Dr. Andrew Newberg is not only someone who is living his passions, but someone who has been researching the whole basis of belief and how that affects our ability to live our passions.  He investigates the neurophysiological basis of the statement from the book The Passion Test, When you are clear, what you want will show up in your life and only to the extent you’re clear.

Dr. Newberg is a world-renowned expert in the neurosciences and the functioning of the brain, particularly in the area of the role belief plays in structuring our experience. He is the Associate Professor of Radiology and Psychiatry, as well as the
Director and cofounder of the Center for Spirituality and the Neurosciences, both at the University of Pennsylvania. He has actively pursued neuro-imaging research projects on the study of aging and dementia, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Newberg has also researched the neurophysiological correlates of acupuncture, meditation, and alternative therapies and how brain function is associated with mystical and religious experiences. He has published over 75 articles, essays, and books. He is coauthor of the bestselling book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, and his latest book has just been released, titled Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs.

Dr. Newberg presents his research throughout the world in both scientific and public forums. He has appeared on Nightline, Good Morning America, ABC News, World News Tonight, National Public Radio, London Talk Radio, and over 15 nationally syndicated radio programs. His work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and now Healthy Wealthy nWise.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  Dr. Newberg, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

 ANDREW NEWBERG:  Thank you for having me.

 CHRIS ATTWOOD:  am so glad you are there. I always have to hope that our guest is there, and I am so glad you’re there tonight.

 ANDREW NEWBERG:  arrived just in time.

 CHRIS ATTWOOD:   Perfect. Dr. Newberg, would you begin first on a personal note? Just share with us how your own passions, the things that you really care most about, led you to the research that you now do and have done on the neurophysiologic connections between beliefs and the human search for meaning.

 ANDREW NEWBERG:  would have to say that it started, really, when I was a child, in many ways. I was always asking a lot of questions and a lot of them were kind of the big philosophical questions: Why are we here? How do we know what’s right and wrong?

How do we understand reality?

I was fortunate that my parents, at the time, were fairly encouraging. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any answers for me, but they were encouraging me to continue to pursue those kinds of questions and to really sort of search deeply, both within myself as
well as the outside world, to figure out how I could best get to some kinds of answers that at least would be satisfying to me.

As I went through my educational process and I went through college, I started to realize that on one hand we did have to look deep inside ourselves and, to a large extent, it is the human mind, the human brain, that enables us to do that. On the other hand, I
was also getting more and more intrigued by different philosophical ideas, different perspectives on reality, both in terms of Western ideas like the Judeo-Christian traditions, Western philosophy, as well as Buddhist and Hindu thought.

When I got into medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, I was very fortunate to be able to run into a psychiatrist working at Penn at the time, named Gene d’Aquili, who was really looking at these kinds of issues, how spirituality affected us, how we
could begin to strive to understand these kinds of questions by looking at the inner section between spirituality and the human person.

When he and I met it was just sort of like ‘magic sparks,’ so to speak. We just realized that we had so many similar interests and so many complementary approaches. He was in psychiatry and anthropology. I was more in the neurosciences and in philosophy, so it just created a wonderful relationship that we could work and develop.

As I pushed forward with this, continuing to realize the importance of integrating science and spirituality, I realized the need to develop empirical ideas and ways in which we can actually test what goes on inside the person when they engage in these kinds of questions, when they seek God, when they try to meditate and search deep within themselves.

For me, this whole process really is just the continuation of the very questions that I had growing up as a child, and I just tried to continue to explore these issues, ask the questions, and keep seeking answers. For me, it is really a part of who I am and a part of my life, and it’s something that I continue to try to do and, hopefully, will do for the rest of my life.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  I love that. You have done a lot of research in many different areas, particularly in this relationship between beliefs, spirituality, and neurophysiology. Would you summarize for us maybe, if you could, the two or three that you consider to
be the core findings or most significant things that you have discovered in this process of ongoing research that you have been engaged in?

 ANDREW NEWBERG:  I think, in some senses, the most important issues is to realize that whenever we are experiencing something in the world, whenever we are thinking about something, it affects who we are, it affects our brain. If somebody is deeply engaged in a meditation practice, in a prayer practice, if they are thinking about something, if they are contemplating something, it affects a lot of different parts of our brain.

