Huberman Lab - Science & Health Benefits of Belief in God & Religion | Dr. David DeSteno

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

My guest is Dr. David DeSteno, PhD, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. We discuss science, God and religion, including what science can and can’t reveal about the existence of God and where religious faith and science do and do not align. We also discuss why questions about life’s origins, miracles and the afterlife have persisted across time. Dr. DeSteno explains how religious rituals cause meaningful improvements in mental and physical health and how prayer and gratitude can markedly reduce stress, increase honesty and compassion and buffer against loneliness and despair. Finally, we explore what distinguishes religions and mission-based communities from cults, and we discuss the role that communities such as 12-step and Burning Man play in modern life. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00) David DeSteno (02:10) Science & Belief in God, Does God Exist? (07:06) Universe Origins & Scientific Questions; Religion & Life/Health Benefits (15:16) Sponsors: Our Place & LMNT (18:23) Russell's Teapot, Overbelief, Faith; Religio-prospecting, Traditional Practices (26:49) Mediation & Compassion, Prayer & Stress Relief, Tools: Meditation, Prayer (34:40) Superstition, Prayers & Rituals; Mourning Rituals, Eulogies, Shiva, Connection (43:58) Grieving & Different Religious Traditions (47:15) Sponsors: AG1 & Eight Sleep (50:12) God vs Religion?; Prayer, Community, Religious Rituals & Ideals (56:17) Psychedelics, Ego Death, Right vs Left-Handed Roots (01:01:24) Good & Evil; Lies & Cheating; Gratitude & Prayer (01:11:03) Loneliness, Community & Religion, Relationship with God & 3AM Friend (01:16:25) Sponsor: Function (01:18:12) Feeling God; Intelligent Design, Evolution, Eye; Awe (01:25:21) Overwhelm & Spiritual Experiences, Awe Despite Understanding (01:31:01) Fear of Death, Afterlife, Tool: Contemplating Death (01:37:11) Time Perception, Connectedness, Traditional Practices (01:42:53) Addiction; 12-Step Programs & Surrender to a Higher Power (01:49:02) New Religions, Burning Man, Modern Spiritual Experiences, Cults (01:58:06) Cults vs Religions, Religious Interpretation & Reorientation (02:03:56) AI, Technology, Religion & Intelligence; Religious Branding (02:11:05) Religion Figures & Flaws, Direct Experience of God (02:15:13) Finding a Belief System, Embracing Religious Practices, Tool: Sampling Religions (02:21:40) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David Desteno. Dr. David Desteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and an expert on the science of morality, religion, and the health benefits of belief in God and religion. Many people, perhaps most people actually, view science and religion as mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. Desteno explains why that view is actually incorrect, and he also shares the data showing that religion and prayer have tremendous mental and physical benefits. We discuss the brain mechanisms that often lead people to embrace faith in God and religion,

and we attempt to tackle some of the big questions that often come up around science and religion. For instance, can the existence of God actually be proven? Can it be disproven? If not, how should we think about miracles, the origin of life, and the afterlife? So small questions like that. We also discuss where the line between rituals and suspicions resides and what distinguishes religions from cults. He also shares that despite the fact that more than a hundred new religion surface every year, that was surprising to me, very few are able to last. That was not surprising.

He also shares amazing data on when and how people lie for personal gain and the simple practices that convert liars into truth tellers and that make people, more empathic overall. To be clear, Dr. Desteno is not promoting religion. He's a scientist and his approach is to study in an unbiased way how belief in God and religious practices can benefit individuals and groups. Thanks to him, it's a remarkable conversation that I also believe is important, especially in this time of rapidly evolving AI technology and social media. I learned a ton speaking with him about science, God, and religion, and I'm certain that

you will too. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Desteno. Dr. David Desteno, welcome. Thanks for having me, Andrew. For so many people, the idea of science and religion or science and God are opposite one another and maybe even mutually antagonistic to one another, depending on who you're talking to and how it's framed. That makes sense, I think,

to a lot of people, religious or not, just because on the face of it, science is supposed to be about disproving hypotheses and religion in most people's minds is based on belief and faith in things that are difficult to disprove. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult to disprove. And people go back and forth, trying to prove the existence of God, trying to disprove the existence of God. This is going on for many, many thousands of years. To start, I just want to know, what is your view on the compatibility of science and let's just say belief in God? Because religion and belief in God are somewhat separable. And we'll get into that. But to keep things simple, what do we know for sure about the compatibility or lack of compatibility between what we

call science and a belief in God? To me, the question of belief, in God, and you're right, it gets in the way of this because people will say, well, if I believe in God, then I can't embrace science. And I think that's wrong. But let me start at the beginning and say, why I think the question of does God exist isn't a useful question. It doesn't mean it's not an important question. As you said, people have been debating this for millennia. But it's not useful because as scientists, we can't prove it. Any scientist who tells you they know for sure God doesn't exist, you shouldn't listen to. The reason I say that is, often sometimes we, you and I, scientists, live by the data. We run experiments. And what's behind any

experiment is we try to manipulate a variable and we see if it produces a change. When you're talking about God, you can't do an experiment. And so, you know, I'll say the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. People hear that a lot and it sounds like a cop-out. But in this case, it's not really. So if I'm testing a new drug, I can have people take the drug and see if it combats a pathogen. And if it doesn't combat a pathogen, I can say, oh, right, well, it doesn't seem to be working in this experiment. Any one experiment can fail for lots of reasons. Maybe people didn't take their medication the right way. Maybe it only works for a certain type of people. And so you can try it again and again in different cases. And you can kind of build up a sense of,

is there evidence here that this drug works or doesn't over time? And if it doesn't, in any case, you might say, eh, maybe there's nothing there. With God, you can't even run the experiment. So I'm a psychologist, and so most of what I do is I bring people into my lab. I study how emotions change their behavior. And so I'll bring people in, and I'll create two groups. I'll balance gender and ideology and intelligence and all of those things. And to one of them will change their emotional state, and I'll see if it'll do something.

With God, you can't run an experiment. You can't manipulate God if God exists, right? People say, oh, Dave, I prayed for X, Y, and Z, and it didn't come true. So, therefore, God must not exist. And I'm like, well, do you know the mind of God? Maybe God only helps people God likes. Maybe God only helps people on every third Tuesday. I don't know.

And if I can't manipulate something about the mind of God, then I can't infer causality if God exists or doesn't exist. And so I think this question of, does God exist, is one science can't answer. I mean, I'm happy to say, as a scientist, I see no empirical evidence that God exists. But without being able to run an experiment to prove it, it's beyond the realm of science. And all it does is polarize us, right? It polarizes people into the camps that you're saying. But I think most people, the ones on X are fundamentalists who are shouting, science is bad,

or hardcore new atheists who are saying religion is bad. I think most people live in the middle somewhere. and most people accept the view that there could be something there, and they're not in tension. And I think for a lot of history, that was, I mean, the Catholic Church funds research. They have a wonderful observatory to look at astronomical behavior. The Dalai Lama funds neuroscience, right, to understand how the mind works. And so we had Francis Collins on the show, one of the great geneticists of our time.

And for him, there's no tension. He says, God, he's a believer. God created the human mind so that we could learn about the wonders of God's creation and how the world works. They don't need to be in tension. So for me, I'd like to put that question to the side. What I'm interested in is the data that we'll talk about that shows engaging with religion and makes life better for people. And why is that? I definitely want to go into all the practices that people can embrace should they choose.

that can indeed, according to the research, make life better, not just for them, but for many people. To ask a second version of the first question, again, I'm wondering how you reconcile the argument that I've often heard where someone will say, okay, well, it's creation and someone else will say, no, it's evolution. And someone say, well, who created evolution? It must have been God that created evolution. Or we could be talking about the origins of the universe. my dad's a theoretical physicist and we've talked about this before and you know say well okay so you have the Big Bang theory and then but you know we had to start from someplace and then okay well then you had you know this soup of things that when combined started to create some sort of order

that built on a structure which built okay well then what started that and and basically it seems to me whoever is willing to stay in the argument longest and and and peel back the layers further and further. They don't win, but they're sort of last person standing in the argument. And, you know, I'm sure this has been debated formally, and I'm sure it's been debated formally for centuries, if not thousands and thousands of years. And here we are, 2025, and people still debate this. And we're seeing a resurgence and religious belief. You also see that on X. You see it on social media. You see it lots of places. And I think there's also great interest in science and belief in science. So the question I have is, you know, if it's

merely a matter of who's willing to peel back the layers furthest, I don't think we're ever going to get to an answer. But is there some sort of rational argument or irrational argument that one can either choose to adopt or not choose to adopt that it at least can give an individual a sense that they've arrived at an answer for them? Right? Because it seems to me that it's either you take the stance that, well, if it can't be disproven, then there's a possibility. And if there's a possibility, there's a possibility. Or you take the stance, unless you can prove it to me, forget it. I'm not going to believe that. And it just becomes an endless cycle of humans arguing with humans, which is maybe what God wants. Well, you know, you're hitting on the point there. This is

why I say it's not a useful scientific question, because when you can raise a finding, say evolution, which we know is true, and then say, oh, well, maybe that's the way God works. If you keep creating a carve-out to explain something, it becomes very difficult to make a strong case, right? I mean, scientists live by falsifiability. Can we falsify something? But if you say, oh, yeah, okay, that falsified. But there's a reason why that falsified because God did a different way. It becomes just, as you say, an endless debate. So when I was an undergraduate in college, I was always interested in the question. of, you know, what does it mean to be a good person? How do you flourish? How do you find happiness? And I was trying to decide between being a history of religions major and a

psychologist. I ultimately decided to be a psychologist because I could get data and not just argue about the things that you're saying. But what I've realized over time is that the things that we're finding that make life better for people, these traditions, they couldn't run randomized control trials, but they had intuited long ago. And so for me, me, what I'd tell people is, yeah, religion is about belief, but it's also about what you do, you know. And so, yes, there are lots of people who really don't believe in God. There are lots of Jews who are atheists yet are deeply engaged in their practices. And it tends to make life better. So let me tell you why I think it's rational. You can make a rational case to believe this. So the thing you're hinting at comes from something called Pascal's Wager, Pascal being one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophy. And he argued that if God exists and you choose to believe in God, you can have everlasting life, right? This is Pascal was Christian.

So this was the Christian God that we were talking about. And he said, by nature of being born, you're forced into this bet. You have to play the game. Should you be religious or not? Well, if there's a chance that you could have everlasting life in a pleasurable way, even the smallest chance of that outweighs any joy you'd have on earth. So if you chose not to believe in God, yeah, you might have a more libertine lifestyle here. But the joy you would gain from that pales in comparison. And so it makes sense from a decision theory, right? The expected value of happiness is

larger, if happiness is infinite. And so Pascal said, you should believe in God. But people say, well, what if I believe the probability that there's everlasting life is zero? Or what if there's I choose the wrong religion. There are lots of religions out there of the wrong God. And what Pascal realized at the time was that you could solve this problem if religion also brought benefits in the here and now, too. And what we're seeing is it does exactly that. So let me give you an example.

Epidemiological data show that people who engage with religion, not just say I believe in God, but actually engage with faith. Over a 15 to 20-year period, it cuts all-cause mortality by 30. percent, cuts death due to cancer and cardiovascular disease by 25 percent, reduces anxiety and depression, increases people's sense of meaning and feeling that their life is flourishing. This is what brought me to my kind of mission today of trying to find and curate conversations between science and religion. You can't argue with those data.

Now, for a long time, people would say those studies were done cross-sectionally, right? And so you would say, you'd look at people who are going to services and people who are not and you'd find people are healthier when they go to services. So you could say, oh, religion makes people healthier. But there was an important alternative, right? Maybe the people who were really sick or really depressed can't get out of bed to go to services. So that was always an issue. Now there's wonderful work by an epidemiologist Tyler Vanderweil from Harvard School of Public Health. he follows thousands and thousands of people longitudinally because you can't run a randomized control trial.

