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• Mr. Waldman's official site
• Excerpt from How God Changes Your Brain
• Review of How God Changes Your Brain

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Therapist responds to the millions who would say that there shouldn't be a connection between God and science. (2:40)
 

Full interview. (24:34)
 

Tavis: Mark Robert Waldman is an associate fellow at the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the author of a number of notable books, including "Born to Believe." His latest is called "How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist." The book was recently featured in a major "Time" magazine cover story. Mr. Waldman, an honor to have you on the program, sir.

Mark Robert Waldman: It is an honor and a pleasure.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you here. Let me start by asking what we - you, not we, you - mean to suggest by this title, "How God Changes Your Brain"?

Waldman: What we found from the brain scan studies that Andy and I do at the University of Pennsylvania - and we've done brain scans of nuns, Buddhists, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, religious and non-religious individuals - we're finding a consistency of patterns that you can see on every brain scan.

What we're finding is that, if you engage in contemplative spiritual practice or meditation or prayer or even focusing intently on a positive thought and a positive affirmation, you can begin to make permanent changes in both the structure and the function of your brain in ways that enhance memory, cognition, awareness, consciousness, compassion, and it simultaneously suppresses the neuromechanisms in your brain that cause anxiety, depression, fear, anger and rage.

Tavis: Yet in the very same book, I read that there is something that can be gained from intentional focused yawning as well.

Waldman: Yes.

Tavis: I don't want to over-state God changing my brain. I don't want to under-state it either, but I got to juxtapose what you just said to me now which, again, what I read in the same book about yawning.

Waldman: One of the things that many spiritual practices use, particularly in Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism, is that you do various forms of deep breathing. So if you close your eyes, you'll breathe in and then you breathe out and you breathe in and you breathe out. John Cabot Zen, who runs a very famous program at the Boston University for 30 years, this has become part of hospital medical treatment of stress reduction. So you do these breathing exercises for 20 to 40 to 50 minutes.

But we have new evidence. A lot of this actually comes from Gallup at State University of New York that yawning is one of the fastest ways to bring you into a state of relaxation and it will actually arouse your precuneous faster than any other technique that we know of. The precuneous is what's being looked at now in neuroscience as the center of human consciousness itself.

So we're doing different tests like at Moorpark College here in California. We're having students yawn for four minutes before taking a test. We're having them just sit quietly, and we're finding that both of these forms of contemplative meditation - although yawning is rather unique - can actually raise your grade point average from a C to a B or B to an A.

So what you do is you deliberately yawn for ten times even if you don't feel like it. The first two or three may feel a little fake, but the more you get into it, the more your brain begins to cool down, particularly the overactive parts of your frontal lobe.

Tavis: There are two thoughts running through my brain right now, not the least of which, number one, is that I barely got out of Indiana University and you're telling me, if I'd just yawned in class, I might have made the Dean's List? Now you tell me. That's my first thought (laughter).

My second thought is - I want to go back to this yawning thing again versus, you know, the yawning versus the spiritual contemplative stilling of one's self, if I can put it that way.

Waldman: Well, this is where we're bringing neuroscience and spirituality together.

Tavis: And that's what I want to talk about. For those who might take this book and use it as another tool in their arsenal to preach that here's what God can do for you -

Waldman: - yes.

Tavis: Whether you're Jewish, whether you're Pentecostal, if you concentrate on the Creator, concentrate on the God source, it can change your life. How do I make that argument out of this book, again, if you tell me that I can do the same thing by yawning?

Waldman: Well, we have a lot of research to do before we're gonna show that yawning does anything more than temporarily relax you.

Tavis: Ah, temporarily is the key word here.

Waldman: Yes.

Tavis: Okay.

Waldman: So the meditation practices that we're talking about, what we've done is that we've distilled from all of the world's religious traditions a set of 12 basic exercises that we have in Chapter 9, I believe, that anyone can do. And if you do these exercises for 12 minutes a day for eight weeks and we put you into a brain scan machine, we can show you that changes are being made in your brain that make all of the improvements that I just talked about.

Tavis: A couple of those exercises would be?

Waldman: One of the exercises would be - well, again, we actually guide people through yawning for about five minutes, but we also do a simple breathing exercise that you breathe in deeply and, as you breathe out, you watch the effect that it has upon your body.

