't do a formal kind of meditation,

Speaker 1 this has really arisen out of a whole contemplative process that I continue to do to this day. I'm trying to figure out the answers to the questions.
And some of that.

Speaker 2 But are there things that you do, Dr.

Speaker 1 Newberg, like when you wake up?

Speaker 2 Are there practices that you have in your own life that help you bring this science into your life and make your own experience of your day-to-day life on the smaller level

Speaker 2 more spiritual or mystical or enlightened?

Speaker 1 It really comes down to the joy of asking questions. And to me, it's always like, well, how do we think about this? And how do we try to explore this? And what should I think about next?

Speaker 1 And asking people around me, what do you think?

Speaker 1 I think one of the real problems in our world today is that we've all, you know, with the whole social media, we all get into the, you know, our own echo chambers, as everybody says, and we just get fed information that is relevant to us.

Speaker 1 And to me, it's like, I want to break out of that. You know, I'm always trying to, what is your path? What are you doing? How are you thinking about things? What practices have you tried?

Speaker 1 I love meeting people who are from different, you know, cultural backgrounds, religious backgrounds, ages.

Speaker 1 They all have a story. They all have something that they want to share.
And I think that the answers are within all of us.

Speaker 1 And in a way that the more we kind of bring all of us together and try to help us to answer those big questions, I think that's the best way to do it.

Speaker 1 So for me, it is just, you know, every day I wake up and think about what's the next question that I have to ask and how am I going to try to answer it.

Speaker 1 And then once I get to some answer, I realize that's only 10 more questions that I now have to work on. So it's always, to me, it's about exploring the world, really.

Speaker 2 You were describing this police officer that was directing traffic in a way that made you say, that's an enlightened human being.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? That an enlightened human being.

Speaker 1 For me, it is. It's about feeling that connection.
It's about.

Speaker 1 truly understanding and having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life and how you want to live that life and how to fully engage it.

Speaker 1 That means I'm thinking about things, I'm feeling about things. And it's sort of how you decide to look at each of these things that to me

Speaker 1 is how we try to think about defining someone as being enlightened or not. And I don't know if anyone can ever say, you know, you are enlightened or you're not.

Speaker 1 I don't know, you know, there is no magic. I can't do a brain scan and say, okay, well, there's the enlightened pattern.
This person is enlightened.

Speaker 1 Again, for each person, it's kind of their own way of looking at the world.

Speaker 1 But I think for me, at least it does have to do with sort of how we embrace ourselves and how we embrace the world as best as possible.

Speaker 1 And there are these different practices and whether it's meditation, prayer, something more spiritual, something with nature, something with humanity. You mentioned hiking in Vermont.

Speaker 1 I go hiking in Colorado. And to me, the analogy is we're all sort of trying to get to the top, but there's lots of paths, you know?

Speaker 1 And there's also a beautiful view. And there's beautiful views all along the line.

Speaker 1 A lot to hear and see every step of the way. You take take in every part of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think, and that's it. You take in every part of it.
The person that listens to this is somebody who is really interested in

Speaker 2 seeing a bigger possibility for their life and knowing what I can do. And as I've been listening to you, I can't help but reflect on the fact that probably

Speaker 2 I'd say top three

Speaker 2 issue that

Speaker 2 people write in about from around the world is this feeling of being stuck. Yeah.
This feeling of not knowing what my purpose is. And I have a hunch that based on your field of research,

Speaker 2 you have a point of view about what feeling stuck actually is in the context of your body, your brain, spirituality, enlightenment.

Speaker 2 So what would you say to somebody who's listening that's like, I just feel stuck. I just feel like I don't have a sense of purpose in how they can use this research to re-engage in their life.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a very important thing for everyone who's listening that, you know, when you feel stuck, and I doubt that there's been a specific research study to try to identify that, but you know, in terms of how we think about the brain, the brain has billions and billions of neurons that are all interconnected with each other.

Speaker 1 And I think when people are stuck, what's happened is, is that the connections that we have going on in our brain are the only ones we're using.

Speaker 1 And so, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a cute phrase, the neurons that fire together wire together. And that's a great thing.
I mean, that can be good. So, I mean, that's how we learn how to play the piano.

Speaker 1 It's how we learn how to play a sport. It's how we learn how to think about something spiritual or religious.
The more we do it, that's why meditation practices work so well.

Speaker 1 The more you do it, the more those neural connections form in your brain. And that can be good.

