Your Brain on Spirituality

Speaker A: Good morning. I'm Michael Kovnat, and this is the next big Idea Daily. Now, when science and religion come up in the same conversation, we tend to expect an argument. But what if we put the argument aside for a moment and asked a different question? What do spiritual practices actually do for us, scientifically speaking? Psychologist David Desteno directs the Social emotions group at UH Northeastern University. In his 2021 book, How God the Science behind the Benefits of Religion, he examines what rituals and religious traditions can teach us about connection, well being, and caring for one another without requiring everyone to share the same beliefs. Then Columbia clinical psychologist Lisa Miller explores our capacity for spiritual experience in her 2021 book, the Awakened the New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. How Religion Works, right after these ads.

Speaker B: Hi, I'm David Desteno, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, author of How God Works and host of the PRX podcast of the same name. Today I want to share with you five of the big ideas from my book, ideas that anyone can put into practice, regardless of their spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. Idea number one, put your isms aside. One of the things I've found in writing about the intersection of science and religion is that isms, Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, atheism often get in the way of people working together, like conservatism and liberalism. They're labels that end up putting us on teams that just want to beat one another. When it comes to finding ways to improve people's lives, scientists and religious thinkers have the same goal. So let's stop arguing about things that science can't answer. There is no scientific test for the fingerprint of God. Atheism is just a belief. Like all other faiths, it's a belief that probability favored us in this corner of the universe. But if we put theology aside, most of the acrimony goes with, uh, it. That leaves us freer to figure out why people who engage in spiritual practices tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives. Examining that question doesn't require adopting any specific belief. You don't need to understand where a technology or a technique came from to use it. So let's figure out how rituals and practices surrounding birth and death, love and loss, morality and meaning can benefit all of us. We've begun to do this with meditation. We know that it offers many benefits, but it can't be the only spiritual practice that does. So my question is, what's the next mindfulness? It's out there, if we're willing to look. But to succeed, we need, as Adam Grant often says to put our own biases to the side and listen respectfully to what others have to say. If we don't do that, if we're not open to what spiritual traditions can teach us, we'll not only slow the progress of the science of well being, but also limit our own idea. Number two, caring equals loving. I once heard the psychologist Allison Gopnik say that while sometimes we care for our children because we love them, it's also true that we love them because we care for them. The basic act of showing care leads our minds to place even more value on little ones. The logic is similar to what economists term the sunk cost fallacy. You know, the more time and effort you put into something, a class, a project, or even a relationship, the harder it is to end it. Even if cutting your losses makes logical sense, memories of that previous investment are hard to ignore now. Kids aren't truly sunk costs, but childcare can feel like it at times. Young children need us to do everything for them. And when we're tired or overworked, that can sometimes feel overwhelming and even affect our ability to bond with them. But if we look at where mother child bonds are the closest in terms of time spent together and emotional closeness, we see Japan as a leader. The Japanese even have their own emotion for this. It's called a mai. Think of it as that feeling you get when you're hard at work and your child tugs on your leg, wanting you to pick them up and read to them. That feeling when you put your work aside and place your child in your lap. That feeling of cherishing. That's a my. And when we look at Shinto, the major religion of Japan, what we see is a frontloading of rituals that publicly demonstrate love and gratitude for a child. They provide important memories of providing care. It even begins before birth, when the family and friends wrap a sash around a pregnant mom's belly to cradle the child. On the seventh day after birth, there's a naming ceremony, then a ceremony at a shrine to give thanks, one to celebrate the child's first bite of solid food, one for their first birthday, and then several others during the early years. All of these require a good deal of planning and expense by parents, and all are highly memorable. The message of gratitude and value for the child can't be missed. And it's those memorable celebrations, those clear signs of care, that remind our minds just how important and worthy of love those children are. Now, it's important to realize that you don't have to follow Shinto to gain these benefits. You can still create rituals to show care for your child, rituals that will strengthen your bonds, set aside time to read or play with them regularly, or set multiple occasions to celebrate them. In my family, we celebrate half birthdays to double the yearly fun. The key is to make it a ritual that must happen, not one that can fall by the wayside if you're busy. If you do this, you'll find your parental bonds will strengthen. Gratitude is a Fount of Virtue mhm. Almost all religions offer prayers of gratitude. And while we often think of gratitude as an emotion focused on the past, it's really focused on the future. It pushes us to act in ways that ensure we'll have more to be grateful for down the line. In my