Hey, this is John Gordon with Positive You, and today, my guest is Andrew Newberg.

Andrew, how you doing?

I'm doing great.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me on the podcast.

It's great to have you.

You've done extensive research in the areas of brain, of prayer, and just so many areas

of neuroscience and brain function.

Can you just share your role and what you do at your university?

So I'm technically the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health

at Thomas Jefferson University, which is in Philadelphia.

Over the past 10 years here, and really almost 30 years going back to my time at the University

of Pennsylvania, my main area of research has actually been in brain imaging, and my background

is actually kind of an obscure field called nuclear medicine, where we inject different

radioactive materials into people to hopefully see what's going on in their body.

We actually can look at any organ of the body, and we do stress tests of the heart, and

we do lung scans and all that.

But one of the main areas that it's used for is for the study of the brain, because we

can radioactively label all different kinds of molecules that are used in the brain, whether

it's sugar, like glucose, whether it's different neurotransmitters, like dopamine or serotonin.

We can radioactively label them, inject them into somebody, and then see where they go.

And a lot of it is used for very traditional kinds of studies, looking at things like Alzheimer's

...