‘How God Changes Your Brain’: This Is Your Mind on Faith
A review of ‘How God Changes Your Brain’, by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman; Ballantine, 2009.
Perhaps, dear reader, you will find it boringly and perhaps even offensively utilitarian to explore what religious faith ‘does’ to us, or rather for us. That is not, generally speaking, why people go to church or synagogue or mosque or temple. But I could be wrong; it wouldn’t be the first time. Utilitarianism is popular, after all. In fact it is the dominant approach to ethics—despite being associated with less of an aversion to harming others, lower empathy, higher psychoticism, a greater sense of meaninglessness of life, and greater Machiavellianism. In any event, Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and pioneer in the young field of ‘neurotheology’ promises, with his co-author Mark Robert Waldman, to uncover the tangible benefits of faith and religious practice in their book, How God Changes Your Brain. And what they set out across several hundred pages is really quite interesting.
Naturally, some understanding of the workings of the brain is needed to grapple with a book like this one and so Newberg and Waldman open with a brief explanation of how the brain functions and what different parts of the brain ‘do’. Citing a wide range of studies, they proceed from there to show how across all major religious traditions, and across a wide range of religious practices, faith and acts of faith, from praying the rosary to meditating on compassion, change the brain in astonishing ways that benefit both the practitioner and those around her. Believers are less stressed, less worried, less down. They are more generous. Their brains work better. Their lives feel more meaningful. But so, too, are non-believing practitioners—people who just go through the motions, so to say. They do not benefit as much as their more believing counterparts, but they still benefit.
Believers are less stressed, less worried, less down. They are more generous. Their brains work better.
A core theme of the book is that the brain is naturally inclined towards religious or at least spiritual experiences. ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,’ said the great French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’ In The Future of an Illusion, Freud makes a similar point—that we cannot eradicate the human need for spirituality. Chesterton put it best, I think, when we warned that when people stopped believing in Christianity, it is not that they would come to believe nothing, but that they would come to believe anything. If it is true that we need to believe, then it follows, I think, that we need to structure that belief in some useful way or else find ourselves believing that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ or that the members of the Royal Family are all lizards. Or perhaps we will become one of those highly ideological types, like those who refused to believe that the Soviet empire was a mass grave beneath the soil and an open prison above it. I have to say, reader, I think it is absolutely fascinating that human beings around the world developed such immensely sophisticated, beautiful faith traditions to structure this ‘need to believe’.
Another key idea is neuroplasticity. This book was written in 2009, when that concept was less familiar to readers. The little mantra, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’—in other words, that our actions shape our brains so that those actions become easier for us to perform—is almost a cliché now. But it remains an important idea. And in this context, what is interesting is that neuroplasticity itself is improved by religious practice. In other words, spiritual practices help us to cleanse those ‘doors of perception’ that Huxley was so fond of invoking. The headbangers and the fundamentalists get all the headlines, but religious belief in general does not make us more stuck in our ways, on the evidence the authors of this book present, but more flexible, mentally speaking. And this means we are more adaptable, emotionally and otherwise.
Neuroplasticity itself is improved by religious practice. In other words, spiritual practices help us to cleanse the ‘doors of perception’.
The challenge with a book such as this, I think, is the same one Iain McGilchrist faces in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things: setting out ideas in a manner that is perceived as interesting by two kinds of reader: those interested mainly in the facts, and those interested mainly in the meanings. The style in which this book is written is not Virginia Woolf’s, but then it is not an ephemeral and dreamlike exploration of the right of women to free expression. The language here is clear and concise. By and large the authors avoid jargon and technical terms. And there are plenty of anecdotes and so on sprinkled across the book, which gives the thing a touch more humanity. As to their handling of the scepticism of readers, my view is (to paraphrase Madame de Sevigné), if you don’t get it, there’s nothing I can do for you. There are some for whom anything religious or spiritual is simply a turn-off. Too bad. I think that is closed-minded; but you do you, babe.
I have written somewhere else about my rather clumsy and unconvinced Catholicism, and as you may have perceived by now if you have read more of my stuff, I perhaps do not quite fit the profile of the stereotypical Catholic. But I am deeply interested in religion and spirituality, and have been since I began to meditate and study philosophy once I left university. In the time since, it has struck me as interesting that many of the practices that are or were ‘built in’, if you like, to just about any mature religious tradition have re-emerged, abstracted from their religious context, and packaged up as part of a ‘wellness’ movement. Take gratitude: many Christians say grace before meals as a matter of course. Many do it in a cursory, grumbling way, more out of duty than with any real fervour. But the upshot is still that those people express gratitude many times every day out of habit. ‘Write down five things for which you are grateful’ does not, therefore, need to occupy a place on their to-do lists. Yet they still reap the benefits of being grateful for what you have rather than bitter about what you don’t. Gratitude has been shown to increase life satisfaction, make us more optimistic, etc. etc.
Many of the practices that are or were ‘built in’, if you like, to just about any mature religious tradition have re-emerged, abstracted from their religious context.
This leads me to two thoughts. First, that perhaps here is a minor irony: many of us are trying to build habits that, till very recently, were habits. Second, that—as Newberg and Waldman show—the stronger the faith of the practitioner in the value of the practice, (and for traditions with a deity, the stronger the belief in God) the more effective the practice is. Therefore, although to practice gratitude outside of a religious tradition is a very worthwhile undertaking, it would be more effective, from the crudely utilitarian point of view that I disparaged at the start of this little review, if it were done within the tradition. (Practising with others also increases the benefits of a given practice.) This is simplistic, I know: there are many reasons why people are suspicious of religion and religious belief, and politicised religion seems to me to be something of which we should be wary. Consider this food for thought, then, if nothing else.
I have strayed from my path, so let me hurry back to it. How God Changes Your Brain is a thought-provoking book which, if nothing else, helps the armchair anthropologists among us understand a bit more completely why these complex religious traditions developed in the first place. It helps us as individuals understand our need to believe – our credulity, if you like – and (for the compulsive self-developers), sets out why and how prayer, meditation, chanting, giving thanks, and all the other trappings of faith improve the quality of our lives.