In fact, the brain in so rich in terms of what we can actually experience, think about, and feel about that many different parts of our brain get into the act and help us to explore these kinds of questions, experience our spiritual side of things, and do the best
that we can at trying to address some of the really big questions that we all have to face.

Now, in terms of beliefs themselves, I think one of the really important things for us to realize is where our beliefs come from because our beliefs have a very profound influence over everything that we do and think, and that’s not just in religious and
spiritual ideas but moral ideas, political ideas, ideas about work, how we interact with other people. Our beliefs do come from the biological roots of who we are

That is a part of it, but our beliefs are also heavily influenced by the people around us, they are heavily influenced by the ideas and thoughts that we have and the things that make sense to us, and they are influenced by our emotional responses. All of these
different factors come into play to help us to create our beliefs about the world, and then those beliefs really make us who we are.

They really are the very essence of our being and, therefore, everything that we do, think, feel, and so forth ultimately comes back to our beliefs, and that helps us to understand and interpret our world. I think those are the two most important issues right now,
that it is the brain that helps us to perceive all of these things, and that the beliefs that we have have a tremendous influence on who we are.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  With this latter one-forgive me if I am misquoting you; you can correct me-but it seems to me, in reading some of your material that you have said something to the effect that it could almost be said, or perhaps it could be said, that one’s
whole experience of life is really a reflection of or a function of one’s beliefs. Please correct my quote.

ANDREW NEWBERG:  I think that is a very good way of putting that. When we look at how people interpret information in the world, so many times the beliefs that we have going into a particular piece of information or into a particular experience color what we ultimately take out of it. The example that actually got me headed in this direction of our book Born to Believe and to really address the question about beliefs came about with some of our original brain-imaging studies of people doing meditation and prayer.

What I was so fascinated by was that, for example, when we did a scan of a nun in prayer, when we talked to the nun about the results and we showed her the changes in the brain, and so forth, she said, Wow, this is really great. This helps me to understand how God has an influence in my life, how religion is so important, and how my spiritual side is connected with my biological side. This is great.

She thanked me, and it was so wonderful that this helped to support and validate her way of believing about the world. I was equally intrigued by the fact that a number of people who were not religious, people who would describe themselves as atheists, would look at the same scans, the same data, and so forth, and they would come to me and they would say, Gee, thank you so much. This is really great stuff. It shows to me that religion is nothing more than a manifestation of the human brain.

There is no spiritual world out there. Thank you so much for supporting our belief that there is no God, that there is no religion out there, and it’s just all our biology. I was so intrigued by the fact that two people, with just very different belief systems of course, can come at the same piece of information and take away from it something very, very different.

If you then extrapolate that to every part of our lives, if you go into a situation at work thinking that you are going to have a positive experience, you are going to take away from it certain positives. So many people often talk about adversity. If you meet adversity, you can derive great positive things from it. If you think that your world is going to be miserable and unpleasant, you are going to wind up in a miserable, unpleasant world.

That may have nothing to do with what the actual circumstances are. I think there are just so many wonderful examples where people have fallen into that kind of trap, and it ultimately is also that ‘half glass empty, half glass full,’ but the beliefs that we have and the ways in which we think about the world, both positively and negatively, wind up shaping almost all of our experiences and all the things that we do.

This ultimately can have a very strong impact on our health and our well-being, both in terms of mental and physical. Studies have shown that people who are more optimistic and look at the world in a more positive way have less stress, and because they have less stress that gives them less problems with heart disease. It helps to improve their
immune-system function and ultimately, they do better.

It really is very valuable to the extent that people can look at things positively, and look at all their different experiences that they have and experiences that they are going to have, in as positive a way as possible. That has very powerful implications on
who they are, what they take away from those experiences, and how they ultimately feel as a person

 CHRIS ATTWOOD: 

From a neurophysiological standpoint would you try, in as simple language as possible, to describe for us how beliefs get structured in the first place?

 ANDREW NEWBERG: 
Our beliefs start really as a child, even as an infant. There is a phrase that I like to say a lot now, which is that, Neurons that fire together, wire together. The whole idea there is that the more we use certain neural pathways in the brain, the more we keep coming back to a same concept, a same belief, and so forth, that is how those neural connections get laid down and that becomes
what is written into the neural activity of the brain.