I can't say, Andrew, tomorrow, if you believe in God, I want you to stop. Or, you know, Dave, tomorrow you don't believe in God, start going to church. Ethically, you can't do that. But what you can do is follow people through time as they become more religious or stop becoming religious, leave the faith, etc. And that's what he finds. And it's not just community. You know, another kind of criticism always been, well, Dave, you know, these health benefits, it's just community. If they joined a bowling club, right, to use Robert Putnam's analogy of bowling alone, they would get the same health benefits.

What you see in the data is that the effect size, which is basically the degree, how much bang for the buck you get, yeah, being in community, joining clubs, having tighter social networks makes you healthier and happier. but the effect size is larger for religious community, right? They're doing something in those communities, and I think it's the practices they do that matter. And even among young adults, where we're seeing increasing levels of anxiety and depression, even private practices, things like prayer and meditation are showing up

as ways to buffer those and protect against them. Do you observe those effects across religions? Are they the same for Christianity, Judaism, for Muslims, And also we could talk about the subdivisions within each of those. It's a good question. So these aren't my data. These are data from Tyler Vanderbill and other folks. They haven't examined every religion.

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and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. I love the raspberry. I love the citrus flavor. Right now, Element has a limited edition, lemonade flavor that is absolutely delicious. I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or

watermelon. Again, I can't pick just one flavor. I love them all. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drink element.com slash Huberman, spelled drinklmn t.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with a purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drink element.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. I was planning to ask you this later, but I'm going to ask you now. It seems

appropriate to ask you now what your thoughts are on this Russell's teapot business, which was taught to me by my post hoc advisor, who was a staunch atheist. Okay. And I'll never forget this conversation. He said,

you know, He said he was an atheist. I had questions about that. I believe in God. I should be, you know, just clear about that now. Back then, I was probably a bit more in the question of that. But deep down, I would have written in my journal. I believe in God.

I have since I was a kid, and I do now. He said, well, there's this, he described it as a celestial teapot. And he gave me this example, the celestial teapot, which was for him a rational argument as to why he was an atheist. I looked it up. It's not called the celestial teapot. It's called Russell's teapot. So he got it wrong. Russell was right.

So here it is. And I'm paraphrasing here from something I pulled from the Internet, but I verified this is accurate to Russell's teapot. Russell's teapot is an analogy formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to illustrate the philosophic burden of proof lies on. the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others. So Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert without offering proof that a teapot too small to be seen by telescopes orbits the sun somewhere in space between the earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong. So this sort of brings us back to the first part

our conversation, you know, what do you think about this? People are walking around with Russell's teapot in their mind saying, you know, the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, not on other people to carry a belief because it can't be falsified. It depends on your philosophy of science. For me, I tend to think about this. So I'm a psychologist. So, you know, William James, the father of psychology, had a real interest in. in religion. And he phrased this slightly differently. He had this notion of something he called an overbelief. And an overbelief is a belief for which the evidence is lacking. It's not disconfirmed, right, but it's lacking, but which nonetheless feels right and leads to positive

outcomes. And for him, if those two criteria were true, then it is rational to embrace that belief. And that's how he basically came to embrace religion. And so I think, again, you know, where we are, is either of those philosophies can be valid. You have to make a choice. One is not more valid than the other. It's based on your philosophy of science. And for me, the question is always going to be one of faith. Right? You know, there are a lot of people who are trying to make a case. I'm thinking of Ross Doubt that's book, Believe. They're trying to make a case for it that is rational to believe in religion because, oh, it's called the fine tuning argument. Look at all the parameters in the world for gravity and other physical coefficients.

If they weren't tuned just exactly right, life could never evolve here. And the probability against them being tuned just exactly right is low. And then people say, well, sure, but there can be hundreds of millions of other universes, right, that we do in the multiverse. And so it's not that weird that we have here. And so I just, I think it's never going to be the case that you're going to have proof. You know, these arguments, these philosophies can bring you up to a certain point. But to take that final step of belief or disbelief, it's faith one way or the other. And again, it's why I think scientists need to stay in their lane.

And even Richard Dawkins, right, the most famous atheist around, will say he cannot be absolutely sure that God doesn't exist. yet he acts like he doesn't and he urges you to not believe and so for me I think let's not do that when we talk about these practices how they lead to health and well-being I can't tell you

if they are divinely inspired from a creator who cares about its creations and kind of gave them a roadmap or a user's guide to make life better or if they're cultural adaptations of people figuring stuff out over millennia but we don't need to answer that to have respect for them and to study how they work and to see what we can learn from them.

And if we're not willing to do that, we're slowing down the science of human flourishing, in my view. In a similar vein, I think in the position that I found myself in the last few years of doing public health education, public science education, you know, I've embraced for a long time the idea that there are behavioral tools that really help, things like meditation, breath work, certainly exercise. maybe even deliberate cold exposure, heat exposure, so on, et cetera. I also embrace prescription drugs and their utility in some instances, right? And I embrace certain over-the-counter compounds. We call them supplements, but they're compounds that nowadays more and more people would say, yeah, maybe taking some vitamin D, people are maybe taking omega-3s, maybe they're not. Maybe you think anything that a doctor doesn't prescribe is or that your mother didn't prescribe is not worthwhile.

But I take the view that all of these are useful for promoting health. I sort of take the same view when it comes to the notion that religious belief or even strong belief in God, praying, et cetera, could be useful. To me, these aren't mutually exclusive. And I think for some reason, and it may be generational. I do think that there's a certain generation above mine that for them, if a pill was not prescribed by a doctor, it must be snake oil. And that's crazy if you think about the fact that, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, there was this big movement to try and get meditation into universities.

And those people were kind of shunned psychedelics. They were to work at the devil. People were fired. Now I can tell you that tens if not hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being used to study psychedelics in laboratories at major universities like yours and mine and a of others in the U.S. and around the world. So what was once considered sorcery and pseudoscience often becomes the topic of a discrete study. Of course, with controlled conditions, you get better understanding of what those things can and can't do. But I think we're arriving at the time

where religion and science are going to start to be looked at with scientific rigor. And I think that's going to bring about more acceptance of God and religion in terms of how the mind works and well-being. I agree with you. But let's talk about that older generation because you're right i have many in my family too who you know if the doctor doesn't prescribe it don't take it but even during that time period when those folks were younger the pharmaceutical companies and i make this argument in my book the pharmaceutical companies had technology to make all kinds of drugs but they didn't know where to look and so what did they do they sent people to traditional cultures around the world to find substances that say the traditional culture say can help people

they called it bioprospecting at the time and you know sure a lot of those didn't do anything but some did and from those we've got we've found wonderful chemotherapy drugs drugs that reduce pain etc and we wouldn't have done that if we didn't let go of our arrogance that some of this traditional wisdom might not be valid and so what i argue for is a terrible word But instead of bioprospecting, I call it religio prospecting, right? We should go back to these traditions, find these practices, do exactly what you're saying, study them in terms of the scientific method, which I fully support and believe in as a scientist, and see what they do.

And what we're finding, they can do a lot. Tell us about some of those findings because they're really striking in terms of what specific practices and belief systems can do in terms of improving our physical. and mental health. And I'm curious as we have that conversation, if you could emphasize where sometimes it's a positive effect, a new positive thing created, as opposed to where you personally might view the data as more pointing to when one does those practices, it doesn't allow the brain to go into its default pathway of worry, et cetera, because I think most people can accept that stress is bad for the brain and body, excessive stress, it's bad for the brain and body.

And so anytime we replace a thought or a behavior with something, you're potentially removing the possibility that that default state was stress, right? So I'm asking you to do this now because I think that positive effects in science sometimes seem obvious, like, oh, you know, maybe pray for a certain number of minutes or meditate, you get an effect. But there's also a question of what the opportunity cost was. What weren't you doing in that five minutes that might have been detrimental? And there's a reason I'm setting it up this way that we'll get to a little bit later. Okay. Let me give you two examples. And I'll start with one that actually really started me down this road.

I had a student named Paul Condon, who's now professor in Oregon, and he was very interested in meditation. And even if you read the New York Times or the Atlantic, it'll tell you, oh, meditation will lower your blood pressure. It'll increase your standardized test scores. It'll increase your executive control. It does all those things, and that's great. But if you talk to the monks, they'll say that's not why it was created, right? It's probably apocryphal, but, you know, the saying goes that the Buddha said, I teach one thing and one thing only, which is the end of suffering. And meditation was a tool that the Buddha believed would help people do this.

And so when you looked around, I'm a social psychologist, so I studied behavior, there was no evidence of this. And so we decided we're going to put this to the test. And so we recruited people who had never meditated before. And they were either put on a wait list or they came for eight weeks to a sacred space on campus where they were led in meditation at the feet of a Buddhist llama. And she created, you know, practices for them in MP3 so they can go in practice. After eight weeks, we invited each of them individually back to the lab. And we told them we're going to measure your memory. We're going to measure your executive control.

It's basically your ability to override your own impulses. That wasn't the experiment. The experiment actually happened in the waiting room to the lab. So when you come into the lab, there's a room with three chairs. And people were sitting in two of them. And these were actors that we hired. People coming into the study thought they were just other people waiting in the room. And so there was one chair left.

And so the person would take the last chair. about two or three minutes later a person would come down the hallway also an actor who worked for us who was on crutches and wearing one of those boots you put on your foot when it's broken it wasn't really broken looking like she was in a good amount of pain she came into the room all the three chairs were taken at that point she would kind of lean back against the wall let out a little whimper of pain And what we wanted to look at is, would somebody help her? Now, the two actors in the chairs, we told, do what you do when you're on the subway, right? You don't want to give up your seat.

Don't look at the person, thumb your phone, ignore them, right? So we're creating a situation where people aren't helping. And our question was, would the person who was in the study in the third chair actually help this person? In the control condition, people who weren't meditating, about 15% of them got up and said, oh, do you want my chair? Can I help you? Can I hold something for you? in the meditation condition it was close to 50% of people who did this right we tripled the rate at which

somebody felt compassion for somebody else in pain and was willing to help them that's a pretty big effect in terms of behavioral science so that was a small study so so we've replicated it we've also done it in a in a situation where someone is is provoking you so in this situation people who had been meditating or not came to the lab and there's a paradigm that's designed to invoke anger. And the way it works is you create a, you spend five minutes to write a story about your life's goals. You have to then present this to the other subject, who they didn't know as an actor for us. He listens to this and he says, really? That's your plan? That doesn't make any sense, right? And this was a paradigm developed by an anger researcher named Tom Denson.

And we know it creates, you know, the HPA access anger response. And so it's really well validated. And people either meditated or, in this case, the control was an active control. They had done lumosity brain training for a while. And what we found is that they were then given the chance to cause punishment to this person. I won't go into it all, but they thought there was a way for them to cause this person pain. The people who didn't meditate were willing to cause this guy, a good amount of pain. Now, it didn't actually happen, of course, but they thought it would. those who had meditated

refused to cause him any pain they still said what he did was wrong and they'd want to talk to him and tell him what he did was wrong but they thought that creating more pain and suffering was not the way to go about it and so for us right here was evidence that these practices make you kinder make you more compassionate it. The other way, what does it save you from in terms of stress? This isn't my work, but there's a lot of work on prayer. And so when people pray, especially if you're reciting formal prayers, not so much if you're just having a conversation with God, but if you're saying the rosary or you're reciting Hindu sutras or any formulaic prayer, what it typically does is it reduces your respiration rate. Not only does it reduce your respiration rate, but it also tends to increase the duration of the exhalations.