Speaker 1 But the problem is, is that because those are the neural connections that form, it can sometimes also close you off to other things and other options and other ideas.

Speaker 1 And so, if it's working for somebody, that can be great.

Speaker 1 But if it's not working, then you know, part of the stuck feeling, now this gets into the emotional responses that we have that a person is not feeling happy.

Speaker 1 And as I mentioned, we talked about the autonomic nervous system. So, not only are they thinking it, but they're feeling it.
You know, they feel it in their body itself.

Speaker 1 Their body becomes less motivated. They're not able to sort of engage the world, as we were talking about a moment ago, as fully as possible.
So the problem is,

Speaker 1 which is not an insurmountable one, but the problem is, is that to break those neural connections requires energy. It's not always easy to find that energy, especially when you feel stuck.

Speaker 1 So part of what we've talked about in some of our work has been that you actually have to make some kind of conscious, purposeful effort to at least just break out of where you are and then hope from there that you can start to find your these other pathways.

Speaker 1 And that's just not like kind of casting your lot to the wind here.

Speaker 1 If you have some ideas about where you would like to go, you would like to find meaning, you would like to engage the world in certain ways, then you can look for those other avenues because they are out there and people have talked about lots of different avenues.

Speaker 1 And some of them are well-known going down a religious path. Others are less, you know, more esoteric or more subtle.

Speaker 1 But people can find those ways, but you have to purposely want to change and to think that you need to try to get out of that stuckness.

Speaker 1 And then I think, and this goes back to our discussion about rituals, is that rituals are also a way of, one, in training the brain, but also helping to get the brain out and shifting the brain's focus.

Speaker 1 So the goal is then to find a new ritual, to find a new practice, a new way of doing things, and then begin to do that.

Speaker 1 And then hopefully that will carry the rest of the brain and the rest of the person's life along.

Speaker 2 That makes so much sense, especially the visual of if you feel stuck, you are likely stuck in patterns of thinking.

Speaker 2 Your commute, they're same people, the same habit, the same way you move through your day. And that's part of what keeps you trapped.
And you gave us these five points.

Speaker 2 that are very common in terms of uniting these spiritual or religious experiences, unity, a sense of intensity in the experience, clarity, surrender, transformation.

Speaker 1 Even if you're stuck, I would imagine if you look backwards,

Speaker 2 you can locate a moment in your life

Speaker 2 where you had a feeling of those things.

Speaker 2 And that provides the clue to you in terms of what you can just insert now.

Speaker 2 I am thinking about my sister-in-law, who's also our chief operating officer. And

Speaker 2 like a year ago, she was just talking about how, I think I'm going to go back to church.

Speaker 2 I really, I really think I'm going to go back to church because like so many people, you have kids, you get busy at work, travel sports start, all of a sudden nobody's going to, yeah, nobody's going to church.

Speaker 2 And she just felt this sense.

Speaker 2 I don't know that she would use the word stuck, but that something was missing.

Speaker 2 And so she looked back into her experience and said, when in my life did I feel a little bit more fulfilled, a little bit more connected, a little bit more optimistic, a little bit more, whatever you want to fill it in.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And it's made a huge difference in our life. And so I do think your own life offers clues and you've given us almost this five points of data to really look at and say, I've experienced this.

Speaker 1 I know for me, if I don't get outside for a walk in nature,

Speaker 2 I feel different. Like I, I, it's, it's a part of what makes me feel connected to something deeper.

Speaker 2 You talked about the nervous system and how I think a lot of people have rituals of either religious practices or meditation or walking or other things that you do.

Speaker 2 I light a particular type of incense every morning. And even just the ritual of lighting it and smelling it, there is something that allows me to drop in.
to a deeper connection and presence in life.

Speaker 2 And if you could tell the person listening, what is the benefit to being

Speaker 2 proactive and conscious about creating a more spiritual, mystical, enlightened, or religious, whatever word you want to use,

Speaker 2 experience in your day-to-day life?

Speaker 1 What's the benefit of this? I'll answer the question in two ways. I'll answer it from the doctor perspective, and I'll answer it from a personal perspective.

Speaker 1 So from the doctor perspective, what a lot of the data, including our research shows, is that when you engage that spiritual side of yourself, it really does have an impact on your biology, on your psyche.

Speaker 1 It really affects your entire person. And the data are pretty clear that it helps you to manage stress better.
It helps you reduce stress. It helps you reduce anxiety, depression.

