The Brain in Prayer · Episode 01 · Neurotheology

What the brain does
when someone prays

Written by Oliver Cás — physician specializing in the diagnosis of rare brain diseases (neuropathology) and author. See Oliver Cás's books →

Since the 1990s, Andrew Newberg has been putting Franciscan nuns, Buddhist monks, and Pentecostals in prayer inside scanners. The results are fascinating — and the wrong reading of them is neuroscience's biggest factory of bad headlines. Let's go through the two windows.

What the scans show

Neuroimaging (SPECT/PET)Small samples

Three findings by Newberg and colleagues have become classics. First: in concentrated verbal prayer (like the psalm recitation of the Franciscan nuns studied) and in deep meditation, activity in the prefrontal cortex — the region of directed attention — increases. Praying with focus is, neurologically, an exercise of attention.

Second: in the states described as unitive — the sense of dissolution of the boundary between the self and the whole, reported by contemplatives across traditions — there is a drop in activity in the superior parietal lobe, precisely the region that builds the body's spatial map, the "where I end and the world begins." The subjective report ("the boundaries vanished") and the objective data (the boundary region went quiet) coincide in a remarkable way.

Third, and most surprising: in glossolalia (Pentecostal speaking in tongues), the pattern is the opposite of meditation — prefrontal activity decreases. Practitioners describe exactly that: not feeling in control of their speech. The brain confirms the phenomenology: whatever glossolalia is, it is not deliberate theater — the cortex of voluntary control is less active, not more.

The reading through the two windows

"Photographing the brain of someone in love does not answer whether the beloved exists. The same goes for someone who prays." — The Two Windows Method