Does the frontal lobe grow through meditation? The American ‘neurotheologist’ Andrew Newberg firmly believes in it, based on his own research. “Meditating has been shown that people who practice it for a long time produce more tissue in the frontal lobe,” he told the editors of The Psychiatrist in an interview. This zoom conversation in the journal serves as a warm-up for the upcoming spring conference of the Dutch Association for Psychiatry (NVvP) at the end of the month in the MECC in Maastricht. Newberg is keynote speaker at the congress opened by Queen Máxima, with the hazy motto: ‘Building connections together!’
Newberg is director of the Research Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, an institution bordering on quackery.
Neuroscientist Newberg, who has been wrestling with what meditation would do to the brain since the early 1970s, is he a quack fantasist or is there solid research behind his claim that the brain changes permanently after prolonged meditation sessions? And if he is a fantasist, what is such a person doing at a serious trade conference of psychiatrists for which no less than 18 accreditation points have been requested?
Newberg, a hardliner when it comes to faith, is a phenomenon in the US. He calls himself neurotheologist, a self-invented profession with which he tries to link science (beautifully colored brain scans) to spirituality, meditation and prayer. In recent years he has appeared on all TV channels in the US and in magazines such as The Washington Post in National Geographic his spiritual say.
Praying nuns
In his stories, his brain scans, carried out twenty years ago, repeatedly appear as evidence of praying Franciscan nuns and meditating Tibetan Buddhists. These studies would show that brain tissue is produced in the frontal lobe during prolonged meditation. This would give people more control over emotion, which would reduce the risk of anxiety and depression, says the journalist The Psychiatrist from the mouth of Newberg.
Since the early 1970s, Newberg has been playing around with what belief – broadly interpreted – does to the brain. His first Buddhist research dates from more than twenty years ago. He put eight Buddhists under an advanced SPECT photon viewer for more than half an hour, before and after the meditation hour. They were given a contrast agent intravenously twice for imaging. The result is not surprising: a lot of things visibly happened in the different parts of the brain, some spots appeared to have become somewhat larger, in other parts of the brain this was somewhat less. His ultimate conclusion, we read in the article, does not go beyond the open door: ‘there is a complex pattern in the blood flow.’
No control group
Thank you the cuckoo, is the first gut reaction. After all, the Buddhists were still shaking after a long intravenous injection, twice. In addition, there was no control group with which to classify the experiment under the heading ‘meaningless anecdotal n=1 experiment’. Newberg also writes that he sees a changing blood flow. This may result in short-term swelling. About creating extra tissue, as he tells The Psychiatristhowever, the article does not mention.
Two years later, Newberg repeated the same experiment, this time with three nuns praying aloud. Here, too, a tiny number of test subjects and no control group. In other words, also in this case: a meaningless study that only shows that something happens at different places in the brain when you do something. Where was the medical ethics committee that approved this trivial study?
SPECT device
In 2015, he placed three Muslims under a SPECT device who also had to pray intensely for a while and then less. Changes in brain activity would indicate a ‘connection with God’, a ‘surrender’, he writes in the article. It gave him the idea that different beliefs, activities such as yoga and meditation activate other areas in the brain, he says in interviews.
Faithful Newberg never stops. In 2015 he used SPECT equipment to scan the brains of fourteen people with (mild) amnesia, while they were listening to a meditation CD. ‘The results are encouraging, but the research has quite a few limitations,’ he concludes. With his remark ‘In new studies with larger groups these should be avoided’, he is already preparing the demand for more subsidies.
High bios risk
In 2015 a review article will be published in which twelve meditation studies are examined, including some by Newberg. ‘Most studies have a high risk of bias while the number of subjects is small’, the article states. It’s a damning observation. It should not go unmentioned that this review publication was written by psychologist Sara Lazar, a researcher who has been researching the ‘beneficial effects of yoga and meditation’ for years – rather biasedly. Even she has her doubts.
Newberg is a scatterbrain, so he keeps a curriculum vitae of 106 pages. For the past ten years he has been engaged in making a systematic (‘taxonomic’) classification of the concept of meditation/faith. There are different forms of meditation that activate all other areas of the brain, as he has discovered over the past twenty years. With which he refers his conclusions from his apparently ill-defined study of nuns, Buddhists and Muslims to the realm of fables.
To the twenty-page essay in the open access journal Frontiers in Psychology incidentally – for a normal person – it is impossible to tie a rope. It is a collection of headings, subheadings with confused texts in between. An essay without a conclusion, that too. Fanatic Newberg seems to have sunk into gibberish after twenty years. Offering him a stage at the NVvP spring conference is the wrong thing to do.
With the cooperation of Ronald van den Berg.