A Teacher
Andrew Newberg
Brain imaging of meditation and prayer
The transmission
Andrew B. Newberg (born 1966 in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania) is an American physician and neuroscientist who helped found neurotheology — the empirical study of what happens in the brain during religious and spiritual experience.
He graduated from Haverford College in chemistry (1988) and took his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), specializing in nuclear medicine. Working with psychiatrist Eugene d’Aquili, he used SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) imaging to scan the brains of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns at the peak of practice, reporting characteristic changes in frontal and parietal activity associated with focused attention and the altered sense of self and space that practitioners describe.
His books — Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (with d’Aquili and Vince Rause, 2001) and How God Changes Your Brain (with Mark Robert Waldman, 2009) — brought this work to a wide audience, and he has published well over 200 peer-reviewed papers.
He is now a professor at Thomas Jefferson University and research director at its Marcus Institute of Integrative Health. Within the Atlas he sits on the empirical spine: his contribution is to show that contemplative and devotional states have measurable neural correlates, while honest limits remain — early SPECT studies used small samples, imaging correlates do not establish that experiences are caused by (or only by) the brain, and the data say nothing about the metaphysical truth of the beliefs involved.
What they gave
Neurotheology: Pioneered the functional brain imaging of meditation, prayer, and ritual, opening spiritual experience to neuroscientific measurement.
- Neural correlates of practice: Documented frontal- and parietal-lobe activity changes underlying focused attention and the dissolution of the ordinary self/space boundary in deep practice.
- Public translation: Through bestselling books, made the neuroscience of contemplative states broadly known and testable as a research program.
- Honest boundary: Maps correlates of experience, not proof of its metaphysical claims; flags small samples and the limits of correlational imaging.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Eugene d’Aquili (with whom he developed the early neurotheology research); nuclear-medicine SPECT imaging; the broader cognitive science of religion.
- Influenced: Neurotheology as a named field; the neuroscience of contemplative practice; and a generation of popular neuroscience-of-spirituality writing.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Why God Won't Go Away2001
- How God Changes Your Brain2009