And this isn't for meditation as well. What does that do? I mean, you talk about breathwork a lot on your show, right? What it does is it increases vaguely tone, reduces heart rate. It puts the body in a state where it is not expecting threat or challenge in the environment, where it wants to engage and be more open to socialization. It reduces cortisol responses. And so what it's basically doing there is, yes, you're saying the,

words, but it's reducing the stress in your body. And even if you're praying about things that are bothering you, things that you're sad or anxious about by saying those prayers over and over again, stuff travels up the Vegas, right? And so by increasing exhalations, by slowing the respiration rate, it's telling your mind you're safe. Things are okay. And thereby it's reducing the stress. And so when you look at that data from Tyler Vanderuels that I mentioned on young adults who pray why does it reduce stress it's basically a way of increasing vagal tone in that in that moment and it helps you sit with the ideas of the things that are bothering you while dizzologically your body's telling you you're safe thank you for reminding everyone that signals travel up to

the vagus in addition to the vagus nerve controlling slowing of the heart rate when you exhale because I think we hear a lot about the vagus pathway and um most people get it wrong you got it exactly right um there's a lot of information flowing out from the body and that actually helps answer the question that was um in the back of my mind heading into this conversation which was um well i'll tell by way of anecdote how i arrived there my high school girlfriend was greek orthodox a lot of greeks in our family and it it wasn't like that movie my big fat greek wedding but it wasn't dissimilar either to go over there you know and greek eastern like people were breaking plates and all the festivities, but one thing I learned spending time with people in the Greek Orthodox community is there's a lot of prayer in their family.

There were also a lot of use of worry beads, you know, these like beads that people would use. It was not unlike spinners, right? But often while reciting prayer, this was more in the older generation in her family and friends. And there was also a lot of superstition that comes up in that movie. But there was a lot of superstition. So I asked her, I was like, why all the superstition? Why the worry beads? And she said, oh, because that replaces what the mind would be doing if you weren't manipulating

these beads and carrying out, you know, kind of superstitious activities. Like the superstitious activities, as long as they don't take over your life, replace things that are much worse. darker thoughts, but more terrifying ideas about terrifying things that you don't want to happen. So it's about it's about replacing all of that with, with repeating themes, literally loops of thought that, of course, they could break out of and interact. I'm not suggesting all Greeks are like this, by the way. I love Greek culture. I love the food. I think they're wonderful people. But it's very interesting that, at least within that culture, they've adopted,

quote-unquote, superstitions are somewhat accepted. Again, the somewhat generational. Worry beads and prayer and ritual, you know, and all these things sort of blend together seamlessly. Like you wouldn't say, oh, you know, they're over there using worry beads. Then they're doing superstitious activities or reciting things in a superstitious way. But, you know, it's all kind of blended into the culture in a way that they seem like very happy people, I'm going to say, very joyful a lot of the time, a lot of the time. Yeah, I mean, the way I like to think about these rituals, as you're mentioning, is they're really sophisticated mind-body practices.

Like, you know, we're a culture that wants the life hack. Give me the life hack so that I can study more. Give me the life hack so that I can save money or lose weight. Rituals are like sophisticated packages. of life hacks where a life hack is like playing a single note on a piano a ritual is like a symphony so let me give you an example that kind of picks up on what you're saying so one of the thing that cuts across everybody's lives unfortunately is that we have to we will grieve at some point we will lose somebody and we will have the pain and so I was interested in looking at at mourning rituals right and what is one thing that almost all religions do when somebody passes you you eulogize this person and it seems normal but when you think about it it's kind of strange because if I just lost a job that I loved, or if my wife just decided she was going to leave me, I wouldn't want to think about daily

how wonderful this person was or this job was because it would increase the pain. But with someone passing, it does the opposite. So George Bonano, who's one of the nations leading bereavement researchers at Columbia, he says one of the biggest predictors of who can move through grief successfully. And by that, I mean,

it doesn't get too intense or it doesn't go on too long that it becomes paralyzing is who can consolidate positive memories of the deceased person the better you are able to doing that the more you'll move through grief successfully and then you're talking about superstitions you know if you look at the Jewish morning ritual of shiva and I won't say this is a superstition but there are elements to it that some people think are strange like when someone passes you cover your mirror why would you cover your mirror? Well, there's lots of research in psychology that shows when you look into a mirror, whatever emotion you were feeling becomes intensified. So if you're happy and you look into a mirror, you'll feel more happy. If you're sad, you'll feel more sad. Those are solid data.

Those are solid data from the like the 1970s or 80s. Interesting. Yeah. And so they would give people emotional inductions. They'd have a group who would look into the mirrors and groups who didn't. They would then measure their emotions after. Always goes out. Selfies. Yeah. I'm just kidding. And so, So by simply covering mirrors at a time when you were feeling intense sadness and grief, it reduces that. They also, and during Shiva, you're supposed to reduce self-focused. So you're not supposed to shave. You're not supposed to wear your best clothes. There's work coming out showing that reductions in self-focus and focusing on you and your needs actually reduces grief.

It's also the case that every day during the seven days of Shiva, your community has to come to your house. and prayers were said in what's called a minion, which is a minimum of 10 people. So people will come and they will say prayers together. And while they're saying prayers, they're kind of swaying in unison, saying the same words in unison. That's something in psychology we call motor synchrony.

What is motor synchrony? It's simply moving your body in synchrony with someone else. So in my lab, we've shown that if we bring people in and we have them engage in motor synchrony. So let's say you and I, Andrew, don't know each other. we sit down, you put on earphones, I put on earphones, or headphones, and in front of us is a little sensor. It's really not a sensor, but it looks like a little pad.

And we play you tones, and you're supposed to tap that sensor every time you hear the tone. And in some conditions, we have these people who have never met. Here, it's simultaneous tones, so they're tapping in unison. In other cases, they're completely random, and so they're not synchronized at all. Through a whole set of shenanigans that I won't go into, what then happens. is one of the persons is put in a situation where they need help to complete a task or they're going to be stuck there for a long time

and not get credit for this study. If we had tapped in unison, people report feeling more connection to this person. They report feeling more compassion for their plight. And by 30% more, they're willing to go help that person spend their time taking on some of that person's burden. Now, if you ask them, why do they do this?

I'll say, you know, I feel like I must know this person. Like maybe he was in my class last semester or maybe it was a party I was at. But that action of synchrony, right, is acute of the mind that these two are joined. We kind of see this if you see flocks of birds or you see schools of fish. You kind of see a greater hole even out of individuals because they're moving together. And so it's an ancient marker to the mind that we are joined. People don't have insight to that, but yet they feel that connection and they can't explain it. So they create a story for it.

What happens at Shiva when you say these prayers? You're surrounded by at least 10 people who are doing an insincony with you. What is that going to do? It's going to increase the empathy and the compassion you feel. It also happens just in religious community in general. Like I talked earlier about why are the effects of religious community better? What are you normally doing? You're singing together.

You're praying together. You're sitting and kneeling together. That's a subtle signal to the mind that you are more connected. And it will increase your empathy for each other. Having been a summer camp counselor in college, it was incredible to see the transition between the first day, kind of shyness and awkwardness of the kids. And then you get them singing together or hanging out around a campfire one night by the next day. It's almost like they'd known each other for a year. There were other factors at play there, but it's remarkable.

And I believe that nervous systems link. up relatively easily if they're given the right. Yeah, they're going to train with each other. The right opportunity is just inherent to our species and to, you know, schools of fish have lateral lines. They measure each other's electrical signals without trying. I think humans, I think we over-emphasize the extent to which this happens through speech. I think it happens a lot more through bodily things.

And we had an expert in the evolution of human speech on here a few years ago, Eric Jarvis, who's a excuse me not columbia the rockefeller i almost insulted him in new york he would never say that um and eric um it's a very accomplished dancer in addition to the the incredible science he does and he told me that people now believe based on genetics anatomy and more that song evolved prior to spoken language which makes sense and so song and dance were the more um evolution ancient forms of language and speech came out of that so it makes sense that we would that we would bond that way you mentioned um people sitting shiva in judaism what other sorts of um activities that in other religions that you see around grieving seem to serve this kind of purpose

i've been to an irish wake that was definitely a different experience people laughing and telling jokes and stories there were some crying too um certainly grieving was happening, but in a very different way, I believe you grew up Catholic. I did, yeah. Okay. So what about some of the other forms of grieving and other religions? Yeah. So, you know, it's funny.

Friends of mine who are Jewish will always say, yeah, we do death well. And I think it's true. As I look at it, the practice of Shiva to me has all the right pieces. And for me, so like eulogizing. happens in all faith. And what I like to say is there are convergences in these, right? If you're, if you're a cultural anthropologist, you're seeing convergent evolution in terms of the cultural things that we can do to put our bodies in the right way. Or if you're a person of faith, you can say, well, you know, God cares about God's creations. And so we're all embodied in the

same way. And so the same practices are going to matter. But some groups may have figured things out more than another. I think, I mean, eulogizing is the big one. At Irish wakes, at some Irish wakes they do cover mirrors they have a completely different theological story for why they do it yeah why do what do they say i think it's something about keeping evil spirits away i i don't know but and in hindu ceremonies they do it as well in certain hindu ceremonies um and so i think it is it is uh always about coming together in in in chinese uh grieving rituals there is this focus on ancestor worship And so when someone dies, yes, they go to a different domain like heaven, but there what they do is they keep the relationship going. So there's something called, they call it, I don't know what the word in Chinese, but it's called ghost money.

And so what you can do if you want to honor an ancestor and be in connection with them is you can go to the store and it's this paper money that looks like real money, but it's not real money. it's a paper currency, and you burn that. And as the smoke rises, it goes to them where they are, and they can use it to buy stuff. You can buy cell phones that are kind of origami shaped as paper, burn that and it goes to them. And that might sound strange, but what it really does is a way of keeping that relationship there,

of not totally losing that person, of having that positive memory, and still feeling like you have them in your life. life because one of the biggest difficulties of humans you know we're social creatures when we experience loneliness when we lose someone it is painful psychologically it's also bad for us physiologically if it goes on well anything that we can do to feel like that relationship is still maintained as opposed to just loss helps us avoid the stress and loneliness that comes with it and so that's another kind of grieving ritual i've seen i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our

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Versus people who really adopt prayer, as you mentioned before, not as it just a conversation with God and listening. I would think of prayer can be two things. It can be a conversation with God. It can also just be listening, which some people might say, well, that's just meditation. But I don't know, maybe you ping God with a question and you see what comes back.

No, there are this kind of thing. There are just deep listening and sitting in silence, yeah. Versus reading the Bible versus reading Torah or scripture of anything. mankind. What's known about that? There have been studies, as I've said, that look at prayer in general for formalized prayer. I mean, there is a sense that, so two questions. Let me deal with the first one first, which is there a difference between God and religion. So because the U.S. is a Christian country, I think most of us, when we think of religion, tend to think of it in terms of Christianity, where belief, where the creed is really important. In most of the world,

religion is more about what you do than what you believe, right? It's what are the rituals? How do they infuse your daily life? And that's why, you know, as I said, there are many Jews who are atheists. There are many Hindus I know who are atheists, yet they engage in the practices and they get the benefits from them. So I think those two are separable. There are also people who believe in God yet don't go to any services and don't practice at all. I say, oh, yeah, I believe in God, but I don't engage in this.

And when you look at the health benefits for those people, they're not there. You have to be actively engaged in the practices. So I think those two can be separated. In terms of prayer, so remember I was telling you about the motor synchrony stuff. There is, and how it makes you feel more compassion toward other people. There is work that shows that when you do motor synchrony on its own versus motor synchrony in prayer. And so these are studies where people were just listening to music and dancing together. together, they're moving together, versus where they were chanting together, chants that are meaningful

to them and their faith, and that set forth principles of the faith. What you find is an increase a greater magnitude of the effect of the motor synchrony when those meaningful parts of prayer are included. Why is that, as I said before, it's a mind-body practice. So the movement, in time the motor synchrony is putting your body in a state where it's more receptive to messages about community or coming together as opposed to feeling tense where your body is saying no no no there's a threat here but your mind is saying no dave be good and reach out to these people and so in that sense combining the creedal elements the belief elements with the practice leads to a greater effect than the practice on its own you see the same thing with

meditation. Meditation, we're all sitting at home with our apps, right, by ourselves. That's not the way meditation is supposed to be done. Traditionally, it was done in a sanga, in a community. And as you said before, why is that important? Because as we're breathing together, our respirations are in training upon one another. And it's creating that sense of synchrony to build community. So I think adding the message elements of what religion's value to the mind-body practice puts you in a situation where you get a synergism. And this is what worries me when we try to extract certain elements. So psychedelics is one great example.