Speaker 1 And because those are also all then physiologically connected to our heart and our lungs and through our autonomic nervous system, it helps our immune system work better.

Speaker 1 It helps us to combat diseases like cancer, heart disease, and so forth. So there are really a lot of health benefits from trying to engage that spiritual side of yourself.

Speaker 1 Again, how you decide to do it is up to you, but doing it, all the data points to physiological changes in the brain, in the body.

Speaker 1 And maybe the one last thing to say, at least as far as that goes, is that

Speaker 1 we did a study where we looked at older individuals who started to do a meditation practice and their brain changes.

Speaker 1 So whether you're 85 or 5, you can change your brain and you can change your brain in positive ways.

Speaker 1 So from a clinical, medical kind of perspective, that's the answer to your question about the benefit.

Speaker 1 But to me personally, and what I hope is also something that everyone wants to find, is that kind of, that way to embrace the world, that way to embrace ourselves, that way to find a kind of enlightenment that makes us feel better about ourselves, feel better about the world, have a feeling of meaning and purpose, have a feeling of optimism, and a feeling of compassion, not just for everyone, but for ourselves as well.

Speaker 1 And that's what often these kinds of experiences lead to.

Speaker 1 Again, in our survey, 95% of people talk about these experiences as leading to positive feelings about their relationships and their jobs and all the different ways in which they think about their lives.

Speaker 1 So to me, trying to find that path is very important.

Speaker 1 And maybe the last thing to say is that people need to be patient with themselves because it's not like you just say, oh, okay, I just got to, I just got to find that feeling of unity.

Speaker 1 I just got to take that walk in the woods and boom, I'm going to be enlightened. It doesn't work that way.
There is no guarantee.

Speaker 1 But as we were also saying in our analogy, as you're trying to walk up that mountain, take a look around because there's a lot of things that you can learn.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of things that you can sense and there's a lot of ways that you can appreciate life. And for me, in this world of neurotheology and doing all these brain scans, It's great.

Speaker 1 We found all these wonderful findings that we've talked about and all that, but the questions are more than the answers.

Speaker 1 And I have learned so much more just from doing this whole process because I've learned from all the people who have come in about their beliefs and how genuine they feel and how important they feel.

Speaker 1 And it's given me a great sense of appreciation and compassion for all the beliefs that

Speaker 1 people have, even for people who believe things that aren't the way I believe things. That's okay.

Speaker 1 And in our divisive world, I hope that this kind of new way of thinking about things and a new enlightenment for the individual as well as for the society is something that can be useful both here and around the world.

Speaker 1 And I hope that's where we get. I'm an idealistic person and I hope that's what this all leads to.

Speaker 2 Do you think your work could prove or disprove the existence of religious experiences?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I don't know if it will ever do that. I'm a never say never person.

Speaker 1 So, you know, anything is possible, but I think it's far more likely that it's going to enrich our perspectives of what it means to be spiritual.

Speaker 1 I come from this world of integrative medicine and we talk about how we understand the person. We have four dimensions.

Speaker 1 We have our biological, which is what the medical world normally tries to take care of and gives us an antibiotic or fixes a leg or whatever.

Speaker 1 But there's a psychological, a social, and a spiritual part of who we are.

Speaker 1 And the way we are best healed and the way we are best healthy and have our greatest sense of well-being is when all those four dimensions are working together.

Speaker 1 And so for me, I think that is it possible that we might find some paradigm shifting results someday. Yeah, you know, we might.

Speaker 1 I have a colleague who's studying near-death experiences because there's a really unique opportunity there.

Speaker 1 If we can document and prove that somehow our mind or our consciousness or our soul, whatever that is, you know, gets outside of ourselves, that changes.

Speaker 1 a lot in terms of how we think about who we are as human beings.

Speaker 1 Now, whether we will do that, I don't know, but that's why to me, the whole field of neurotheology is so valuable, because it gives us an opportunity to look at all of these big questions, theological questions, philosophical questions, questions about the nature of reality and so forth.

Speaker 1 I hope we will find some answers, but I hope that they will be answers that will be useful for everyone.

Speaker 2 You just said something that I wanted to have you unpack further, which was there are four.

Speaker 1 From a medical perspective, there are four aspects to a human being. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The medical world has really focused, and appropriately so on the biological part of who we are.

Speaker 1 So if we get COVID, we take an anti-you know, an antiviral or we take medicines to reduce inflammation and it really just, we take care of the biology.