Then we do another aspect in another exercise where you teach yourself, or you train yourself, to watch all of your positive-negative thoughts going through your mind. It's virtually impossible to turn off the noisy conversations that are constantly taking place in your frontal lobes, but you can train yourself to become an observer. So you step back just a little bit.

Now one of the exercises that I like to use, for example, is imagine that you're sitting on the side of a riverbank and leaves are floating down on the stream. So you sit there and a thought comes up in meditation and you might say, "This is silly. Why am I sitting here focusing on that?" All right. Put that thought on the leaf, let it float down the stream, let it go.

Come back for a moment to your breathing or your awareness or your relaxation. Watch the next thought or feeling that comes up. Maybe a feeling comes up and you're saying, "I'm feeling a little anxious and nervous." Put that thought on a leaf, let it float down the river, and you come back to the present moment-to-moment experience.

Thirty years of research shows that this is the most effective way to eliminate serious forms of depression and anxiety, and when you apply these types of spiritual techniques, you can take the theology out of them and use them in a secular form and, if you want to, you can take the theology from a different religion and put them back in. You still get the same neurological benefits.

Tavis: What do you make of that? There are two things I want to get to here. First, though, what do you make of the fact that it doesn't matter who the God source is, doesn't matter who you're worshiping, that in your research, you get the same kind of effect?

If you can still yourself, back to your earlier word, contemplate on something spiritual, something sacred, it impacts your brain, it impacts your whole physiology. What do you make of the fact that it doesn't really matter what that God source is?

Waldman: I've been contemplating God for at least 30 years and I still don't know what God means and I presume, if I ask you, what is your definition of God, I doubt if, one, you'd be able to answer me or, two, every time I ask you, you'd probably give me a different answer.

What Andy Newberg and I have done and we've documented in this book is that we've collected thousands of peoples' descriptions of God, definitions of God. We asked adults and children to draw pictures of God, from atheist communities, from Christian communities, from New Age communities. We asked people to describe their spiritual experiences and guess what everybody has in common? Virtually nothing.

Tavis: (Laughter) I was waiting on that. I didn't want to mess up the punch line, but I thought that was where you were headed (laughter).

Waldman: Now this was amazing to us when we did this statistical analysis, but there's something wonderful in that because what it means is that, for each individual, God or spirituality is a profoundly unique experience.

And even if you're an atheist and science is your biggest love in life, if you focus on the Big Bang or evolution, these are also concepts that are beyond comprehension. So whether it's God or the Big Bang, the more you think about this, the more you're gonna grow dandrites on axons in some of the most important parts of your brain.

Tavis: One of the things that I get a chance to do as a talk show host every now and again is to ask a question for my own edification, something I just really want to know. I try to ask good questions most times. I try, at least. But this is a question for Tavis. You all forgive me for this.

Some viewers know, as I've talked about it many times before, I grew up and still am and my entire life has been spent inside of the Pentecostal church, and you talk about that. In your research, you had some engagement with some Pentecostals.

Waldman: Yes.

Tavis: Again, I want to make it clear that, as I said a moment ago, when you still yourself and focus on something, something sacred, your research says the same thing and yet you yourself had an interesting experience when you went inside the Pentecostal realm. Would you mind sharing that with me?

Waldman: I like to church-hop, so on one particular Saturday, or Sunday, in Camarillo, I was able to make the 12 churches and see what was going on. In the 11th church that I went into - and the Southern Baptist community actually takes the sign off because people are kind of turned off with that - I went in and I went in very open-heartedly.

I really wanted to know what they're about because we have a chapter in this book called The Fundamentalist in Your Brain. But I really wanted to find out if it's true that fundamentalists are as nasty as people like Richard Dawkins say they are.

It has not been my experience, but I walked into this church and this person chewed me out. I said, "Well, isn't Jesus' basic message 'Love thine enemy'?" He leans forward into my face and he says, "I can love you, but I don't have to like you." I was so upset by this inside. I mean, I came in just wanting to listen and share. I ran out of that church realizing I left my briefcase inside. I had to go back and face him again (laughter).

I didn't do so well on generating compassion towards him, which is what our work is about. We do believe that all of these spiritual practices, whether they're done secularly or religiously, strengthen the anterior cingulate which is your compassionate part in your brain. It's the heart of your brain.