Psychedelics traditionally, whether it was ayahuasca or psilocybin, were taken in the context of a ceremony where you had a shaman who, through chanting or drum beats or whatever it might be, created a situation where the body, was very relaxed and felt safe. And then at that point, you would take the psychedelic. And we had Michael Pollan on my show, and when he said, he told me, he said, Dave, the one thing that's really important

when you take psilocybin is you have to feel supremely safe. Because when that moment of self dissolution comes or ego death comes, it can be beautiful or it can be terrifying. And if you don't feel safe, it can go the wrong way. And you know, the data show about 25% of trips are bad, about 8% or so bad that they necessitate some type of mental health intervention. And so you have the shaman with you. You have the experience of ego death. You see whatever you're going to see. And that person helps you reintegrate that and make sense of it.

So, you know, at Hopkins where they're doing great work, they don't have a religious shaman, but they have a guide, right? The guide is with you. You form a relationship with this person during your trip. The person is there with you. They'll put their hand on your hand. They'll they're there to help make sense and keep you feeling safe. They're doing the same role as a shaman. But if you're in Brooklyn, you know, dropping psilocybin with your local Brooklyn hipsters without the container around to keep you safe, there's a good chance you may have a bad outcome.

And so for me, you know, long answered your question about prayer, I think we have these containers of the rituals and the ideals of the religions that work together synergistically. And when you extract those, the question is, will they work as well? Or if not, is there actually even in some cases a danger? A couple of things. First of all, yes, psilocybin can be terrifying. I can attest to that, as can LSD. Did you have a bad trip?

Well, I don't recommend this. But when I was young, far too young, I experimented with psilocybin and LSD, had some good experiences. and then a couple of really bad experiences that led me to just basically write them off for a long period of time, then later revisited that in the proper context with therapeutic support there, completely different experience,

but still psilocybin terrifying every single time, but the integration piece is really critical, critical, critical. We could have a long conversation about psychedelics, but I'll just mention now, because I'll come back to this in a little bit, But a friend of mine who's quite religious, he's Christian, quite religious, and very versed in the Bible, studies the Bible, is very skeptical of psychedelics or even concerned about people's use of psychedelics, not because they're quote-unquote anti-Christian, but because there's this idea that during psychedelic journeys that evil forces actually can see into your unconscious. mind. Now, that might seem like a wild and crazy idea. We could also talk about psychedelics as like what serotonin receptors they happen to be activating. So we could move around the topic

from different perspectives. But it is interesting in the sense that when people talk about psychedelic journeys, you just did. I am. It always seems to be this divergent road. You can either have a very meaningful and positive experience or it can include elements that are terrifying that if not integrated properly can be potentially destructive. So the idea that maybe certain components of religion would see it as hazardous, sign that to evil spirits, devil, et cetera, isn't outside what we've observed scientifically or clinically either. No, that's true. And I think you may know this better than me being a neuroscientist. I think some of the most recent work on psychedelics suggests to use a poor metaphor,

What it's basically doing is loosening the mind, right? It reopens up periods of critical learning. And so things that have become kind of rigid and reified in your brain, suddenly there's flexibility again. And so the messages that you're getting at that time can have much more influence and situational influences than they would at any other time. And if you don't have that safe container for the religion,

yeah, it can take you in really problematic ways. But what I find interesting about it, you know, is people often talk about that moment of when it's good, of ego death as kind of being this transcendent experience where you feel this sense of connection to everything and great love. And if you look at mystical traditions where they're all designed to kind of get you to this point, there are what are traditionally called right-handed roots and left-handed roots. Right-handed roots are the ones that are kind of deeply embedded in religions. that we normally don't see as much because therefore people who are kind of living a contemplative lifestyle.

So Christian traditions have them. Goodest tradition we're more familiar with, et cetera. And so you can, by virtue of engaging in long practices of meditation, building your skill over many years, get your mind to that point where you can have this sense of ego death.

Left-handed traditions, they're the quick and easy way. So rather than learn the practice, you can take the drug. and get there as well. And so what's interesting to me is that they're both roots and religions themselves even outside of the chemicals

have a way for those who want to follow it to gain this transcendent experience. But they're always a little more worried about the left-hand roots for the reasons you're saying because they don't have the practice and the guidance long-term and they can go badly for people

and lead you to problematic. I can see people interpreting it. demonic influences yeah I think it's also worth knowing that sometimes people can have a very good experience on psychedelics but without adequate integration or if the frequency is too high sometimes issues can surface weeks or months later it's not always just that they have a bad experience and I'm generally optimistic about psychedelics as a clinical tool yeah I'm hoping they will get FDA approval soon I'm hoping that the FDA approval will require proper therapeutic support in order for them to be used clinically.

But nonetheless, psychedelics are adjacent to religion and belief in God, I think, because, as you point out, they tend to recede the waterline on the conscious mind and bring us into these unconscious states that I think a lot of people do achieve through prayer and through meditation, but as you pointed out, it takes much longer. The reason I brought up this notion of evil spirits is that many religions have a component of good and evil. And we tend to assume that those forces are presented as things outside of us.

You know, you have a God and a devil, right? And they're battling one another. I have to assume that some of that is born out of the idea that we also understand that the human brain has circuits that hold the potential for good and the potential for evil. And those exist in all of us. In some people, there's enough top-down inhibition

or enough that comes from good, you know, good parenting and good childhood experiences and so on, or just default wiring that makes people behaving terribly very unlikely. But lots of experiments done in the wake of World War II in your field, your field of psychology, we're focused on demonstrating, really, that under the right conditions, most anybody can engage in evil behavior, or at least sadistic behavior. We don't talk about those experiments so much lately because they're not politically correct, but was it the Milgram experiments? These ones that are which were the experiments I think were done at Yale where people were the Milgram experience where they were the Milgram experience where people literally believed that they were causing intense pain in others and they would get people to ratchet up to the point where they were inducing extreme pain on others to the point where people later were shocked, no pun intended. that they themselves had been, had done that,

had that they had been the person controlling the amount and intensity of that much pain over someone else for no other reason except that they were told to. Now, I realize those experiments are a little bit controversial, but I think there have been enough demonstrations that humans hold the potential

to do bad things to other humans under the right conditions that we can accept that the human brain at least has the wiring to go there. what are the data on this notion of good and evil why do religions present good and evil outside of us is there any evidence that a bias toward accepting that there is good and evil in us is helpful because i can think of you know when i think about buddhism for instance i think about love and kindness meditation i think about mindfulness i think about eliminating suffering

When I think about the New Testament, I think about a loving God. We hear Jesus as being of love and forgiveness and redemption. And then, of course, we have the Old Testament, which is a lot less forgiving. A lot less forgiving. So what are your reflections on good and evil in religion and how they can serve us in terms of our beliefs? Or, I don't know the data, for people that want to reject that. Is there an advantage to rejecting that? There's a lot there.

So first, the question of why do I think religions think about it as outside of us? So one of the things I teach is moral psychology. Why do people do good or bad? And what the data has shown us over the past few decades is that people's moral behavior is a lot more variable than anyone would ever predict. And because of that, because most people like to think of ourselves as good people, when we do something wrong that's objectifiably wrong, we feel like something came over us. right and so it's easy to say there is an evil force outside that was guiding me what we're learning now is that a lot of moral processing within the brain happens kind of below your conscious awareness and I'll give you an example of that in a minute so it feels like it's coming

over us so therefore maybe it's some other force but the point you raise is a good one right we did not evolve to be saints we did not evolve to be sinners we evolved to be adaptive right to basically be able to reproduce and pass on our genetic material. Because we're a social species, we need to cooperate with each other. And therefore, most of the time, when people can see what we're doing, we're going to try and be good because we don't want a reputation for being a bad person. No one's going to cooperate with us. But if you're in a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too, that's adaptive.

You're going to take it. And so as an example, we do studies on sharing. cheating in my lab. And we have the situation where people come to the lab and we say, okay, look, there's two tasks that need to be done. One is short and fun takes about 10 minutes. One is long and onerous. It takes about 45. You are in the role of decider. You can pick which one of these you want to do. Most people think the fairest way to do it is to flip a coin because whichever one you don't do, the person behind you is going to get stuck doing. And everybody says, Yeah, that makes sense.

And so we give them a little device that's a computerized coin flipper so they can hit the button and it comes up heads or tails. The reason we do that is so we can control, which side comes up. Heds, you get the fun task, tails you get the bad task.

100% of people, when you ask them and you say, if you lied about this, because you're going to be in the room by yourself, if you say you got heads when you didn't, is that morally wrong? only time in my life I get unanimous data 100% of people say yeah that's morally wrong that's encouraging if they say that well yeah wait and so then we put them in the room and we say

you know they know they can decide how they want they know most people say you should use the coin they say you should use the coin guess what percentage of them so we we know they why because they come out and they basically say oh i got the easy task and we let them go do that we know the coin came up tails because we rigged it what percent of people do you think lie to us i don't know depending on a study it's usually like 85 percent 85 percent yeah now there are situations where we tell them you can't decide you must do what the coin tells you and there it still about a third of people cheat oh my goodness seriously yeah and so and we've done it with money you can get more money on the coin flip high or lower

but what's interesting is when you ask people later why did they cheat they will create a story because no one likes to think of themselves as bad. So they'll say things like, well, yeah, normally I wouldn't do that, but, you know, I had an appointment later, and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't late, and I thought that longer task might be a problem. Or my favorite one was because the bad task was like logic problems they had to solve.

One person said, well, you know, the guy who was sitting next to me in the waiting room, and I know it would get the one that I didn't choose, he was an engineer. So I thought he would like the logic problems that took a lot longer to do. Right. And so people are creating these stories. And so the point of this is that if it was public, no one would ever cheat. Like, you know, when I go on TV, people will say, can we do one of your cheating experiments? And I'm like, no. No one's going to cheat when they're like, you know, have the TV cameras on them, right? But when you can get away with it, your brain changes the computations of what's valuable. You will cheat because it's adaptive to not exert extra energy. You don't have to if there's no reputational cost. And so people do. Where does religion fit in this? Well, there's wonderful work. This is by Demetri's Psycholatus, who's a professor at Yukon, where he has people in different cultures do a similar thing.

And he has them play a game where they can cheat somebody else out of money. And they either do it in a restaurant kitchen or in a temple. The rate of cheating drops dramatically if you're doing it in the temple. Why? Because suddenly you're reminded, oh, my goodness, God cares about this. And there's going to be a price for me to pay if I do this. And so that's top-down. But it also works from the bottom up, right?

We know that the brain's computations of what we value is often done below our conscious awareness. It is influenced by lots of things, including feeling states. So one thing we study in my lab is gratitude. Bring people into the lab. We have all different ways of making them feel grateful, but the easiest way is count your blessings. Take five minutes and count your blessings. We then give them tasks where they can cheat in this way. those who have calendar blessings, cheating is almost non-existent.

85% to zero. Well, in that study, they were told they had to do what the coin said. So what the coin flipper said. So the average cheating rate was like 25 or 30%. It went down to 2%. Wow. Right. Still a market change.

Still a market change. And I'm sure in the other one, it would drop, if we did it the other way, it would drop dramatically too. We find that when we give people the opportunity to help someone else who is asking for help, a stranger they don't know. If they feel grateful, they're much more likely to do it. And we can do it in such a way that we can titrate the level of gratitude they're feeling to the amount of help they're giving. And so what's happening here is religions cultivate, they curate our emotional lives. What do you people do when they pray?

A lot of prayer, the most common prayer is a prayer of gratitude. If you are experiencing gratitude more frequently in your day, it puts you in a position where you are being nudged from the bottom up, to be more willing to be honest, patient, generous, and helpful to other people. And so what's going on? The gratitude that you're feeling is putting your body in a state where the brain wants to be more prosocial.