Speaker 1 Now that's great and it's been very successful, but for someone who's dealing with chronic illnesses, for example, like cancer or heart disease, well, it affects their person.

Speaker 1 It may make them depressed. It may make them anxious.
They have a fear of death. They have bad dreams.
They have, you know, all these different things.

Speaker 1 So that now is affecting the psychology of who they are. And it's a reciprocal interrelationship.
You know, if you have some kind of illness or problem, it's going to affect your psyche.

Speaker 1 And if your psychological status, if you're depressed, you're more likely to have heart disease and cancer and so forth. So those two reciprocally fit together.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Then you get to your social interactions.

Speaker 1 Well, if you got cancer and you're chemotherapy and you can't get to your pickleball game or your, you know, card game or whatever, and you see your friends, or you can't go to church because you're stuck in a hospital.

Speaker 1 Well, now your social environment goes away and your social environment has been shown to be absolutely essential for health, well-being, and even mortality outcomes.

Speaker 1 Sometimes for practical purposes, getting somebody to the hospital, making sure they take their medicines, but just having that personal interaction. That's why.

Speaker 1 So many of the kids and so many people became depressed and anxious during COVID because we couldn't have our social supports. It was horrible from that perspective.

Speaker 1 And then then finally, there's the spiritual side, which is kind of wraps all of that up. You know, how we feel, who we are as a person, how do we, how does our existence have meaning and

Speaker 1 how do we feel about who we are? That then spills back over to, are we optimistic about dealing with our health problems? Are we optimistic about our social interactions,

Speaker 1 about how we feel psychologically? There was a big study that showed that optimism is

Speaker 1 really correlated with a longer life and less disease. So all of these things are very interconnected and they all can be affected by each other.

Speaker 1 So, as an integrative medicine doctor, our goal is always to try to find ways of helping people with each of those dimensions and to really ask the questions about them because sometimes people are reluctant to talk about the spiritual side of things or the social side of things.

Speaker 1 And we know so many people who come into our offices and they have headaches and they're chronic fatigue.

Speaker 1 And then finally, they get divorced from their spouse or whatever and they feel a lot better, you know, because that was giving them so much psychological stress or they get out of a job or something like that.

Speaker 2 What's the difference from a medical perspective between

Speaker 2 the psychological aspect of your life and the spiritual aspect of your life?

Speaker 1 There's a lot of overlap. We have trouble distinguishing them.
If you have a spiritual experience, I say, well, what did you feel? Well, you might say, I felt joy. I felt love.
I felt, you know, calm.

Speaker 1 Well, those are psychological terms as well as potentially spiritual terms.

Speaker 1 So what was it that made you say it was a spiritual experience and that it just wasn't something that, you know, psychologically you felt better?

Speaker 1 And so, again, these are some of the bigger questions that we don't really have a complete answer to because there does seem to be something about all those other elements that we talked about, the unity and so forth, the intensity that makes it feel spiritual.

Speaker 1 That is a little bit different than just the psychological.

Speaker 2 How do you want us to think about it?

Speaker 1 Because I'm sitting here grappling with it right now and I'm going, okay, well, psychological, I'm thinking about

Speaker 2 my mood. I'm thinking about my mindset.
I'm thinking about focus, attention. I'm thinking about

Speaker 2 my core beliefs or the thinking errors that I engage in.

Speaker 2 Spirituality

Speaker 2 feels

Speaker 2 like a deeper issue,

Speaker 1 an anchor

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 impacts psychology to me.

Speaker 2 Almost like the relationship between where where your social connections are and your actual biological health.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 There's definitely an interconnectedness between them. Again, for each person, they have to kind of figure out and tease that out to a certain extent, but there's going to be a lot of overlap.

Speaker 1 And so many times we know that people, you know, hit that spiritual perspective.

Speaker 1 uh because they have psychological issues they they've hit that proverbial rock bottom whether it's depression anxiety substance abuse or whatever. And they feel like, I've got to turn this around.

Speaker 1 And many times the turnaround is something spiritual. So there's definitely an interrelationship, but, and that is part of what we're trying to understand.

Speaker 1 Again, part of the problem has to do with the language that we use. I mean, ultimately, it's always a little amusing to me because mystical experiences are by definition.

Speaker 1 undefinable or you know they're ineffable as they would say they can't be described but i've had so many people said i had this indescribable experience but let me describe it to you um and so, but we wind up being stuck with some of the words.