Well, what do I do at 2:00 in the afternoon with a traumatic experience? Well, around the corner in Camarillo is a church that's open 24/7 and they speak in tongues and I visited there before. I went over there and there were three ministers in the group. Everyone else had gone home.

I asked them about my experience. I said, "Is this just a unique experience or have you had the same kind of experiences like that?" The Pentecostals have actually had a hard time with some of the fundamentalist communities as well. But they're listening to me open-heartedly. They know what my background is. They know I'm a neuroscientist. One of them said, "Can we pray over you?" Sure, why not?

I have three people sitting around me in a circle. One is reading a passage from the Bible. The other person is speaking in tongues, and we've done brain scans of what goes on in the brain with people speaking in tongues. And the third person over here is looking up and saying, "Thank God for putting this neuroscientist on our planet." This was one of the most healing, compassionate, loving places that I've been to.

So to be a good researcher, I said, "I'm gonna go around the country" which I did. I took my son to Oberlin College which is surrounded by some of the most conservative churches I've been into, and I went into Jehovah's Witnesses and I went to Southern Baptist churches and I explained the situation that I experienced and they all agreed that that one minister was off-base.

I can walk into a Jehovah's Witness congregation - and I wish more non-religious people would do this - and have been met with more heartfelt love and caring and acceptance for me no matter what my belief system is. It makes me come back out and wonder, "What are they doing that's right that the rest of us are not doing?"

Tavis: What is the greatest value to you of church-hopping, to use your phrase, of going to visiting so many of these facilities, these churches? What's the greatest value to you personally?

Waldman: We find that you can take bits and pieces from all these spiritual traditions, put them together, you fill a room full of people of different belief systems, Christians, atheists, Jews, everyone, and you can guide them through a 15-minute exercise we call compassionate communication that we address in this book and, in less than seven minutes, people are virtually having tears running down their faces, talking about intimate experiences, even though they're talking to a stranger, even though they're talking to people who hold beliefs that are utterly opposed to them.

So the biggest thing that Andy and I feel is that you can use a little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of spirituality to help to bring just a little more peace into the world.

Tavis: How do you respond to those people who say you're off your rocker to begin with for even connecting science and faith, science and God, science and religion?

Waldman: They're wrong. There was a program on University channel just the other day. The relationship between science and religion was actually promoted by the Catholic Church in the 1400s. But what we have found evidence of is that, if you focus on an angry God or a negative attitude, this does damage to your brain.

Whether it comes from the pulpit or from the political arena, if you use angry rhetoric, you're not only damaging the brain of the speaker, but everyone who is listening in the TV audience. Their brains are being damaged too.

Tavis: Give me a definition of what you mean by angry God.

Waldman: A wrathful God. The Baylor University study shows that there were four different types of gods that people think about in America. An angry, wrathful God, an all-compassionate God, a God that is distant and just leaves everything alone. Unfortunately, the compassionate God is only 25% of the population, but we think the questions that were asked were wrong.

So if you ask questions in a survey, "Do you see God as being all or nothing or everything? Is God a spirit that moves through you? Is God simply the nature of the universe itself?", then you'll find that the majority of Americans and the vast majority of people throughout the world believe in a spirituality and believe in a God that is a mystical definition. It's beyond comprehension. And if you focus on anything mystical that takes you beyond yourself, that changes your brain in beneficial ways.

So how God changes your brain, even if you're an atheist and you contemplate God, this is good for you. And if you bring that into a dialog from a compassionate place, you will create warmth and empathy and bring people of different religions together to appreciate each other. That's our theme.

Tavis: When you say contemplate, what do you mean by that? The reason why I'm asking that question is because, obviously, to contemplate does not mean, to your atheist example or even agnostic, to contemplate doesn't mean to accept, to contemplate doesn't mean to buy into.

Waldman: That's correct, that's correct.

Tavis: To contemplate means I'm gonna wrestle with this. What you're telling me is that just the mere wrestling with that does all of this?

Waldman: If you do it from a place of being nonjudgmental. So you take your deepest value, whether you be religious or non-religious, hold that in your mind. For me, peacefulness is a deep value. For me, being able to form alliances with people to learn how to communicate better with each other because I'm a therapist as well. This is essential.

