The Intersection of Brain Science and Faith: An Interview with Professor Angela Deulen

Introduction

In a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming, many individuals seek transformation in their spiritual lives. In a recent episode of the 40 Days of Reconciliation podcast, Professor Angela Deulen shared her insights. She is a psychology professor at California Baptist University. She discussed the powerful connection between our brains and our spiritual experiences. This post delves into her enlightening discussion. It offers valuable takeaways for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of transformation in the context of faith.

Understanding Transformation: The Role of Neuroplasticity

One of the key concepts discussed by Dr. Deulen is neuroplasticity, which refers to the brain’s remarkable ability to change and adapt. She explained that our brains are not fixed; rather, they can be reshaped through our experiences and choices. She gave an example comparing neural pathways to muscles. Just as muscles become stronger through consistent use, neural pathways in our brains strengthen with repetition. When we focus on spiritual disciplines, such as prayer and meditation, we stimulate the brain. This stimulation aligns with God’s intentions.

The Importance of Renewing the Mind

Dr. Deulen emphasized the significance of Romans 12, which calls for believers to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. She highlighted that accepting Christ brings the Holy Spirit into our lives. However, it does not automatically remove worldly influences or sin. Instead, individuals must actively participate in renewing their minds through obedience to God’s word. This can be challenging, especially when faced with difficulties, but it is essential for spiritual growth.

Navigating Feelings and Spiritual Awareness

A common struggle among believers is the feeling of disconnect from the Holy Spirit. Dr. Deulen noted that our society is heavily influenced by emotions, which can cloud our spiritual awareness. She likened this to a noisy environment that makes it difficult to hear the subtle presence of the Holy Spirit. We can quiet our minds by engaging in practices, such as prayer and reflection. These practices nourish our brains. As a result, we enhance our ability to recognize the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.

The Challenge of Sin and Transformation

Addressing the issue of sin, Dr. Deulen explained that acknowledging and confessing our sins is a crucial part of the transformation process. Many individuals prefer to avoid confronting their sins, opting instead for superficial displays of spirituality. However, true transformation requires vulnerability and the willingness to do hard things, such as confessing and repenting. This not only strengthens our connection to God but also enhances the health of our brains.

Conclusion: Key Takeaways

Dr. Angela Deulen’s insights offer profound guidance for those seeking transformation in their spiritual lives. By understanding the brain’s capacity for change, we can cultivate a deeper connection to our faith. It’s important to renew our minds. To experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit, we must engage in spiritual disciplines. We should confront sin and allow ourselves to be transformed by God’s word.

Link to Angela’s podcast: https://www.angeladeulen.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome Professor Dwaleen Angera. She's a professor of psychology at the California Baptist University.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a privilege to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

When a believer has accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Pastor Nostavia, how can they tap into the God-given brain ability to tell themselves I can do this, I can fight, I can be strong in the faith?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Yeah, such a great question. You know, Emmanuel, right before we started recording, you and I were talking about uh Romans 12 that tells us to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. And sometimes we believe, you know, we're gonna become a Christian and the Holy Spirit's gonna indwell us, which it does, and we're grateful, but that that's gonna somehow magically remove the world from us, remove sin from us. But we're told that we need to take part in that renewing of our mind. When I came out of high school a long time ago, 35 years ago or so, when I was coming out of high school, the thinking around the brain was that your brain is your brain, that you know, whatever brain you're stuck with is just what you're stuck with. And we now know through neuroscience that the brain is wonderfully changeable or malleable. The term that we use in neuroscience is neuroplasticity. This is a term that refers to the brain's ability to change itself, to rewire itself, to create new circuitry and new neural pathways. The truth is that our brain, even though it's an organ, sometimes acts a little bit like a muscle. And what I mean by that is if I only ever used my right arm, it would be a lot stronger muscularly than my left arm. If I just taped my left arm to my body and never ever used it, it would atrophy. Neural pathways in the brain are the same. If we use a pathway, whether it's a good pathway or a bad pathway, if we use a neural pathway, it becomes stronger and faster than the neural pathways that we don't have. So when we go to renew our mind, it is so important then that we are paying attention to the things that are gonna cause our brain to fire in ways that God intended it to fire. You know, we're told, for example, in everything to give thanks. And sometimes it's hard to give thanks when you don't have enough money in the bank, or you know, your car breaks down, or you know, a loved one dies. It's hard to give thanks in those circumstances. But what we know is when we obey God's word, that's one example. There are a lot of commands, obviously, in God's word. When we obey God's word, it changes the way that the brain is wired. And those patterns, those neural habits become faster and faster and faster. That's how we become disciples, that's how we become transformed, is by the renewing of our mind, allowing our mind to be changed and transformed by his words and his commandments. I'll say one more thing on this, if you don't mind, Emmanuel, and that is that the spiritual disciplines like prayer and meditating on God's word and gratitude practices and and to some degree even fasting, those spiritual disciplines actually change the overall health of the brain. So, for example, when we are praying or meditating on God's word, it nourishes the frontal lobe of the brain. This is where empathy and altruism are. This is where we process right and wrong, we make good decisions, all of that is in that frontal lobe, what we call executive function, and it quiets the limbic system. The limbic system contains a structure called the amygdala, and that part of the brain is responsible for fear and anger and sadness. And so when we engage in those spiritual disciplines, it's literally nourishing because it increases blood flow, so more nutrients, more oxygen, more hydration to the part of the brain where all the good stuff happens, and it quiets, not damages, not shuts, not doesn't shut it off, but quiets that emotional part of the brain. So that also helps in the transformation process.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