The same time you're praying, you're getting the message, hey, you should be more pro-social. And so, again, it's a synergistic effect to push us in that way. When it comes to discussions around religion and religious practices, you can see a lot of commonalities among religious practices. When you need to take a step back, whether or not it's around gratitude or it's around grieving, celebrating birth of children, et cetera. There's a lot of discussion nowadays how at least in the United States, but I think elsewhere in the world as well, people are more isolated.

Yeah. People are feeling probably more pulled into their phones, really. There's an interesting picture published recently or a series of picture. I forget exactly where, but we'll provide a link to it where someone took pictures of real pictures of humans in a natural environment in cities, et cetera, but deleted the phones anytime they were holding their phones and everyone's just staring at their palms at the beach with their kids. Their kids are on the subway.

I don't know if there was a subway one, but it's just everyone, we're all staring at our palms all the time. It's a very bizarre point in human history. So the question I have is when people, pray when people have a belief in God, presumably they feel less alone. Yeah. It certainly makes me feel less alone to pray. In fact, at some point, I found anyway that if you pray regularly, that you never feel lonely. You never feel alone because you realize that people come, people go. Ideally, you don't lose people close to you quickly or too soon, but everyone

dies eventually but your relationship with God if you have one is a permanent thing from it's just the and the more you lean into that component and a faith in that the less lonely you feel ever it's kind of remarkable and you know in this age of like AI and digital twins and smartphones where everyone's got at least one smartphone um i think this is not a a trivial aspect to all of it I mean, the notion of not being alone is so fundamental to feeling safe as a human. So I don't know what the research on loneliness and religion says, but oftentimes we hear about these things in the context of community. What about just the mental health benefits of feeling like you're not alone because you really believe you're not alone? Yeah.

I mean, so the data show that people who engage with religion report much less loneliness. And it's probably both, right? It is usually they're engaged in a religious community that causes deeper social bonds. But I think you're right. It does, believing you have a relationship with God allows you to feel like someone is always there. And, you know, there's an important difference, right?

Being alone is not the same as being lonely, right? You can be surrounded by a lot of people but not feel connection to them. With God, from what we can tell, there is this sense of having a relationship with someone who has your back, right? A friend that, in essence, you can count on. It's interesting, in a lot of evangelical traditions, there's a lot of emphasis placed on having conversations with God. So I'm not sure how you were raised, but for me being Catholic, it was more like you would pray and you know God was there.

But in a lot of these evangelical traditions, there are trainings that people go to to be able to listen for God. And I'm not as familiar with the steps of those, but there really is this sense to kind of train yourself to be able to hear God or sense God by you. And it's not for me to say whether this is true or not. I don't know. Remember, I'm a scientist. And so when I talk about these things, I'm not trying to reduce them anyway. I'm saying, look, we're embodied creatures. we have a brain. If I see God or hear God, my occipital cortex is going to light up. It doesn't

mean it's reducible to the neurons in there, it just means that's what it is. And so it's not for me to say whether they're actually hearing God or not. But this emphasis on forming a relationship with God that is kind of two ways is a big part of the faith. And those people report feeling a lot less loneliness. And I think it's a way of solving the problem that we're sensing right now in this, in this society, which is growing a loneliness, a growing sense that no one values you, right? No one has your back. I was talking to Robert Waldinger, who, right, was the head of the Harvard study in adult development. And I'm sure you've heard him say one of the biggest predictors for health is good personal relationships,

but it's also having what he calls that 3am friend, right? It's that friend that you know you can count on. That's not going to be like, Andrew, yeah, I can't help you move today. Sorry, I got something better to do, right? And with God, even though God's not going to basically show up and help you move, if you believe and have faith in God and you feel you can connect and converse with God, God's that 3 a.m. friend. He's there when you need it. And so I can clearly see that helping people. But in terms of the data, we don't know, we know religious people are less lonely. We don't know how much of it is the sense of God

or how much if it comes from community is probably a combo. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health.

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Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to function. And people will sometimes talk about being able to really feel him. That's usually the language that's used. I mean, people close to me are, like, really got it up. Seems like more and more these days. And I have some friends who are, you know, who are clearly atheists and I have friends that aren't. But this notion that you can feel God, right, as a presence, not just, you know, like some being that you're in conversation with. It's obviously an internal feeling.

But then people often, I've experienced this, will experience it kind of around you as well. And then, of course, I can step back and go, okay, well, that's my insular cortex. and you know that right like of course right but the the argument that um anyone who believes in god or religion would make was okay well how did that all get placed there right and then we get back to the beginning of the conversation we're peeling back the layers of the onion right and saying well who put that there and um it's actually probably um appropriate to raise the words intelligent design um yeah that was popular a few years ago it's kind of disappeared now in the at least in the media. I studied the visual system and I worked on a number of other things, but in the context

of the visual system, this is very relevant because eyes are incredible in their ability to extract light information, obviously, and to allow us visual perceptions. And the evolution of the eye is kind of the linchpin argument for those that believe in intelligent design. They always bring up that, you know, the eye couldn't have developed this way. And I could tell you all sorts of things about evolution of the eyes, because I've spent a lot of time with this literature, about how some eyes developed with the photoreceptors on one side of the retina and the others of the photoreceptors facing outward. And, you know, and there are a bunch of different solutions to how you take light information and create perceptions of the outside world. But if you were to

look at any one of those, whether or not it's in a, you know, a crustacean that just needs to see light and dark or some species that only needs to see if something's moving or stationary versus us. We have very high resolution vision or a hawk that has twice our acuity. You'd say, yeah, it's a pretty spectacular thing. Three cell layers, a couple hundred different cell types, and you can create this rich experience that we call visual perception. You can close your eyes. You can imagine things that you see. Incredible. It's a good thing for the intelligent design folks to hang their hat on. And yet, anyone that studies evolution of eyes can tell you, all right, let's start here.

Pack six, the gene leads downstream to OTX2, you know, and you can literally march someone through the logic that it's all genes, transcription factors, and proteins, and you get an eye. In fact, there are people building eyes in dishes now from one cell. You can take that cell, proliferate that cell, give it the right transcription factor. you can build what pretty much looks like an eye. So I feel like the complexity argument, not the spirituality argument, is sometimes used to push back on the idea of God and religion.

And I'm just wondering what your thoughts on that are because it's slightly different than saying what came first. It's just saying, you know, how could you get this? And that's how I think where society lives right now, people who believe that you could only get that complexity through God and people who believe you could only get that complexity through biology, and they're just sort of clash, even though we don't hear about intelligent design quite so often these days. Yeah, but it is related. I mean, this is kind of the fine-tuning argument, again, as opposed to kind of physical constants we're talking about the evolution of the eye or of the body. Let me say, to me, the scientific method was the greatest, one of the greatest discoveries ever, and I'm grateful for it being a scientist. I do not believe in intelligent design.

But we're in one of those situations again where people can interpret it different ways. You know, there is every reason to believe the eye could have evolved in the way it did. And there were probably lots of different mutations that didn't benefit things. And then by probability those all went away and the ones that did kind of went forward on and on. I think for some people, what it really is is this sense of awe, right? When you see something that is so spectacularly complex. like the eye. You're kind of awed by it. How did it evolve in just this way? And so that emotion itself, the experience of awe itself, actually makes people more open to supernatural experiences.

So this is wonderful work done by a student of mine, now a professor at St. Olaf's, Carlo Val de Solo. And what he showed is that when you allow people to feel awe by showing them natural beauty like pictures of the Grand Canyon or wonderful sunsets. or however you go when you induce it architecturally. People suddenly give more probability to the idea that there is something beyond them. Right. And so here again, you're seeing the combo.

You're saying, well, this, how could this ever form? I'm in awe of it. Oh, I'm feeling that emotion that makes me more open to the idea that there is, in fact, something beyond. And it seems to feel right. And let's face it, most people, if you're not trained scientifically, you don't really understand how to think probabilologically. And I'm not saying that's a problem with people. It's just

part of our business, right? We have to learn how to think that way. And so it just seems like so completely impossible that this one out of a trillion thing could happen. But if you think about how many other steps were taken, how many other different ways the lines could have gone in the genetics, they probably did. And they probably didn't work. And so they're left It's kind of like the argument, I never wore a seatbelt and I'm alive. Well, you are, but a lot of the other people who didn't aren't, right? And so you can't prove it that way. So for me, I think it kind of brings me back to this issue of why I just don't think

it's a relevant scientific question because you can't prove it one way or the other. And so it's always going to come down to faith. And so even people who make intelligent design arguments, ultimately I find them not persuasive because, as you said, we can work our way to it. And then how do you prove? There's two routes to get there. How do you prove which one it was? It's an article of faith.

Yeah, well, I personally believe in evolutionary theory. Yeah, me too. And I also believe in God. And I don't think they're mutually exclusive. This is the other problem, right? People say, well, I know what God is and what God did. If there is a God and the way God created the universe and did things, none of us have any conception of that.

And it's probably beyond our brain's ability to understand what that is. And so for me, like you, I don't see any tension. The tension comes when you become very tied to actual texts, right? And positions of people interpreting what they think God did or what they think God said. And that's where you run into problems. Yeah, I feel like the word that keeps sneaking up in my mind is overwhelm. I mean, we could think of awe as a. positive experience it usually is but in some sense you have to wonder whether or not some of the

where one inserts belief in god versus belief in a in a scientific process again not mutually exclusive but um has to do with where they sort of draw the line of overwhelm or where the line of overwhelm arises for them because when i look at the grand canyon i don't know much about geology i have some sense of how it got there but it is kind of overwhelming right i can't just zero in on one, you know, kind of layer of sedimentation and know the story of that, which makes perfect sense why there are, you know, millions of layers on top of it. And then, of course, you would get that, that wall within the Grand Canyon. Whereas I can look at an eye, whether or not it's in a cuttlefish, which are very interesting eyes, by the way, W-shaped pupils, or a old world

primate eye, like ours. And I can say, yeah, I, you know, if you had a couple hours and you were having trouble falling asleep, I could tell you the story of how the phone photoreceptors wired up with the bipolar cells with the ganglion cells and how it tells your your brain everything from time of day to the color and contour of images in the room. Like we understand that. So there's no overwhelm for me. Yeah, yeah. Whereas if I try and think about or brain development, I mean, I teach fetal development.

I mean, it's amazing. Two cells, sperm and egg. And you get, if all things go well, you get a baby. You get a human. And it's kind of like an overwhelming experience. But we understand a lot of how that happens. It still is miraculous. It does seem like a miracle.

So we assign these words like awe or miracle to things that I think they sort of are at the line of overwhelm for what our brain can comprehend. And for different people, it's different. Now, as I say that, it almost sounds like I'm drawing like a distinction between those that can have knowledge and can handle a concept and those that don't. And I'm not because if you were to, for instance, present me with, well, a natural. scene like I love Yosemite I go there I'll go there soon to watch the meteor shower I don't know how all that works I've got colleagues and friends who know pieces of it and it it's much better for me to just experience that and think about how people thousands of years ago saw the exact same thing and it becomes a spiritual religious experience for me I anticipate we'll see how the how much cloud cover there is this year but I will feel connect to people, to God, et cetera. So you see, like, I feel like this line of overwhelm feels big. Likewise with grief, birth of a child.

There's something that, like, fills us with, I don't know what you call the emotion. Maybe it's, but it feels like a welling up of like neural activity, chemical activity. And we go and go, this is a spiritual experience. Yeah. But that's also because I can't break it down. And I don't want to. No, and that's in some ways what is you're hitting it on it exactly right. It's a sense of not being able to fully comprehend,

feeling small in the presence of it. But I think the point that you're making that I want to make sure isn't lost is when you can understand it still doesn't mean it's not miraculous. Right. Or that God, if you're a person of faith, didn't set that process in motion.

And this is again, is what I think is really important. It's like when we learn to explain something, we get an insight into the power of creation. By creation, I mean following evolution, not God created the world in six days creation. But as a lot of scientists who are people of faith will say, that to me is awesome. I appreciate the awe of creation that it happened this way. It doesn't negate my belief in God because I can explain it. God put us here with a brain to learn and to understand.

how God's creation works. And so I think your point about overwhelm is right, but I want to make sure people realize that it doesn't mean that when you can explain it, it's reducible. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I recently started raising quarrel, and I'm like in awe of coral.