So if you hold the idea of peace, love, compassion, God - this was established by Herb Benson at Harvard University 30 years ago - if you hold that in your mind for 12 minutes, your thalamus, the Grand Central Station of sensory awareness, reacts to your thought as if it was an objective reality in the world. So if you focus on God in a positive way, you end up having a physiological experience that God is objectively real.

If you focus on peace constantly, that peace exists. There's no evidence in science that peace exists. We can't find a box and put peace into it and say, "Swallow this pill and it'll give you peace." You focus on that and your brain begins to believe that peace is an objective reality that exists inside of the world.

Tavis: Let me ask you a question that some regard as silly, but it won't be the first or last time I'm accused of doing that. But I'm curious here, given your expertise here as a neuroscientist.

Given what you've said to me today, help me imagine a world in which every world leader - President Obama, Putin, run the list - help me imagine a world in which every world leader would spend so many minutes a day in this contemplative space doing exactly what you have said.

I'm asking this question for the obvious reason. You talked about peace, which is an important value to you.

Waldman: Yes.

Tavis: I'm trying to figure out how our world might be different if our world leaders spent this kind of time in a contemplative space on a daily basis.

Waldman: I think the people that you mentioned are really doing that. Even the mantra of the statement that Obama would make, "We can change, we can do it together," and he keeps repeating it over and over and over, makes that a reality inside of him to such a point that it will actually activate the motivational centers of the brain, sends that message to the parietal lobe where your sense of self and other is, and it becomes more and more of an inner reality and an inner truth.

If we could all do that in the world, to take our deepest values of getting along with each other and know that we can change and you hold that - but you're gonna have to do it for about 12 minutes a day. Maybe it takes less, but that's what our brain scan studies have narrowed it down so far is 12 minutes a day - in eight weeks, you can begin to make permanent changes to parts of your brain that neuroscientists have never known that we're able to affect.

So you can take any kind of positive affirmation and use this to motivate your language. It changes the way in which you speak to each other. You'll find that your voice begins to slow down.

My brain and your brain, if I stay in a peaceful state and you're in an angry state, one of our brains is gonna win. If you resonate to my brain, you'll become more peaceful. If I resonate to your brain, I'll become more angry. That's cooperative. Unfortunately, angry thoughts - the "us" versus "them" mentality, my religion is better than your religion - those types of thoughts create a problem. It creates neural dissonance in your brain.

Tavis: You're not just a neuroscientist. Now you're like a psychic (laughter) because you knew exactly where I was about to go. That's the other question that I wanted to ask. What can these various faiths, these various religions, learn about the dogma that they engage in from understanding what's in this book?

Waldman: Well, we're trying to use our neuroscience to actually change the structure of different churches. Churches are actually - I get more calls from churches and synagogues and temples and religious organizations to come lecture about this, spirituality and the brain, that spirituality is good for you.

So the message is always the same. Pick and choose from your religious traditions. Focus on the most positive, meaningful, value-oriented messages within there. If they are positive, you'll do your brain good; you'll do other peoples' brains good. If you do focus on the negative passages, which you can find in many of the spiritual texts, ignore them.

The neuroscientist is going to say to you that focusing on the negative text is going to release a bunch of stress neurochemicals that actually destroy the part of your brain that helps you to suppress anxiety and anger and rage. So the more you listen to an angry politician or an angry person from the pulpit, the more that person is gonna be stuck in that anger and we don't know if you can get rid of that.

Tavis: So what do we do? Do we turn that out? We turn them off?

Waldman: Come back inside. What is your deepest value? What is your affirmation? What little tiny thing do you believe brings you a sense of inner peace and happiness? Then bring that into your dialog. Do your meditation. Do your prayer. Do your spirituality.

From that place, within your place, let it come through in your communication. It's through the eye contact, slow speaking and hearing that you can help generate compassion in the other person's heart even if they have an opposing belief to your own.

Tavis: It is the case every now and then. I'm hosting this program and somebody walks in here and I think I'm gonna talk for half the show and the conversation goes all the way to the wire, to the end of the half hour, because the conversation, to me at least, was just that riveting.

Such was the case tonight with Mark Robert Waldman who is the co-author of the new book, "How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist." Dr. Waldman, good to have you on.

Waldman: Thank you so much.

Tavis: Good to see you.