For example, as you grow up, if you knock your glass off the table and your mother says, Don’t do that, and then you knock it off again and she says, Don’t do that, that negative reinforcement creates negative emotions in us. It ultimately connects with, If
I keep doing that, this is not a good situation. Conversely, if you want to start to learn mathematics, you need to learn that one plus two equals three. How do you do that? You say it over and over again until it sticks.

Ultimately, the connections form and you realize that one plus two does, in fact, equal three. As we grow we develop the massive interconnections of all the different nerve cells in the brain, and actually as a child you have many, many more connections than what you ultimately have as an adult. As you go through the process of growth and development, your parents and teachers and peers, they help you to prune back, or cut back the connections that are not really the right ones, that one plus two does not equal four.

It equals three. Those are what ultimately become the connections that you grow into and they become a part of who you are. As you grow and continue to develop into adolescence and into adulthood, it becomes very difficult, really, to shake some of those early ideas, those early beliefs because those neurons have become so strongly connected with each other.

The brain would require a lot of energy to kind of break out of that old pattern. It’s not that you can’t, but it takes a lot more effort and a lot more energy to do that. That’s why it is often difficult to break out of our old patterns. The way the beliefs ultimately
form, though, is this way in which the nerve cells themselves actually can strengthen their connections the more they fire.

That is whether it is a belief about God or religion, or a belief about how to behave morally, or how to be a good friend. All of these things get written into those neural connections of our brain and the different parts of our brain. We start to get in more detail when we talk about the frontal lobes that are right behind the forehead. That helps us to focus our attention on a particular thing, on a particular belief.

If you focus your attention on how to be a good person, if you focus your attention on how to be a good, religious person, or whatever it is that you are interested in, then the frontal lobes connect with other parts of the brain that help those nerve cells to
connect, write it into your memory areas, and that is what becomes a part of who you are because that is what you remember.

You remember how to become a good person, how to be the type of religious or spiritual person you might want to be, how to be a good worker, how to be responsible, and all of these different things that we take with us throughout our lives.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  I am going to try to repeat back to you, just to see if I got it, and hopefully for our listeners’ perspectives, to make sure that all of us got it. As I understand it, as a child we have many possible connections in our brain, and then those get-the word you used was ‘pruning’-pruned back to a more limited set of possibilities, if you will, that are structured by the beliefs that we are taught or that we come to adopt as a result of different neural connections firing repeatedly within our brain. Is that correct?

ANDREW NEWBERG:   Yes, absolutely. That is correct, and one thing to just add to that is that there is this kind of interesting interplay between the beliefs that we hold right now and the beliefs as they change into the future because, as I mentioned, like when people looked at our brain scan they strengthened their own beliefs.

They used the beliefs that they, which actually helped them to rewire, and then ultimately, as a lot of us have been looking at now, is how does the brain change? How does it make that leap to a new way of thinking about things?

 CHRIS ATTWOOD:  Yes, so talk about that a little bit, will you? How do we make that leap?

 ANDREW NEWBERG:  It is certainly harder because, again, these neural connections are well grounded in us and therefore, it takes a lot of energy. It may take a lot of convincing. It may take a lot of new focus of an individual that they almost have to force
themselves out of an old habit, an old pattern. The more that they can focus out of that old pattern into a new pattern and make that conscious decision to do that, the better off they are at being able to break out of it.

We see this all the time in science, for example, that we get into these sorts of ways of looking at the world. I am a physician, obviously, and we get into ways of how we treat people. That is based on some kind of information, some kind of data. Then as new information comes out, we have to change those ideas, those beliefs about human health and what we need to do with people.

Sometimes that is hard to do and, in fact, a lot of times it takes a long time before you can convince all the major doctors in the world that this is the way we really need to do something in a new way. Sometimes the early studies are met with a lot of criticism and even ridicule. It is always interesting to me because people seem to think that science is sort of this high and lofty thing.

Science is certainly wonderful, but it is made of scientists who have all the same problems and foibles that any other human being has. Therefore, we sometimes forget that we need to also check our own belief systems about how the body works and how we
think about human health, and so forth. It is not easy to make those changes, but what we have found is that the brain is capable of changing, it is capable of creating new connections, and it can do that.