And it makes me feel no less in touch with the incredible diversity of life and no less in touch with and all the mechanisms, but no less in touch with notions of God or spirituality. The two seem to blend for me, but that wasn't always true. In one of Richard Feynman's books, he talks about the fact that someone once challenged him with the idea that, well, you know, if you can understand all the elements of a rose or I forget what the example was, that, you know, doesn't that, you know, at the quantum level, doesn't that diminish your experience of it? And he said, no, to the contrary, it enriches my experience of it. I don't know if he was a religious person or not. something tells me probably not but who knows and then you know and i like the anecdote about

steve jobs who unfortunately it's at on his deathbed you know uh he he was a spiritual person into meditation and obviously strongly uh uh oriented towards technology also but his final words i think were um like uh wow wow and i think we are all wow and i think we are all kind of captivated by notions of the passage from from life to death like what is that what comes next none of us still here know uh for sure and i do want to raise this this issue of fear of death sure as a i mean philosophers have talked about the psychologist who talked about this i mean the one thing that um i think lives in all of our brains um conscious or not is a fear of death huge religions are geared around the idea that this life is not the last life.

What is it known about people's belief in afterlife in being able to calm them about fear of death? I've heard it argued and we'll talk more about addiction in a moment that all addiction is fear of death or gambling or both. That's all gambling addiction. Some people gamble in casinos, other people gamble in other ways. But that if you really start peeling back the layers, it's all fear of death. the death anxiety being the one thing that binds all of us. So afterlife, fear of death, heaven, hell, you know, break it down for us. Yeah. So what we know, right, is that if you look at anxiety around death, it's kind of an upside down you, right? So people who really believe in

an afterlife, they have the least anxiety about death because they feel like I'm going someplace good. people who firmly reject any form of afterlife. They're a little more anxious than the believers, but they're less anxious than one other group, right? Because they'm like, oh, I'm going to end up in the ground, okay, I don't like it, fine. The group that is the most anxious about death are the people who don't know because they're like,

is there an afterlife? And if there is, did I do what I need to get into that afterlife? And so those folks are the ones because they're struggling with the belief. certainty, right? We know the brain likes certainty, one way or the other. And certainty that things are going to be good is better than certainty that there's just an end and there's no suffering. It's just an end. There's no hell you're going to. But the people who don't know, they're the ones who are the most anxious. And so I think for, I think the reason a lot of religions talk about

this, well, there are multiple reasons. One is because it's just inherently strange to think that you're a conscious being in one day that consciousness is going to end. So that's scary. But it often gets tied into a way to shape people's behavior, right? Religions use that fear as a way to guide people, right? You better be a good person or your karma is going to be bad and your next life is going to be in a worse position or you're going to go to hell and have pain for some period of time or perhaps everlasting. And so it takes on this moral tone and that fear is very motivating, right? We know from the psychological literature, if you want to get somebody to do something, fear is a great way to motivate them. The problem with that is, is if you're

constantly afraid of it all the time, your body is in the state of anxiety, and that's not healthy for you. And so I think a lot of faiths try to kind of reinterpret fear of death in a different way. Death isn't always bad. So one thing you'll find in a lot of faiths is they actually you to contemplate your death. So in Buddhism, there are meditations that are focused on thinking about yourself dying. There's even these intense forms of meditation. I forget the actual word in the original language, but they're basically called corpse meditations where people, the monks, will meditate in front of a decaying corpse over days as a way to

study that you can actually see and experience what will happen to you. In Christianity, right, there's this sense of contemplate your death on Ash Wednesday, which is the start of the season before Easter. In many traditions, the priest will put ashes on your head, or the minister put ashes on your head and say from dust you came to dust, you will go. It's a reminder that you're going to die. In Judaism, it's interesting, even on their New Year's, which is Rosh Hashanah, that's a celebratory day. there's this prayer they say in temple called the Unitana Tokef, and part of that is, who's not going to be here next year? Look around. Some will die by floods, some by famine, some by illness, some by fire. And again, it's a reminder that life is ephemeral. And so the trick with this is

if you can think about your death, not in a morbid way, not in the way that you dwell on it, it's actually quite useful. So the one thing we know in psychological science is that as people age, their values change right when you're young you want the new iPhone you want to go on a great vacation you want to get ahead all of these kind of bucket list things for that you think will make you happy as you begin to age and you can see the end on the horizon people's values change suddenly they value time with loved ones service to others kind of things that build a legacy right interestingly if you look at the literature

those are the things that really bring happiness at any age those are the things that experiences of people you love service to others make you happy and so as we age we come to realize that worked by the psychologist Laura Carstinson at Stanford shows that if you have people

contemplate their death when they're young temporarily it reorients their values toward the things that truly bring up suddenly they'll start caring about that stuff and so the idea of contemplating death that is a part of almost every religious tradition if you do it for a short period of time and not in a morbid way but daily actually points you toward the things in life that make you more happy and so if you then become a person of faith you also believe that the end is going to be good for you as well and so you

don't have that anxiety and so I think religion in death is a complicated thing there is fear of death But there's also a way to use the idea that life is ephemeral to help us find happiness sooner than we typically do. On a related note, I think one of the most interesting things about the human brain, aside from its ability to change itself, plasticity, is how much control we have over our perception of time. And when I say perception of time, I mean our ability to contract or expand our way. window of perception. So just like we can contract and expand our visual window, we can contract and expand our perception of time. So in a conversation like this, it's a fairly compact, I'm thinking about just the now. If I were to take a walk this afternoon and I wanted to think about, you know, who walked on this beach before me and before them and who's going to come after?

I can start to see a bigger time bin, as we call it, time window, and then the significance of any one thing that's happening in the current moment becomes much smaller. I think about this a lot, and there's a wonderful book that's not available in audio form called The Secret Pulse of Time that gets into how this expansion contraction works. But I feel like thread through every religion and every religious practice. is an attempt to reconcile the need to feel, quote-unquote, present, to live in the now, to do good deeds now, to not do bad deeds, to be grateful, all of that, socially connected, but also to link us to something larger that is basically designed to humble us. We're not as important as we think. No one problem is as important. even the biggest challenge in the world is this two shall pass maybe not in your lifetime because you're thinking about it until your last breath let's hope not but no one else is going to be worried about it afterwards so I don't quite know how to formulate this question

but what I'm asking is here perhaps again it's it's the notion that if one thinks really about the fact that we're going to die we're all going to die there are people claiming they're not going to die but they too are going to die there's a lot of overwhelm in that if you really go into that and you know if you're attached to your present life and the present moment as the most important thing but if you can access ideas and feelings around the fact that you know you're part of a continuum you're connected to people in the past that had the same fears that alone makes you feel a little less it seems a little less futile so the question question i have is what do you see across religions that allows people to bring themselves some

peace around the the reality that they're going to die that is um really about connectedness not just with other people but in time um the buddhist um seem to have mastered this through a daily practice of meditation in other religions it seems it comes about through what we call holidays um you know each year on the same days roughly we go through the same practices that kind of links up year to year. It breaks up the moment to momentness of things. You see where I'm getting with this? I'm sorry, this isn't a better formulated question, but I think about this all the time. I still don't know how to talk about it because there really isn't a language for this time elasticity. Anyway, I love your thoughts on this if you would. I have a friend who's a rabbi

and not being Jewish one day I said to her. So, you know, why do you still pray? in Hebrew, you know, in Catholicism, we don't pray in Latin anymore, like we pray in English. Yeah, good point. Right. And what she said was, I mean, part of it is to keep the culture. But part of it is, too, she says, it is sometimes an amazing experience when I stop to think that the words I am saying now have been said by Jews for thousands of years going back. and those same words will be said hopefully thousands of years going forward and what it does

is it situates me in this sequence of time and I know that the challenges that I'm facing have been faced by people before and will be faced by people afterward and in that experience I feel part of something greater and I think you know one thing we're seeing now you keep hearing on on the news, how people are leaving traditional faiths, and they are. But there's a subset of people who are actually going back to more orthodox faiths, traditional Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism. And what they'll often say is there's an appreciation in these forms where it's still the Latin Mass or other types of things for things that have felt true and universal through time.

And when I worship that way, I feel that connection to humanity and this sense that we're all in this together. And they find and feel a sense of deeper purpose. Like things just aren't relative and, you know, changing here and there depending upon people's norms and mores at the moment. And so, you know, there's no work that I can think of that points to this. But I think the phenomenon you're describing is one that is very, felt by a lot of people, especially if they engage in practices that have a longer tradition going back. Because I think the human brain's ability to distract itself into task or moments or recreation

or drug itself so that you don't pay attention to the passage of time, this is why I do think that a lot of addictive behavior, but also just a lot of what we call kind of unconscious stuff, like scrolling or, you know, or eating food that's not good for us, even when we're not hungry. Like, these things are just, you know, I have a friend and she said, you know, yeah, I'll get lost in an audiobooks sometimes. I thought, audiobooks are great. You're saying, not the way she's using them, right, to just get lost as a way to distract. Yeah.

We don't know how to sometimes deal with quiet. Why not? Is it because we feel alone? Well, if not, then I think it's like this, I think it is really a fear of. death, along the lines of addiction, I find it interesting that in all the different sectors of 12-step programs, which I think the data now show can be very effective, not for everyone, but they can be very effective for a lot of people. One of the requisite steps is giving over to a higher power. In that step, it sort of spells out that the human brain, one's own brain,

is not capable of handling it all right it also it says listen you're not supposed to be able to do this alone you're not even supposed to be able to do this with a community you need something else first the community is important but a will to change is important but you need help and the one piece that you can't get away with is trying to do it without some notion of higher power and 12 steps very careful not to dictate if that should be Christianity Judaism or Muslim it's sort of all encompassing in that way but it can't just be you and your brain and your and your will right and And it's not you, your brain, your will, and your community of other people who are rallying against this thing you're trying to overcome.

You have to give over some degree of power. This is the serenity prayer, right? Like you're acknowledging what you can't control. And I find that to be remarkable, right? Some people have accused 12th step of being a religion or a cult. We'll talk about cults in a moment. But I think therein is like this acceptance that the human brain is amazing. but it can't do all the things that it needs to do on its own.

That for me is one of the most convincing reasons to have a belief in God because I know a thing or two about the brain. I certainly don't know everything. And it's really good at a lot of things. And it's really dreadful at a lot of other things. And it's completely incapable of other things. And there are lots of, quote, unquote, energies in the universe. I mean, there's energies coming out of the sun that we can't see or perceive that act on us.

So this notion that there would be energies in our universe, I know this sounds kind of mystical woo and new age, but literally radioactive energies and energies that we can't see but have an impact on us, that's not just something to debate. That's real. Scientists will agree that's real. So I guess for me, the leap to God and religion doesn't seem as far anymore. It just seems like it's like right there. I mean, things that we, you know, 30 years ago, someone told you the way quantum mechanics work you would have thought they were insane and so um i think we have to have some intellectual humility that there are forces in this world as you're saying that we don't have access to yet in terms of our conscious awareness but nonetheless they can act on us

your point though i think about um the 12-step program is an interesting one because they do work for a lot of people and what the data show about kind of giving over some control believing in a higher power is it actually is useful for avoiding addiction. So people who are engaged with religious practice have some protection against addiction. The rates are lower. But when you surrender to a higher power, a lot of people resist this. And they think the idea is problematic because they interpret it as meaning you're like an automaton. You're just going to give over everything to God and not be a thoughtful person.

that's not what it means for the people who actually do this right for the people who surrender to God what it means is I'm going to try and do the best I can make the best decision I can live the best way I can but I realize that I can't control everything including my own behavior all the time it's going to do the best I can and then I'm just going to give it over and hope that God trust that God will help me and that does two things one is again it provides the sense that you have a friend, there's someone else who cares about you, you're kind of like a junior partner with this person working toward the goal. And that, I'm not exactly sure why. I don't know if anybody has to know exactly why it works, but that reduces stress and anxiety a lot.

