Welcome, esteemed viewers to today’s Science and Spirituality featuring Dr. Mario Beauregard an associate research professor in the departments of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Montreal in Canada.

Dr. Beauregard is known for the 2008 book “The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul,” which he co-authored with journalist Denyse O’Leary. Before joining the University of Montreal faculty, Dr. Mario Beauregard did postdoctoral research at the University of Texas, USA and the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, Canada.

Dr. Beauregard has received international recognition for his pioneering work on the neurobiology of mystical experience, and was selected to be among the “One Hundred Pioneers of the 21st Century” by World Media Net. Supreme Master Television recently had the honor to speak with Dr. Beauregard about his research on the brain’s role in spiritual experiences and his views on mind-body-spirit relations.

I became fascinated by the questions about the mind, the brain, (and) the soul when I was about eight years old. I was living on a farm. My parents were farmers and we had a lot of space, fields, forest, and we were isolated physically. I didn’t have too many neighbors, so I had a lot of time to reflect.

At that time I had a big insight. I realized that the brain and the mind and the soul were totally different concepts. I decided later on to become a scientist to be able to demonstrate that you cannot reduce spirituality and the mind to the brain.

To study brain regions and neural networks, Dr. Beauregard uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), an advanced imaging technology that shows brain activity in three dimensions. Another of Dr. Beauregard’s tools is Electroencephalography or EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain.

These techniques help us to understand or to identify the most important brain regions and circuits involved in various processes, in emotion, but also in spiritual states. An emotion is also a part of spiritual experiences. Brain structures like the amygdala, the orbital frontal cortex and the front of the brain are also involved in various aspects of spiritual experiences and states.

With regard to spirituality, it seems that one of the most important chemical messengers in the brain is serotonin. Serotonin is involved in mood regulation, (and) sleep, but it seems to be the crucial neurotransmitter implicated in spirituality and spiritual experiences. It seems that the greater the amount of serotonin in the brain, the higher the spiritual states and the degree of spirituality that one can reach.

Both natural philosophy and metaphysics are branches of philosophy, and hundreds of years ago scientific questions were addressed in the realm of natural philosophy, while the nature of being, religion and the world, the existence of the Divine, and questions about creation were dealt with in metaphysics. However, when the “scientific method” made natural philosophy an empirical, experimental pursuit, science distinguished itself totally from philosophy and became dominated by a materialistic, reductionist paradigm.

The fathers of modern science were all very spiritual people, like Newton, Galilei, Descartes. But after a few centuries, scientists thought that we only needed mechanical explanations to understand humans and the Universe. So, materialism became a metaphysical assumption most scientists now are afraid to challenge. Fortunately, there’s an increasing number of scientists who dare to challenge openly this old notion of materialism.

Recently, neuroscientists have begun to learn more about the complex relations between cognition, emotion and brain activity.

During the last decade, there have been an increasing number of brain imaging studies showing that indeed mental processes can significantly influence what’s going on at the brain level. We used brain imaging technologies like fMRI to demonstrate that you can teach this person to self-regulate brain activity.

The brain responds to a very high emotional charge, for instance, emotionally laden film clips or pictures. You ask them to become a detached observer of their own feelings and of the pictures or the film excerpts, and the brain response totally changes, so that you don’t see anymore a big response in the portion of the brain that we called the emotional brain or the limbic system.

Dr. Beauregard received much attention for his 2006 research measuring the brain activity of nuns, who are with a Catholic religious order called the Carmelites, during their spiritual experiences. The study, entitled “Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns,” was published in the prestigious journal “Neuroscience Letters.”

This experiment was the first one done in neuroscience to understand the neural basis of spiritual states. The nuns reported the impression of being absorbed by something much greater than themselves. They also had an alteration in their representation of the body within space. The nuns reported feelings of peace, bliss, unconditional love. All of what they reported subjectively fit with what we observed neurologically.

This experiment proves that there’s no single “God spot” in the brain, in the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe is involved in this experience of spiritual states, but many other brain regions are involved as well. Spiritual experience is a multi-dimensional experience that is associated with a complex network of brain regions across the brain.

In the nuns, when we used the EEG, we saw very slow (brain) waves, some delta waves, some more theta waves also. Theta waves are slow waves ranging between four to about seven hertz. These waves are seen during the state right before people fall asleep. And it’s associated also with the retrieval of memories from the unconscious and creativity.