Even though we prune back a number of the excess connections, some of them are still there, at least in some kind of rudimentary form. There are ways of accessing those new ways of thinking, and people can have those transformative moments, those ‘Aha!’
experiences, where they suddenly realize that they have to take their life in a whole different direction. It is possible to do that, but it is hard to study because you never exactly know when those moments are going to come along.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:   Yes, right. Exactly. When we were discussing preparing for this interview, I asked you if you would be willing to take a specific example, and since many of the people who are on the phone are familiar with the work that Janet and I have done in The Passion Test and the process that is created there, I thought it would be both fun and interesting to look at that in the context of this role of beliefs and how we shift beliefs.

One thing that you said, Dr. Newberg, is that our beliefs really create a picture of our reality. It sounds as if it is almost like we put glasses on. Of course, many of us have heard this analogy, but the way you’ve described it, it sounds like we put glasses on, and
those glasses are a function of our beliefs. Then we see the world through those glasses, as you described the nun who saw your research through her glasses and the atheist who sees the research through his glasses.

I want to come back to this. It follows from that then that our beliefs are really what structure our ability to experience joy and fulfillment in our life. I wonder, does that follow? Is that a logical conclusion from what you have been saying and your research?  

ANDREW NEWBERG: 

Yes, absolutely, although there are some intriguing twists to this, which are that, on one hand, when we look at the world positively, our beliefs are deeply tied in with our emotions. We use our emotions to initially create our beliefs to a certain extent. Obviously, when we have a negative reinforcement, when we are embarrassed and feel badly because somebody has yelled at us when we did something wrong, then that emotional response helps to write that belief in.

Okay, it’s bad to do whatever it is that I was getting yelled at for. On the other hand, if we try to be loving and compassionate, and it comes back to us with more love and compassion, then we feel good and we feel very positive. That positive emotion also helps to write new beliefs into our way of thinking about things. Then maybe we will approach the next person with that same kind of love and compassion

Our emotions help us to create those beliefs, but once we have our beliefs, then our emotions also help us to support them. If a person looks at the world in a particular way-maybe they are a Republican or a Democrat, or maybe they are a Christian versus a Jew versus a Muslim-that belief system provides them a certain amount of support.

It helps us to understand our world, which makes us feel good and comfortable. We have a good sense of what our world is about, how to act, and how to behave. That becomes very important for us because we want to feel like we know what is going on and that we have some clear handle on how to respond to our world around us.

The downside of that is when sometimes the overall belief system creates a negative experience, it makes it that much harder sometimes to actually break out of because in kind of a quirky, weird way it actually feels good to feel bad. I know that sounds kind of strange, but if somebody had very poor self-esteem, and there was actually a study that showed this, people who have poor self-esteem actually sometimes enjoy being around people who are very critical of them because it helps to support their belief system.

They feel like, Okay, I understand the world. It makes sense, even though they are putting the person down. Whereas if you had a very positive, very friendly person who said, Oh, no. You’re a great person, then that creates a conflict inside because they think, I’m not that great, and this person is telling me I am, so they must be lying to me. There is a problem there, and it creates conflict and unhappiness.

Even though the person ultimately is kind of in a negative mode, they almost have a certain sense of comfort from that. That is also part of why it gets hard to break out of those negative perspectives. Coming back to The Passion Test, I remember in one of our first conversations, one of the most important concepts that you started out with was the idea that so many people are not following their passions.

They are looking at the world in kind of a negative way, and it goes back to this story that I just said. In some instances, it almost feels good to them in kind of a weird way that they are looking at the world in the negative, because it’s like, Okay, I’m not that
great of a person. I really don’t deserve to follow my passions.

Then they create this whole network of beliefs that supports that in a certain way, and that is what ultimately we have to work with with individuals in many different ways. Of course, The Passion Test is a great way to do that, to get them out of that. How do you kind of redirect the person to get them focused in a different way of thinking?

Get them out of the negativity and into something that’s more positive and provide a much better perspective that they have on their life so that they can construct healthier, more constructive beliefs going forward.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  

Right. I know that you have read through The Passion Test. You are familiar with the kinds of exercises there and, of course, the first step in The Passion Test is to help someone clarify what are the five things that are most important to them in their life, the things that they love most or that matter most to them in their life.

