Welcome to life, death, and the Space Between podcast. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and

medium, and here we explore life, death, consciousness, and what it all means. Today, I'm excited to

welcome Dr. Andrew Newberg to the show.

Dr. Newberg is the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health and

a physician at Jefferson University Hospital.

He is board certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine.

Andrew has been asking questions about reality, truth, and God since he was very young

and has long been fascinated by the human mind and its complex workings.

Andrew's research now largely focuses on how brain function is associated with various mental states,

in particular religious and mystical experiences.

His research has included brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals, and trans states,

as well as surveys of people's spiritual experiences and attitudes.

He has also evaluated the relationship between religious or spiritual phenomenon and health,

and the effect of meditation on memory.

He believes it is important to keep science rigorous and religion religious.

Andrew is the author of several books, including how enlightenment changes your brain

and neuro theology, how science can enlighten us about spirituality. Welcome, Andrew. Thank you. Thanks for

having me on the podcast. So let's start with two questions I have. One, what is nuclear medicine?

And two, what is neurotheology? Well, nuclear

medicine may be a little easier to define. Basically, that's the study where we do some type of,

some type of scan that, where we inject some kind of radioactive tracer into a person and then

follow some aspect of the body's physiology. So we can do this with the brain. You can do it up with other body parts as well. But the general gist of it is that we're trying to look at something functional that's going on in the brain. And so we can look at brain blood flow, metabolism, different neurotransmitters as well. So it's a whole field of

...