When Science and Spirituality returns, Dr. Mario Beauregard will discuss the placebo effect and how research on near death experiences can inform us about the nature of mind, brain and consciousness. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality featuring Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal in Canada, who is known for his research using a new, non-materialist paradigm in the field of neuroscience. Dr. Beauregard says the mind is extremely powerful and that recent studies demonstrate how our thoughts can change our circumstances.

An example is the “placebo effect,” where subjects are told that a medicine they are taking will cure or lessen their disease symptoms when in reality the treatment, such as a pill made out of sugar, has no medicinal value.

Neurologists at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver (Canada) told patients that they had discovered a new drug very effective against Parkinson’s disease. The patients who most believed in this new treatment started to produce and release in their brains dopamine at levels comparable to that of healthy people.

It shows that what you believe will strongly influence what’s going on in your brain, demonstrating that mind cannot be reduced systematically to electrical and chemical processes in the brain because mind can control these processes in the brain.

Dr. Beauregard next describes an experiment that followed his research with Carmelite nuns, in which he measured the brain activity of subjects who had near death experiences of a specific kind.

In a classical near death experience, you have several aspects, like the impression of leaving your physical body. You can also have the impression of floating along a tunnel at a very rapid pace. Sometimes also the experiencers will report encounters with deceased relatives or friends. But this encounter with the Light or Being of Light seems to be one of the most crucial components regarding a subsequent psycho-spiritual transformation.

So the near death experiencers that we recruited, all of them had this encounter with the Light or Being of Light. And interestingly, half of the experiencers, before their death experience were atheists, and after this experience they became very spiritual people. They felt that this Light or Being of Light was God, not necessarily in a Christian sense but a very intelligent being, very loving, radiating unconditional love.

In other words, they claim that during a meditative state they can reconnect to this Light. These people claim that they retain a sense of connection with this Light or Being of Light. So we simply asked them to do this in a meditative state to measure brain activity during such a state, and in order to be able to compare the results with those of the Carmelite experiment. And interestingly the results were very similar. It’s possible that for various types of spiritual experience, the brain regions and networks may be the same.

There is also scientific evidence to support the idea that spiritual experiences occur outside the realm of the brain. Dr. Beauregard now relates the story of the artist Pam Reynolds as an example.

There are other lines of evidence indicating that the mind and consciousness can also operate non-locally; that is, outside the confines of the brain and the body. And this is shown in certain studies about near death experience.

Pam Reynolds, an American singer and composer was in standstill surgery, it’s a very risky operation. And so in her case she was clinically dead for 60 minutes. What’s fascinating is that while there is no brain activity, no heart activity, she had the impression of leaving her physical body, and floating over her body in the surgery room. And she’s been able to describe very accurately the surgical tools that were used by her surgeons and also report very accurately dialogues between the neurosurgeons, the nurses and the cardiologist who was there also.

And another fascinating aspect in her experience is the fact that after a while she left the surgical room and she had the impression of floating along a tunnel quite rapidly, and at the end of the tunnel she met with deceased relatives. She met with a beautiful Being of Light, and her life was totally transformed.

We know for sure that there was no brain activity, because she was monitored with EEG. Yet she was able to perceive, to remember, to have feelings, to be self aware. Cases like that strongly suggest that what we call mind and consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity; they can have an independent existence from the body and the brain.

Other research has also been done on the non-locality of mind and consciousness; for example, experiments showing that one person praying for another who is ill, even from a great distance away, can have a healing effect on the recipient.

As Dr. Beauregard notes, experiments have demonstrated one can change the heart rhythm or the electrothermal response, which indicates emotional reactivity, of another from a distance as well.

There are now hundreds of studies showing that this can indeed be done by a normal person. So you can imagine the possibilities that humans have at that level. But in reality we don’t know the limits of what we can do, non- locally.

We thank Dr. Mario Beauregard for sharing his fascinating research on how the brain, mind and consciousness relate to spiritual experience. Please join us next Monday for Part 2 of our program, where Dr. Beauregard will discuss how quantum physics can inform psychoneuroimmunology, and the importance of reinventing a new paradigm for science.

For more details on Dr. Mario Beauregard, please visit Books by Dr. Beauregard are available at Amazon.com

Cherished viewers, thank you for your company today on Science and Spirituality. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom after Noteworthy News here on Supreme Master Television. May your life be blessed with Heaven’s love, comfort and light.