lab, we've been studying gratitude for years, and we found it really is a fount of virtue. If you cultivate it, other good qualities will flow forth. Let's take honesty, for example. We've run studies showing that gratitude makes people cheat less. In one study, for example, we had people focus on something they were grateful for. Right before we asked them to flip a coin on a website for heads, they got a lot more money than for tails. What they didn't know is that we had rigged the coin to always come of tails. But since people were doing experiments on computers in their own homes, we simply asked them to tell us what they got and that we'd pay them accordingly. As it turned out, about 50% of people lied on average, but that percentage dropped to 27 if they were feeling grateful. In similar ways, we found that gratitude makes people more helpful, more generous, and more patient. So when Christians say grace before their evening meals, or when Jews say the Modiani prayer on awakening, a prayer to give thanks for being on earth another day, the gratitude they're cultivating is a booster for virtue. In fact, we found that higher daily levels of gratitude predict lower impulsivity in general. So while it's true that most religions tell people to be honest, generous, and the like, they're also giving people tools to help make it happen. Tools that nudge our emotions and thus our decisions below our conscious radar. Here again, you don't have to be a believer to practice gratitude. Just find time daily to acknowledge the kind or generous acts, even small ones, that you've received. That's all the participants in our studies did. And yet it profoundly changed how they behaved. Idea 4 Death is lurking who will live and who will die? Who will die at their predestined time and who before who by water and who by fire? Who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague? These words are from the Unatana Tokev, a, uh, prayer that Jews the world over recite on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It's a reminder that life is uncertain. Its length is a gift, not a guarantee. And as, ah, the events of the last two years have made painfully clear, life for any of us can end sooner than we hoped or expected due to disease, disaster, or even violence. But Judaism isn't alone in having rituals that remind people of death. For many Christians, Ash Wednesday serves a similar purpose. As priests or ministers mark people's foreheads with literal ash, they say, remember, you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. For many Buddhists, meditations on death are a basic practice. On a psychological level, highlighting the possibility of death, while not a pleasant thought, serves a positive purpose. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has long argued that people's perception of the time until their likely death guides their motivations. When we perceive time to be open ended, when death seems almost infinitely away, we focus on individual pursuits. We want to enhance our careers, our skills, our wealth, and our status. But when time feels constrained, when the milepost marking the end of our journey can be glimpsed, our motivations change. We value the people and friendships that make us happiest. We gravitate toward the activities that we find to be the most meaningful. Carstensen and her colleagues usually find this pattern when they compare the mindsets of older people to younger ones. Those in their 60s and 70s ages, when the time horizons to death seem smaller, tend to be more focused on finding connection and meaning compared to their younger counterparts, they also tend to be happier. But this difference isn't really a function of age. The move toward or away from deeper connection and well being can happen at any age. If time horizons suddenly shift in unexpected ways, for example, in the face of pandemics like SARS or now Covid, data show that the age difference disappears. Younger people suddenly look like older ones in valuing connection. Likewise, when Carstensen asked seniors what they'd do if they suddenly were given a medicine that added decades to their lives, their preferences look like those of young adults. What's most important to realize, though, is that pursuing happiness by valuing an interconnected as opposed to atomistic approach to life does bring more happiness at any age. Research shows that when Americans want to be happier, they tend to buy something or develop a new skill. But this strategy tends not to work well. Greater joy comes from activities that are social strengthening bonds with friends and family, or working to benefit the community. The good news is that these benefits, coming from mortality reminders, are available to all of us. Even simple reminders can help ones that can be separated from any specific theology. You don't have to be a person of faith to contemplate your death. Remember, Carstensen's work showed that simply thinking about living for longer or shorter periods changes what people value. What's more, you don't have to wait for a specific day or season to do it. Many religious thinkers like the medieval scholar Thomas A. Kempis, urged people to contemplate death every day and in so doing, to realize that they should live today as if they wouldn't see tomorrow. Idea 5 Meditation isn't just about you. We all value kindness, but showing it doesn't always come easy. Sometimes we lose our cool or patience and lash out. But it's other times, too, the less obvious ones, that can really add up. We walk right by hungry homeless people on the street without giving them a second thought. We don't give our seat on the subway to the pregnant mom with a toddler in tow. We don't stop to ask a coworker how they're doing when they obviously are stressed. It's not that anyone wants to be callous. It's just that we're often running on autopilot, too caught up in our own desires and concerns, to notice that the person next to us is carrying some type of pain