Speaker 1 And that's why it's funny to me sometimes when I look at the narratives, because they'll like make certain words in capitals because it's infinitely more real or something like that, because they don't know how to describe it, you know?

Speaker 1 And that is part of it too, I think, which is the sort of the inability to describe.

Speaker 1 But it makes sense because these areas of the brain, when they're shutting down, that kind of takes them away from our ability to then interpret them from a language perspective.

Speaker 1 Like there's all these pieces of how we start to think about it. That's fascinating.

Speaker 1 Dr.

Speaker 2 Neuberg, what are your parting words?

Speaker 1 Well, I think, first of all, I hope people have learned a lot about the brain and spirituality and sexuality as well.

Speaker 1 You know, I hope that everybody has realizes some important things. I think people need to realize that within all of us, we have a brain that is capable of finding these paths.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean it's going to be an easy pursuit, but it can happen to everyone and it can happen to anyone.

Speaker 1 And I think as long as people are pushing themselves or asking questions or striving for something a little bit greater than who they are, trying to make that connection to something greater than who they are, I certainly hope that people will use this information to realize that, to strive for that kind of a goal.

Speaker 1 And hopefully they will find the right pathway for them, maybe some of the pathways that we've talked about. Well, Dr.
Newberg, I am blown away by our conversation.

Speaker 1 I absolutely loved every minute of it.

Speaker 2 It's almost like a lot of what you talked about based on personal experience, I just know is true, but it's so cool that you've been scanning people's brains and can explain the science behind what we're experiencing, regardless of the words that we use to explain it.

Speaker 2 And just validating from a medical standpoint and a neuroscience standpoint, why this is so important

Speaker 2 to be deliberate about about bringing into your life.

Speaker 1 Right, absolutely. Well, and I agree.
I mean,

Speaker 1 I think having the science does give that added perspective.

Speaker 1 It doesn't eliminate, as we said, you know, it doesn't eliminate the spiritual, it doesn't eliminate the religious, but it gives us this new perspective to look at things and to think about things in ways that we haven't done before.

Speaker 1 And hopefully it gives us some practical information.

Speaker 1 People love to have that piece of data that they can say, okay, well, you know, yeah, that makes sense. It's my frontal lobe or it's this or it's that.

Speaker 1 But again, you know, ultimately, it's all, you know, it's our whole being. And that to me is what's the most exciting.
But it's great to be able to study it.

Speaker 1 And it's been wonderful to do this work, but we've just scratched the surface and there's so much more left for us to explore. And hopefully we'll all do it together.
Well, Dr.

Speaker 1 Newberg, I am blown away by our conversation.

Speaker 2 And I am so excited that you have shared all of your amazing research and insights with me and the person that's listening today. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 And I also also want to thank you.

Speaker 2 I want to thank you for listening all the way to this moment, for really taking in what Dr. Newberg shared with you today.

Speaker 2 And in case no one else tells you, I want to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life.

Speaker 2 And based on these brain scans and everything that Dr. Newberg just explained about the research, there's no doubt in my mind that one aspect of living a better life is

Speaker 2 having spiritual experiences be a part of your day-to-day life.

Speaker 2 So I hope you feel inspired to try out some of the things that you heard about today, because I know it's going to make a huge difference in your life and I really want that for you.

Speaker 2 Alrighty, I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode.

Speaker 1 All right, ready?

Speaker 2 All right, great.

Speaker 1 What the heck did I do with that?

Speaker 2 You guys printed it out for me.

Speaker 1 Great. Is that good? Okay, great.
Okay, great. Okay, I do too.
That's a woo, mystical. Make sure you have the like, ooh, kind of.

Speaker 2 What's been interesting as an experience is just

Speaker 2 what it feels like to live in an area

Speaker 2 that feels deeply spiritual and quiet and having your nervous system. Just

Speaker 1 one, one of my, I love, you know, when we go hiking out in Colorado and many times on our hike, I'm just like, wait, just listen to that. And it's just,

Speaker 1 it's an amazing feeling. Yeah.
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 All righty. Thank you.
That was fantastic.

Speaker 1 Oh, and one more thing.

Speaker 2 And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language.
You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

Speaker 2 I'm just your friend.

Speaker 2 I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.

Speaker 1 Got it? Good.

Speaker 2 I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 2 Stitcher.

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Speaker 2 Hey, it's your friend Mel. If you love the Mel Robbins podcast, you're going to love this.

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