If you would, speak about two things: one, what is the potential value of consciously putting your attention on what you really love and care about; that is number one. The second question is, is there a value to actually identifying a small number-five, for example-as opposed to 10, 20, or 30?

ANDREW NEWBERG:  I think there is no question that focusing on your passions, focusing on things that have a positive influence in your life, focusing on the things that you feel good about, has a positive impact on us. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, that ‘the neurons that fire together, wire together,’ and that if you use your frontal lobes to focus on something, anything-positive or negative-that becomes your belief system.

That becomes what is written into who you are, so if you focus on something that is positive, focus on something that is your passion, focus on something that makes you feel good about yourself, makes you feel good about the world, that, in and of itself, is
going to start you down that path of rewiring whatever negative experiences or beliefs that you have and creating a much more positive framework for your belief systems, a more positive framework for the neural connections that are in
your brain.

In fact, actually, the frontal lobes connect our emotional parts of the brain, the parts of the brain that help us to feel positively and negatively about who we are. Therefore, if you are positively focused on your passions, that is going to give you a greater sense of emotional responsiveness and it is going to make you feel better about things.

The idea about why there may be some advantage in limiting what you focus on, that also comes, to a certain extent, in parallel with how we think about the brain’s function, which is how we keep things in what we call ‘working memory,’ how many things we can focus on at any particular moment in time. What most research studies show is that we have actually a fairly limited capacity to do that.

We can only really keep in mind maybe five or six things that we can kind of concentrate on and think about and manipulate in our brain, at least, all at the same time. You can’t remember 20 different names all at the same time; you can remember three or four things all at the same time. I think that the idea of trying to keep a person focused very intensely on a fairly small number of the things that really matter the most helps to create a much greater sense of how important those things are, and also helps the brain to kind of function in its most efficient kind of way.

That is the best way. If you overwhelm the brain with too many things, then it actually starts to not work well. We sort of see that with people with Attention Deficit Disorder where they wind up having too many things that they are focusing on and they can’t really concentrate on the one or two things that they need to at a particular point in time. Even in a healthy person, if you overwhelm a person with too much information and too much stuff, that is not good for them.

The more you can keep people focused on one or two or three very limited items, that is always going to be better for the individual’s brain to focus on those and to make them a part of their own belief systems.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: 
From what you were saying earlier, if I or anyone has developed a belief system that says that, I am a victim of my circumstances, for example, or that, I’m really not very worthwhile, or that, I don’t have enough knowledge to really do what I love, or that, In some way, in one way or another, I am not able to follow my passions. I’m not able to support myself, for example, with following
my passions.

From what you have said, once we have kind of developed those beliefs and those neural pathways have been created, it’s really not going to have that much impact if we just do something like The Passion Test once and then go away and live our life, is it?

 ANDREW NEWBERG: 
Right, absolutely. We see this repeatedly, over and over again, with a lot of approaches to helping ourselves. We see this in dieting all the time. If you need to lose weight, you can’t do something for a week or two. Yes, sure, you might lose some weight, but then it usually comes back on and usually comes back on in a vengeance.

I think a lot of times if you just try to do that one-time thing or you just kind of reflect on something for a day or so and then never really come back to it, then that just kind of goes away. In fact, going back to the idea that, ‘neurons that fire together, wire
together,’ the converse to that is either use it or lose it. If you don’t continue to pursue certain ideas, if you don’t focus on something new, then you are going to lose those connections.

The fact that you may be trying to break out of a negative spin, and you kind of think about things positively on a particular day, that may be great but that is not going to get written into your memory banks. It is not going to get written into your neural
connections unless you keep coming back to it and you keep coming back to it on daily basis, on a weekly basis, and really make it a part of who you are. In fact, as I think we will probably talk about a little bit later, this is the real value of rituals.

CHRIS ATTWOOD:  

Talk about that now. I think this is a good time to talk about rituals.

 ANDREW NEWBERG: 

Yes. Of course, rituals tend to be thought of in terms of religious rituals and so forth, but rituals occur in every part of our lives. We have rituals when we wake up in the morning, we have rituals about going to work and how we set up our desk, and rituals with our friends, exercise rituals, and of course, religious and spiritual rituals, and sports rituals.  What rituals
really mean is…

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