inside. And most troubling of all, we haven't hit bottom yet. Surveys show that concern for others has been on a steady decline over the past 30 years. Buddhists recognized the struggle long ago. Despite our best intentions, practicing kindness can sometimes be really hard. It usually requires a sacrifice, giving someone time, money, companionship, or even a shoulder to cry on. And that means it can feel like work, especially when it's not focused on a friend or a loved one. It's something we have to remind and will ourselves to do, meaning we'll often fail. For kindness to truly grow, there needs to be a better way, a, uh, way to make it automatic. That's why Buddhists created what may be the world's first kindness technology, meditation. Most people tend to think of meditation as a way to help themselves to reduce stress, enhance memory, or even improve creativity and standardized test scores. But that's not why it was created. For the Buddha and other meditation teachers, it had one to help people care more about reducing the suffering of all sentient beings. As it turns out, meditation does just that my lab has found, for example, that having people practice meditation for a short time makes them kinder. After only eight weeks of study with the Buddhist Lama, 50% of those who were randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain. Only 16% of those who didn't meditate did the same. The way we tested people's compassion was by having an actor play the role of the stranger in pain by using crutches and wearing a foot cast while trying to find a seat in a crowded room. But compassion wasn't limited to strangers. It also applied to enemies. In another study, we found that after three weeks of meditation, most people refrained from seeking revenge on someone who insulted them, unlike most of those who did not meditate. Here again, you don't have to be a Buddhist to use this technology for kindness. You don't even have to leave your house to go on a meditation retreat. We've replicated these findings using the Headspace mobile app. But by taking the time to meditate for short periods each day, you'll not only feel less stressed, you'll become a better and kinder person, too. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the book.

Speaker A: Thank you, David. Okay, coming up, Lisa Miller will share ideas from the awakened, the new science of spirituality, and our quest for an inspired life. So I've never been a guy with a website, even though I've worked in media for decades and having an online presence always made sense and but I was daunted. The technical and the design skills always felt outside my grasp and paying someone never made budgetary sense. But my Internet sideline days are over now because now I know about Hostinger. I've played around with Hostinger's AI builder and here's what I love about it. You describe what you want and it builds a working version of your dream website in minutes. No coding, no designer, no developer needed. And it doesn't stop at launch. Domain website email marketing one hostinger accounts covers it all instead of having to have five subscriptions. Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing runs through December 14th and the premium plan is just 1.99per month. Snag Hostinger services at their lowest prices before the sale ends. Create your website today for just $1.99. Go to hostinger.com nbid and use code nbid for an additional 10% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing.

Speaker C: I'm Dr. Lisa Miller. I'm a clinical scientist and psychologist of 25 years, professor at Columbia University, and founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, where we take a Foundationally spiritual look into health, wellness, renewal, as well as the upside, thriving, deep relationships, meaning and love. Often in our culture people will say, well, I am very scientifically oriented or I'm a very spiritual person. But it turns out that science and spirituality can go hand in hand. When I was starting out, I gave a grand round lecture on what was to become my first set of published papers on spirituality as protective against depression in young adults. And as I went through the data, very standard systematic presentation of psychiatric data, senior scholars, people who I really admired were getting up and just m walking right out. I remember the doors, double doors, slamming, shutting and thinking, wow, this is unfamiliar to people. And I had a choice right then to either play to the crowd and take what would have perhaps in the immediate sense been a smoother or easier road, or take the slammed doors as a sign that this work needed to be done, that this line of inquiry was not represented yet in the field of mental health, that there was something about our human condition that had not yet been fully acknowledged by mainstream mental health. Science is a lens. It's a, ah, methodology. Whether we're using MRIs or genotyping or telescopes, the lens can be pointed at a great range of questions. And what question we ask is left to the inspiration of the scientist. Science can only expand as far as the scientist's own imagination. Here is where the culture of the 20th century perhaps contained the scientist to questions that never really reached human spiritual life. But in the 21st century, we now see scientists inspired to ask questions on the impact of spirituality in the human life. This is not just a matter of curiosity or, you know, dalliance. This enables us as a scientific community to turn the lens of science on some of the most pressing and compelling forms of human suffering. We can look at the impact of lived human spiritual life on addiction, on depression, and even on suicidality, the number one killer of young adults in our era. Parents will tell me, you know, I have three children and they're all so wonderful and I love them so much. But my little one, he always asks such deep, profound questions like mommy, you know, why did God