Because, you know, we like to think in this world that we're optimizers, right? I'm always like, I want to buy this car. Well, let me research everything about this car so I can make sure I get the exact right car. Or if I'm trying to make a decision about my health. I'm going to research everything I can. But, you know, at a certain point, the tyranny of choice, too many, too much information can drive us nuts. And so if you do the best you can, but then trust in something else, it reduces that stress. And I think ultimately then makes it easier for you to achieve that goal down the line because you also feel like someone else is counting on you. I mean, I don't go to the gym.

I should go to the gym. You know, the one time in my life when I went to the gym, when I had a workout, partner who I know if I didn't go was going to be like Dave you have to come I'm counting on you and so you know there's that added element too and so I think the idea of surrender doesn't mean you're not thinking intelligently it doesn't mean you're giving over control of your life it means you're accepting a partnership with someone else who's going to try and help you and again not for me to say if that's true or not but I think that's how it works for people we've been talking about God and to some extent religion, how many new religions are there? I mean, why don't we see new

religions? I mean, obviously there are subdivisions. I know, you know, Mormons, LDS, as they're called. Often, you have Orthodox, conservative, and reformed Judaism, you have Catholics and Protestants, and you've got seven-day Adventists and forgive me for not, you know, subdividing other religions, but you get the idea. But how often is there a new subdivision? And how often is there an entirely new religion? And since I haven't heard of these new religions, how come they don't stick? It's a good question. In fact, for one episode of my show, we were interested in this because I didn't know the statistics.

And so we invited on a scholar who studies this. And she kind of shocked me because she said that every year, there's between 100 and 200 new religions that form. Now, the definition there is a little loose, right? Some of those religions we would call cults. Some of those religions are, you know, there's a person in Canada who put a Kleenex box on her head and said she's, you know, getting messages from some alien race. Did that happen? Something like that happened. I may not have the details exactly right, but yes.

But most of them, the reason you don't hear about them is because they're flashes in the pan, right? For a religion to stick, there's two ways. One is somebody in power, right? You can think about it. In the old days, the emperor said, this is my friend. faith. You all will now be this faith. But in the modern world, that's less. It tends to be the case when they speak to some need. And that is their practices and their ideology address someone in a new way. The people who are leaving faith, they're not becoming atheists. They're looking for new ways

to be spiritual, because let's face it, most religious institutions, they're human-based institutions. They have moral failures, right? And we know that there has been abuse and discrimination and misogyny and all these things attached to face. And hopefully we can talk about that because I don't want people to think that I'm saying religion is always good, although on average I think it is. It has to speak to you. And those are few and far between. Right now, what astounded me is where people are having profound spiritual experiences is a burning man. So most people think of burning man as this kind of debauchrous part.

party in the desert, which for some people, it is. It is. But this is worked by the neuroscientist Molly Crockett at Princeton. She went to Burning Man. She was a burner herself. Coming up soon. Are you going? Yeah, no. God, no. I hate the heat. Do you know that this year ticket sales are up by a significant amount compared to even before the pandemic? It doesn't surprise me. Yeah, a number of friends who have never gone before, contact me in the last week. Are you going? I've never been. Yeah. Are you going to go? No, this year I'll be abroad, but, you know, it could happen.

I'm somewhat curious, not this year. What she showed is that there's a segment of people there that report having profound spiritual experiences. Now, if you think of Burning Man, right, it's one of these, what we would call a liminal space, right? It is everything that's normal in life doesn't happen there. People go to take different names. They wear different clothes. you are exposed to an environment that is relatively harsh in the desert. And people who have gone tell me the only way that you can really survive

is you have to depend on other people. And they have this thing there called the culture of giving or gifting. I forget the actual name, but there's no money at Burning Man. Everything is basically through the kindness of others in exchange. And so people are in this environment where their normal life, their normal clothes, their normal identity. is stripped away. They're experiencing the harshness of the elements of the heat on the playa.

And they experience that they can exist there because of the kindness of others. And people who interpreted this way Molly finds report not only feeling this profound kind of self-transcendant experience, but when they come back, it stays. And they actually tend to be more prosocial. And so some religions have realized this now. So a friend of mine named Alex Leach, who's an Episcopal minister, runs a camp. Because at Burning Man, there are all these camps. And his camp is called Religious A-F.

I don't know if I can say that word on there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Far worse has been. Yeah, right, right. Religious as fuck. And so, and what they are there is, is it's there. And he told me, the reason he found him this is because when he first started going,

he said, I never felt God as palpably, the presence of God as palpably, as I could feel it there. because there were just people ministering to each other and welcoming each other and being kind to each other in a way without expectation. And so he runs this camp and there are a lot of people who used to be Christian

who are experiencing this and coming to the camp and refinding their faith because in that moment they're having those transcendent experiences that you normally don't get when you're just sitting in church sometimes. There's another group,

I forget the, I think it's called milk and honey, I don't remember, but they have a thousand person Shabbat for Jews there. And it's this incredible experience people report. And so I think for a lot of people, they're looking for those spiritual experiences and things like Burning Man are a way to do it. And then they have, what do they call them, little burns or remote burns, right, throughout the year, they'll come together at different times and do this. And so I think what you're seeing is a desire of people to kind of feel.

feel that god-shaped hold in their heart to feel that and for a lot of them kind of the stayed religious rituals that we're kind of getting now aren't doing that and so i could see something evolving out of that but who knows where we're going interesting um you know the grateful dead and people that follow the grateful dead came close to meeting some of the major criteria for a religion I'm growing up in the South Bay area in the late 70s and 80s and early 90s. I mean, Grateful Dead would come play at Frost Amphitheater. They play at Shoreline. I mean, you get people literally following them around the country.

It had elements of, I'm going to offend some people. My sister was kind of into the, she didn't follow them, but she was a deadhead. I mean, it had elements of cultism in the sense that people were going to call giving up their lives and going. But then people who did that would say, no, that actually. was not giving up life that was accessing life you know for them yeah and then of course i have some friends who are colleagues at stanford who are who were serious quote unquote deadheads but that was only during the summer so they were like part time part timers yeah yeah kind of burning man yeah few bands however at least in the united states and they were international right um had that

kind of following yeah um usually when we hear about followings where the main characters have beards um and there's uh drugs involved yeah um and not every deadhead was in super into drugs i know some that were totally uh straight edge actually um and they actually used to have i should just mention aa and n a meetings at at shows so for people could go who were in recovery um but you know cults generally include some um like over symbolized leader like their face some you know something of like the skull the like steal i think it's called like steal your steal your face is that what that thing is called and then there's jerry who's kind of like the the mate jerry garcia was like the the main one right and then this idea that you would do certain things and not do certain

they he has elements of a religion yeah um and but cults like the ones that we hear about like the heavens gate cult that thought that they were going to live forever they committed mass suicide during the hillbop comet hail bop came through and they were all they killed themselves or the branch dividian thing in waco you know you usually have someone who believes they are special this was not true for the grateful dead you never heard jerry garcia saying that he was like the messiah or something but with david koresh and the branch divin it's you you you had that um a self a belief that one is extra special you had people really changing their whole life structure and then oftentimes you have crime you end up with something happening and

where people are being exploited and then that's like obvious cult or mass suicide or um jones town or something like that so you know the line between cult and new religion is extremely thin um so it makes sense to me why not many would break through um and so i have this question do you think that the existence of christianity judaism the Muslim faith and buddhism kind of tiles what the human brain needs in terms of options. Oh, in atheism and agnosticism. Like if you take those, it sort of like tiles the various like anxiety states that the brain has. And you go, you know, we don't really need another one, right?

Like all the things are handled. Grief, birth, enough celebrations each year, enough kind of ideas and flexibility about the afterlife, enough, you know, moral structure internally, not such a huge time commitment for this but you know if you're an orthodox chew or you're very serious buddhist that's a lot of time yeah that's a lot of investment in ritual and meditating but you know you can be a really like a darn good christian by going to church on sunday and praying each day and doing some bible reading like you know that's compatible with with a bunch of other things so you don't have to give up your whole life to invest in it you get see what i'm getting at here yeah it could be that that

the humans as a species have uh have figured this out and then someone saying no God figured it out, right? That this is what we need. It fills in the gaps. It seems unlikely that we're going to get a bunch of other religions. I think so. But, I mean, let me talk about the issue of cult versus religion. I think you're absolutely right first.

Cults primarily have the idea of this charismatic leader, which is why you often kind of hear this notion. It's a cult of personality. It's usually somebody who thinks they're special. You have to worship that leader. And when somebody thinks they're that special, things often go wrong with where they're going to lead people. Regular religions, though, can have the same problems.

I mean, the thing I'd like to say is when you look at religious practices, a way to think about them is as spiritual technologies, right? They're technologies, mind-body practices that can move hearts and minds. They can move them for good. They can move them for ill, right? It depends upon the motives of the people who are using them. So, you know, people always say, Dave, religions are the source of all war. Most wars aren't fought about religion.

There are some that are like, hey, I disagree with you. your interpretation of the scripture. Most of them are about land and resources, but religion gets pulled in. And what we know is that when you are feeling threatened, so the Bible, as you said, is a book of many voices. There are beautiful passages in there about mercy and kindness. There are other passages in there about dashing the heads of your enemies, babies against rocks, right, to punish them. And so what we know is that when people feel more threatened, their conception of God, or this has worked by the psychologist Kirk Gray and Joshua Jackson, their conceptions of God become more aggressive and punitive.

They believe that God values vengeance more. And if you ask them to recall verses from the Bible, they're going to recall the ones that are about smashing the baby's heads as opposed to being kind and merciful. And so this is why you can see things like Christian nationalism form. And you can see, if you go to some of these events, you'll see pictures of Jesus holding an AK-47, right? Because our mind to be adaptive, as if we're not involved to be saints or sinners, when we feel we're threatened, we want to fight against that, we will use religion to justify it. And so the point that I want to make sure all your listeners know is not saying religion is good, it's a technology that can be used for evil. You know, I mean, even Richard Dawkins will say the same thing about science, right?

You want to find a way to cure people of maladies, science is your friend. You want to find the best way to annihilate a bunch of people most efficiently. Science is your friend. And so for me, the reason I spend this time talking about religions, I know it can be used for bad. But if you look at the data on average in people's lives, yes, certain institutions have caused people to be abused, discriminated against, et cetera, and we should combat those. But on average, whether it's a gift from God or a cultural adaptation, it helps us live better. For the most part, I agree with you. That is, there's a lot of convergence in the practices of the faiths because in some ways we're all the same body and brain and it helps us solve those.

And they're all pretty large and have their followings. And they're attached to the culture you're raised in. But I think that times of flux, times of change, and I kind of sense we're getting in one of this net, one of these now, I don't mean like end times, but I mean things with technology, things with norms, the way that we have been living, our economic practices are changing really rapidly right now. And people are becoming at the same time more disillusioned with some of the traditional face. And so for me right now, this seems like a period where there could be a reorientation. And the ones that are going to happen that are going to come are the ones to speak to people. You mentioned AI. There have been churches.

They haven't stuck yet, but I could see this happening where they're built around an AI. The idea is AI will become so knowledgeable that it will almost basically be an omniscient, superintelligence. Amnition because you can know everything about you through what you do online and superintelligence because it can solve problems better than humans can. And so there are people who are thinking about churches around AI. Will it stick or not? I don't know. But to the extent that a new faith can let people feel that presence of God, can solve some of their problems by helping them feel connected to each other,

reduce anxiety, reduce stress. It wouldn't surprise me if something else comes now in this kind of moment of flux we're in. I don't know if you're aware of this. Most people probably aren't, but the person who holds the world record for highest IQ, has been verified by Guinness, I know, because they posted the Guinness certificate to their account on X. I follow this person out of interest, is a self-declared Christian, very much aligning their platform as the highest IQ in the world, and by a huge margin, I should say, with their understanding of the Bible and why Christianity is the best answer to holds the best answers to everything. I should say I don't align with everything they post.

