ANDY: I think that it’s one of the fundamental problems that we all have as human beings: that we are, in some senses, forced to conceive of very concrete belief systems. And part of that goes back to how the brain works. Because if you think about how the neurons in the brain work, the more connections that are used, the stronger those connections become, the stronger your beliefs become. So that’s why if your belief system is in, say, Christianity - then you read the bible, you pray to Jesus Christ, you think about Christianity, and that becomes your reality because the neurons that are firing that underlay all those ideas and experiences become stronger and stronger the more you focus on it. And that becomes your reality.

Now how, or why, do you go beyond that? Usually what happens is that there is some crisis or some issue that arises where a person realizes the limitation in their belief system, or that there is something that’s not working for them. And it could be an emotion not working for them – maybe they have a depression or anxiety about the world. Or it could be that their ways of meeting people, or dating, or political beliefs, or whatever, are not working for them. And then the question is, can you get out of that?

Again I think What the Bleep really targeted this idea that a lot of times we get so stuck within our belief systems even when they’re not working. And it becomes difficult to recognize the negative, destructive nature of beliefs that we hold. But when we do ultimately find them, sometimes we can come to the decision that this is just not working and we need to find a new way. This can be experientially driven. It could be an insight that comes to them. Or it could be through a long, methodical process that they ultimately try to rearrange those connections in the brain and try to rewire their brain and rewire their beliefs.

TBH: From your experience and research, what is it that is actually happening when someone has a “mystical experience.” Let’s say it’s someone who’s atheistic, or pragmatic and very down to earth. And all of a sudden they have this direct experience, altogether out of the belief system box, that transcends their sense of self. How do you explain that?

ANDY: Well this is actually the heart of the research I’ve been doing over the last decade or so. One of the critical areas that I think is involved is this area called the parietal lobe that normally takes our sensory information and tries to create for us a sense of ourself. And if the sensory information that is normally streaming in to give us our sense of self goes away, which can be either on purpose through the practice of meditation, or spontaneous like a near death experience, or what have you - then you no longer conceive of your self in the same way. Instead of having a very deep sense of everything is separate from you, you have this deep sense that you are intimately interconnected with everything. And when that happens, that can create a very strong change in how your perception of the world continues from that point forward. That particular moment actually rearranges the neural connections.

One of the things we have realized in our research is that emotions are very important for belief. The stronger the emotional response, the more powerful the memory and the more powerful the belief that will come from it. That’s why if you’re stressed about studying for a test, you’ll remember those facts more than you will sometime later when you no longer have that stress. So when you have a mystical experience, the incredible power of the emotional responses that you get from it drives those experiences very deeply into your memory so that you perceive that experience as being one of the most vivid, one of the most clearly remembered experiences that you’ve ever had. And whatever insights you take from that you carry on with you.

Most people who have had mystical experiences will describe that they carry with them a sense of their profound reality pretty much until the day they die. The amazing thing about those experiences is, not only do they feel incredibly real when people are having those experiences, but the memory of them continues to make them feel incredibly real - even more so than their everyday reality experience. Which is remarkable.

As far as we can tell, the limbic system of the brain that helps to control our emotions and which also helps to “write” our memories into our brains is also activated during these states.

Some of the early work that I did looking at meditation shows that a part of the frontal lobe is turned on when we are focusing our attention. So when our attention is on meditation or prayer, it’s activated and we show that in our brain scans. But what we’ve always hypothesized and now are starting to see some evidence for, is that when people have very, very strong experiences where not only does the spatial sense of self and other go away, which is that orientation part of the brain, but the sense of the self as in control goes away. It’s almost as if the self is overcome by the experience itself and what we think happens in those cases is the frontal lobe, instead of being turned on, shuts down.

In our studies of speaking in tongues, for example, which is a very strong spiritual state, subjects say they don’t feel like they’re in charge of that process. And our studies are showing that the frontal lobe is shut down during that state. We’ve never captured that with meditation because the person is always in the active “act” of meditation. But I suspect that if we actually captured somebody when they literally just completely lost it and hit some kind of true, peak state that the frontal lobe activity would go back down again. So I think that that’s a very important area.

The last area that’s probably worth mentioning is an area called the thalamus. This is a very key relay in the brain and it helps all the different structures talk to each other. And the thalamus is also a very critical sensory relay as well. This is the one area where we have found differences between long-term meditators and non-meditators. We think that part of how a person’s perceptions of the world are changed may ultimately be through the thalamus. How the thalamus works to help us establish our sense of the world and our perceptions of the world may also be dramatically altered through these kinds of transformational experiences.