make the son? Or mommy, is it true that some people are truly good and truly evil? There's a little thinker in the crowd and that's very much the case, that just as we have a broad range of human variability around athletic ability and musical ability, there are people who tend to be profoundly spiritually oriented even as very young children. And yet, just as whether or not we're an NFL star, we can all Enjoy running outside and exercising. Uh, we are all not just physical beings. We're also, every one of us, spiritual beings. Every single one of us, from day one, is endowed with an innate inborn capacity for awakened awareness. This is our birthright. When we use twin studies to examine the degree to which any human capacity is innate versus socialized, we see that this capacity for spiritual life is one third heritable in our genome and 2/3 environmentally formed. So while, uh, every single one of us is a spiritual being, 2/3 environmental impact of our parents, our grandparents, our coaches and teachers, perhaps our pastor, Rabbi, Priest Amon, all weigh in to shape our awakened awareness. But with adulthood, that environmental peace more and more becomes subject to our own choice, our inner environment. Whether we meditate, reflect, walk in nature and our outer environment, those with whom we choose to spend our time, our Sangha Mingyan Fellowship friends. So the choice to develop awakened awareness is ours. It is our birthright. And yet it is incumbent on us to strengthen this muscle. In applying the lens of science to human spiritual experience, we can use many different methods, and they're each very illuminating, whether we're using genotyping or long term clinical course studies. But perhaps one of the most striking is to use the mri. And in particular we used the functional mri, which tracks blood flow, how we actually use our brains. And here we found the most astounding thing. We invited young adults of all different faith traditions, all different cultures, into the MRI machine to tell us a time when they'd had a deep, profound personal spiritual experience. And the first thing we found was that indeed, there are, uh, clear neural correlates associated with spiritual awareness. But perhaps even more profound was our finding that whether someone is Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, spiritual but not religious, as enlightened humanist, during a spiritual experience, the same neural correlates, the very same neural correlates are engaged. There is one universal spiritual engagement of the brain. There is one universal awakened brain. We all have it, we all share it. It bonds us in the deepest way. And whether you are an orthodox Christian, an orthodox Jew, a, uh, devout Muslim, or a committed Buddhist, spiritual but not religious, you are using the same universal neural correlates of the awakened brain. In the awakened brain, there are four components. And I'll just tell you one of them now, which is the bonding network. Just as when we were very young children, in our parents or grandparents arms, we felt loved, we felt held, we felt buoyed up. Well, so too, in a state of awakened awareness, we engage the bonding network. And we perceive, we feel, we Know that we are loved and held by life itself. Again, whether we interpret or understand that awareness, as God holds us, Jesus holds us, or life itself has my back, somehow life has a way of working out. One door closes, another opens. However we might grasp that awareness, the deep foundational clarity that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone is perceived through our awakened brain. My husband and I were in China many years ago for our honeymoon. And, um, standing outside the Beijing train station, we had a map in Chinese. Didn't really know what our next move might be. We couldn't quite read this map. And we're wondering, where's the bus? Where's the train? Where do we go from here? And when we came up out of our puzzlement, we realized we were surrounded by 20 people quietly, graciously standing in a circle around us suggesting, can we help? Not a word was said. We didn't speak their language, they didn't speak ours. But we felt in our heart a profound sense of care and readiness to be our guides. We were lost, and yet we had just been found by 20 gracious new acquaintances. This is an awakened connection. We can be on the other side of the world. We can be on an airplane or in a bus station. We could be packaged differently in terms of our looks and our culture and be of different traditions or religions. And yet the deepest knowing of the heart brings us together when we realize our awakened connections. What we might call love of neighbor, we now know in our MRI studies of all the different forms of spiritual practice, it is love of neighbor that most strengthens the awakened brain. In my work with high ranking leaders, whether we're speaking about a general in the Pentagon, someone who runs a hedge fund, a CEO, very often what I hear is the most important decision that I've made was made at the level of my deep gut instinct, my intuition. I had reams of data. I had the voice of many good advisors. But of the many logical possibilities, the right one, the choice that was true. I simply knew in my heart. That is awakened awareness. That is a spiritual perception. High pixel, high data information in a single moment. It can take years to untangle the logic behind why. That indeed was the finest of decisions. But knowing in the moment of action is a moment of perception using your awakened brain.

Speaker A: Thank you, Lisa. All right, listeners, you can get copies of the books we talked about using the links in the episode notes or while you're there. Sign up for our free newsletter so you can get these big ideas right in your inbox. And please leave us a rating or review in your podcast player, if you would. That will help others find the show, and we'd really appreciate it. I'm Michael Kovnat. Ah, see you Monday.