The neuroscience of speaking in tongues

Members of some Christian sects have been known to utter a meaningless language of sounds that they say are divinely inspired.

According to some Penn researchers, these people really do experience an altered consciousness.

Mark Waldman, associate fellow at Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind, and Penn professor Andrew Newberg conducted brain scans on five Christian Pentecostal women who claim to be able to speak in tongues, noting changes in mental activity in the first study to suggest a scientifically legitimate basis for this behavior.

"By reducing activity in the frontal lobes, where our sense of everyday consciousness may be generated, the brain is free to perceive information in new ways," Waldman wrote in an e-mail.

Waldman wrote that, while the sensations of people who speak in tongues feel like a religious experience, "there is no God part of the brain."

Rather, Waldman's studies show that, by thinking about having an intense religious experience, people can shape their brains over the course of their lives to make them more likely to have such an experience.

"Long-term contemplation on any idea or experience might cause permanent changes in the brain that makes the experience seem physiologically real," he wrote. "Such a person might constantly be filled with a very real sense of feeling connected to God, or the universe, or a moral virtue or ideal."

Nancy Wintering, a clinical social worker in Penn's Department of Nuclear Medicine, said the movements and utterances of people speaking in tongues are not completely voluntary. However, they are not entirely beyond the control of the practitioner, either.

The subjects were "cognitively aware of the activity," Wintering said.

Wintering said investigating altered states of consciousness may yield further scientific breakthroughs.

She is planning on researching the effects of routine meditation upon early-stage Alzheimer's sufferers to see if it can help them retain memory for longer.

The phenomenon of speaking in tongues, scientifically termed "glossolalia," can be traced to early Christian doctrine, Wintering said.

"The apostles said it was one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit," Wintering said. Practitioners, she added, find "personal meaning" in speaking in tongues.

Waldman said practitioners today typically engage in the activity "to ask for guidance in their lives."

Traditionally, people who speak in tongues have not been well received by other Christian groups.

"A few ministers have even called it the devil's work," Waldman said.

Together with Newberg, Waldman has authored a book called Why We Believe What We Believe, focusing in part on glossolalia. It was published in September.

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