And so I just want to be clear about that. But it's very interesting to me that you have people who are using technology like social media as a way to platform traditional longstanding religions and merging that with kind of modern notions of intelligence, right? IQ tests aren't the only way that we gauge intelligence, of course. But I think most people place enough value on people who have high extreme IQ. to interpret it a certain way. I wondered, until I realized this is actually a person, at least to my knowledge, I wondered, like, is this an AI thing?

Now there's video, so he's in Korea. He'll, he speaks English and he'll talk about this. You're seeing it similar in Silicon Valley right now. Like, I think Peter Thiel is embracing Christianity. Really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Oh, okay. Even Elon Musk, who's, I don't think he says he believes in God,

but he says Christianity is a force for good in the world. I would call him saying there's, there's got to be something there in terms of energy in the universe, then when that question was posed. Yeah. And so I think you're seeing this among a lot of tech sophisticates. I don't have the good answer to why. But it is, your point is well taken.

That is intelligence, how religious you are does not correlate with intelligence, right? There are really brilliant people who embrace the idea that there is a God and there is a creator. And there are some that aren't. And I think it's because those people realize, like I was saying before, that if you're a person who is really rational and is really intelligent, when you look at the data, there's nothing to refute it. And so, again, no one sees evidence of God in the world scientifically, but we also realize we can't rule it out. And when they have whatever their own inner life is, if they feel they have that connection, why reject it? And so I think it's important to realize that it's not a marker of poor intelligence. Unless there's something I'm not aware of, the person holding the Guinness-confirmed highest IQ in the world is certainly highly religious.

So we know the boxes are checked at probably all up and down. They're probably atheists that have very low intelligence and atheists who are very high intelligence and Christians and Jews and Muslims and the Buddhists and the whole business. I think one of the reasons why certain religions get tacked with stereotypes are the kind of avatars that we see in our mind when we think about that religion. So, for instance, Buddhism, you think about the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama seems like what most people think about the Dalai Lama, well, prior to this recent kind of controversy, I thought the Dalai Lama is just kind of like just a happy, just happy. All, good with everything, right? Even the, the style of clothing is very kind of generic across monks when the Dalai Lama's walking around, like, you know, all in these orange robes and I look pretty peaceful and happy.

And so people, I think, assume that, okay, well, if you want to feel like that, Buddhism would be a good idea, right? whereas other religions tend to have a bit more of a, their brand is a bit more varied in terms of the emotional tone, as we talk about Christianity, certainly Old Testament, New Testament. What do you think about the branding of religions? Because I feel like it's one of the most important factors that either draws people toward or away from a religion, whether or not the person is speaking words of love, universal love love only for if you join in acceptance forgiveness condemning i mean these are the things that people resonate with or that serve as separators and i think um there are also the things that make us look at

some people who when we go that person crazy yeah like like i mean you didn't really have to see david koresh speak for more than a second you didn't even have to know about all the criminal stuff going on you have the crazy eyes yeah like the guy's crazy yeah right and and his glasses made them look like Jeffrey Dahmer also and like they're I don't know what's up with those glasses but um you know like this guy's like eerie you wouldn't you wouldn't let them near anyone you care about so there there's this kind of branding issue that I think is important um at least to discuss because I think when people hear religion their mind goes to that yeah they're not thinking about the practices necessarily they're thinking about the brand yeah I mean if you're not familiar

with a religion, same as if you're not familiar with a product, what's going to drive you is the stereotype of the brand. But I think the more you look, you realize that those are problematic for good or for ill. So, you know, you raised a point about the Dalai Lama, and, you know, my original reaction when I first saw it was exactly the same as yours. But, you know, even Buddhism, a religion that is built on the idea of loving kindness and ending suffering, you know, in Sri Lanka right now is being used. to justify kind of a genocide against certain groups,

and the monks themselves are taking up arms, right? And people are shocked when they hear that, because any religion can do that. So the danger in religion is always that by increasing community for those who are part of your religion, you can be increasing the distance against those who aren't part of your religion, which is why at heart the true message of religion

is not to make it us versus them. It's to increase the moral circle of concern. such that it includes everybody. You know, the Bible talks about you should honor your father and your mother and be good to your family. But more than that, if you're counting the number of times, it says who to be good to? It says, be good to the stranger. Be good to the stranger in your land.

And so it's expanding that moral circle. But my point is that, you know, people now say, oh, look at the Christian nationalists. I would never want to be any part of that, right? It's all, if you're a person on the left, it's all people who are conservative and looking to control people's lives. And so the branding is a big problem, but it's, I think, obscures the complexities that are going on in different phases. But you're right. That's going to be the thing that's going to draw you or repulse you, even if it's not accurate. We know from medicine that the more similar that your doctor looks to you and the people you know, the more likely you're going to take

their advice. I think similarly, the the more different the dress of a of a religious figure the more different their haircut the more different they speak the less likely you are to join up with them it feels far away and so it's going to be interesting to see in the years to come how people gravitate toward or repelled by religion in general or specific religions given that now pretty much everything is visible to everybody right you know it's not sufficient for somebody to to just post things in text you They have to actually speak in video, I believe. You have to see them.

You have to kind of like, and so we used to talk about scripture, right? But now religious figures are we expect to see them directly. And I think there's going to be less shrouding and less separation. And it would be really interesting to see if people are drawn to or repelled from people. I don't know what to predict. I don't know either because you could think about it as. They're making themselves more accessible to the public and to the masses. But again, there was something also, sometimes when they held themselves as separate as more holy, more knowledgeable, more someone not like me who knows more than I do, who I can trust.

So it's a good point. I'm not sure which way it's going to go. Yeah, there's something very true about the time we're living in now, which is very different than just 20 years ago, which is now the most. the more famous you are, the harder it is for you to control your reputation. That's true. Because the real you has to be visible, and any flaws are also going to be visible at some point. Whereas 20 years ago, the more famous you were, the easier it was to maintain your reputation. People could really shroud themselves.

And they could create mystique. And this is true in every area, not just in terms of celebrity and fame. This is true for politicians. This is true, I think, for religious figures. You have my friends from the, you know, special operations community have said, you know, a lot of the mystique that that empowered them to do really difficult things. A lot, you know, movies have been made about their community in a ways that has been semi-destructive, actually, to certain aspects of the work they needed to do. And so I see a lot of parallels here. And so it's going to be interesting if we start to embrace that some of these religious figures also are going to be flawed, right?

I mean, the Catholic Church, you know, had the veil pulled back on a subset of Catholics, certainly. it wasn't all, but a subset of people in the Catholic Church doing horrible things. But there's still a lot of Catholics in the world. Yeah. Right. People who understand Catholicism were able to say that's not what Catholicism is about. In fact, we're about the exact opposite. And we're able to, I think, by now they reasonably dissociated themselves from that, right?

Yeah. I mean, there still are ongoing debates. And what will happen now is you'll have people who are coming up for higher positions within the church and look back and show where they, even though they didn't do anything, they were covering things up. So the echoes of that go on. But, you know, the point you raised is a good one. I think it's going to hit certain religions more than others.

So there are certain religions where it's really important to have an intermediary, like in Catholicism, right? For you to get certain sacraments, the priest is the mediator, right? Who does the priest? Does this transubstantiation allows the bread and wine to be turned into the body and blood of Christ that you then? receive. In many other religions, the role of the minister, priest, or reverend, isn't as important, right? There's direct experience. I can experience God directly in my prayers or through my practices. And so I think a lot will depend on whether you need that mediator or not. And I think there is this push among some people to want that direct experience, to not be hindered or have the baggage of

the institution upon them. A couple of questions. for you if you're willing. Do you pray? I'm one of those people who prays at times where I'm feeling the stress. So prayer is not a practice of mine. I always feel like when I say this, I'm like the doctor who smokes cigarettes, right? It's like, Dave, you tell people prayer is good. I'm still kind of working out my belief system. You know, the show I do, how God works, is really as much of a journey for me as it is for everybody else. And so I believe in the data. I believe this stuff is good. I was raised Catholic. I was an altar boy. I left the church. Where I am now, I'm trying to figure it out. But what I try to do is embrace practices that I think matter. So I embrace this practice of gratitude, right?

Rather than praying every day to get it, I find ways to cultivate it daily and see how it changes me. I try to meditate. Am I good at it? No. Do I think it's beneficial to me? Yes. And so I'm trying to figure out which spiritual community, if any, I fit in. I'd like to say I'm an agnostic. You know, 20 years ago, I would have been an atheist. Now I realize I'm humble enough to say, I don't know. I've seen or felt things that I can't explain. Does that tell me anything? I don't know. But I'm on this journey to, to find out. And I hope, you know, I take my listeners with me on that journey. Do you believe in miracles?

Depends that you define miracles. I believe that there are things that happen that we cannot explain. And being agnostic, I'm willing to say that those could be due to some unseen force. I just don't know. But I believe there are things that happen beyond our understanding and beyond our ability to predict. Well, in addition to your book and your podcast, if somebody is interested in exploring these questions, they want to live in the question, which it sounds like you're doing, right? You're living very much so, living in the question of, is there a God? What role does God play in one's life, et cetera? If somebody's interested in exploring those questions, in addition to reading your book and listening to your podcast, which they definitely should do, because I think it provides a really, elegant framework for how to approach these things. What else do you recommend? You know, you are in a position to make recommendations, understanding that people will make their choices either way.

So let me take off my scientist hat for one moment and just talk to you as me and what I believe. If there is a God, I believe that it's a God who would care for all of God's creatures, that there wouldn't be one religion that is right. And what I've seen in enough different face, the ones that have lasted a while and meet people's needs is that they provide ways to live better lives. And so I would say try on different ones, see what resonates with you. I mean, people convert, people leave.

And I think really there are multiple roots to God if God exists, and there are multiple ways to use this wisdom to improve your life if God doesn't exist. And it's okay to sample. it's okay to try it's okay to ask your questions but what i want to urge them to do is please don't just assume that there's no rational reason to think about religion and the best piece of advice i can give you is is advice that a wise rabbi once told me and the hebrew i'm not going to pronounce it correctly but the hebrew saying is is uh naesh vishma and that basically means we will do and then we will understand. And this comes from when Moses in the book of Exodus was coming down from the

Mountain with the Ten Commandments. And he was teaching the Israelites about it. And they're like, what? I don't quite understand this. But okay, I'm going to do it. And sometimes it's in the doing of the practice that the understanding comes later of why it's important or how it can help you. If you have to work out all of the logic first, it can be an impediment. And so try. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I know everyone will appreciate hearing that. I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in your laboratory and teaching and the fact that you're writing books about hard topics and that you're coming to those hard topics. You know, you have tremendous support out there, of course. But it's a bold thing for a scientist.

Don't do it before tenure. That's what I said about starting a podcast. And that you're taking the time to come here today to teach you. and to educate. You have your own podcast and your book will provide links to those in the show note captions, obviously. And I'm a huge fan of your work. Today's conversation really reinforce me a number of things. One, how important it is to live it in these very important questions, regardless of where one lands or happens to be, regardless of what religion you were raised with or lack thereof. And also that, you know, there are a lot of questions that bind humans and a lot of them are scary like what happens after I die we know what what's the meaning

of all this um you know is there a god those those sorts of things and I feel like you're providing a very useful roadmap for people to continue to ask those questions without telling them what to believe certainly nor who to believe nor if what they're hearing out there is correct or not but you're giving people a roadmap for how to pose really good questions and I think the fact that the data clearly show that there's benefit to practices. We keep coming back to this, as you just did, or that practices and in the doing, there's a lot of information. I hear a tacit message also that, you know, one shouldn't be worried that you're going to, like,

get swept down the path of lack of self-control. It's actually about having more agency, as one asks these questions. So thank you for doing the work you do at every level. You're working at so many different levels to explore these ideas. to educate people. Certainly, I've learned a ton today, and I know our listeners have, too. Well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. We'll come back again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. David Desteno. To find links to his research,

as well as to learn more about his books, including his most recent one, entitled How God Works, the science behind the benefits of religion. Please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast. by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

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