There is a person who once said, I really don't know whether I have the Holy Spirit. I don't feel anything in me. Why does a person feel like that?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

I think our world is very feelings-oriented and in ways that aren't necessarily helpful. I think when we get wrapped up on whether or not we're feeling spiritual or feeling like the Holy Spirit's at work, I think we get in our own way, and probably the Holy Spirit's way too. The truth of the matter is when the frontal lobe I was just talking about, when it's not working, then that amygdala, that structure I talked about a minute ago, that runs fear and anger and sadness and those kinds of things through our system, also responsible for what we call fight or flight responses. When that part of the brain gets upregulated, it creates almost like noise. I mean, it's not really noise, but it's interference with our ability to feel peace or and I think the ability to feel the Holy Spirit. I think we live in a very noisy, fast-paced world that's not slow enough or reflective enough. And I think there it's more noise, both real noise, and then kind of a metaphorical noise in our spirits that prevent us from really feeling, feeling, or experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit. I think the more that we can quiet our nervous systems and engage that frontal lobe over time, probably not immediately at first, but over time we become more aware of the Holy Spirit's presence in our life. And that awareness doesn't mean we're gonna have warm, fuzzy feelings all the time, but we're we're aware, we can see his thumbprints on the things that have transpired or the decisions we're getting ready to make, or the way that we ask God for something, and then it shows up in another unexpected way.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Is there a motivational way for the brain to focus much better?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, I think this goes back to Roman 12, and that's the first thing about being transformed. We don't really want, I think, sometimes to be transformed because it's hard. You know, you get you become aware of sin in your life, you're convicted of sin, and you can either do the hard thing, which is confess the sin, repent to whoever you need to repent to, God to other believers. Um, you know, we're we're told in scripture not just to confess our sin to God, but James tells us to confess our sin to others so that we may be healed. Because when we start telling other people about the sin in our life in ways that are really repentant, it changes us. So that's healing. But that those things are hard and they're scary. So what we would rather do, rather than doing that hard thing, and I'm gonna come back and talk about that in a minute, but what we'd rather do is just kind of put on a mask. We want to perform. We're gonna learn more scriptures so we can quote them at church and people will think we're so spiritual. Or we'll pray really lofty prayers when people are looking, because then they'll know that I'm a Christian somehow. Or I'll wear my Jesus shirt or my cross, or um, I'll go to all of these church events because those things are actually easier than the real deep transformative work of sanctification, of saying, I will be transformed, I will let the word of God renew my mind and have its transforming effect on me. Because we avoid hard things, but this is what we know. Hard things, there's a part of the brain, and it actually sits at the back of that frontal lobe we were talking about, and it it helps regulate our emotions, and it helps regulate the kind of the teeter-totter between whether we're gonna be in the frontal lobe with empathy and altruism and good decision making and good problem solving, or we're gonna be in the emotional part of the brain with fear and anger and those kinds of things. So that structure, it's called the anterior cingulate. That structure is when we do hard things, we actually strengthen the fiber bundle around that anterior cingulate, that structure, which by the way, is where we, when we brain map, map people's brains when they are connecting with God, that's the part of the brain that lights up. We believe that that's where people, that space in between reason and logic and emotion, that's the space where we think God connects with us. So we strengthen it by doing hard things. But just like that muscle, you know, if I tape back to the analogy I gave at the beginning, if I tape my left arm to my body and I never use it, it atrophies. The fiber bundles around that anterior cingulate, when we don't do hard things, atrophy. And so learning to do hard things as a believer, like the hard work of sanctification and repenting and confessing your sin to others and letting God's holy word transform us by the renewing of our mind. When we do that deeper work, it actually strengthens the part of the brain, and over time, we will experience God differently because we've strengthened the part of the brain where we connect with Him.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

How can we tap into this good revealed awareness to reconcile ourselves with God?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

That's so good. You know, I've been meditating on this a lot in my own life right now. I think what happens is we had just have really short memories as believers. God does something big and wonderful, and then the next time something we're faced with a scary obstacle, we've forgotten how good what God was the last time it happened. So with Elijah, God works all of these signs and wonders through him. And then when Jezebel decides she's gonna kill him, he gets out of that frontal lobe, right? He goes into the fear mechanism of his brain and he runs away and hides. And of course, God meets him in that. He goes, the Lord goes and restores him. But I've been thinking about the Israelites wandering through the desert, and God does something really amazing, like part the Red Sea, and they walk through it, and their enemies are destroyed. And then in the you know, next chapter, they're crying out because God has brought them to the desert to die, and they're gonna, you know, not have any water, and they're gonna die of thirst, and they should go back to Egypt because they've already forgotten the God that delivered them. When we take our eyes off God, we go back. It's so easy to go back into that part of that brain where fear is. Our fight and flight instincts kick in, and we start trying to solve it on our own, or we start complaining, or we start running away. All the examples, scripture's full of examples, and we have to remember who he is in those moments. We have to stop and say, wait, I know who God is. He's the one that parted the Red Sea, He's the one who opened up the heavens, he's the one that time and time again serves up, shows up for his people. And when we remember that, we behave differently than we do when we allow ourselves to be overcome by our circumstances. And we somehow think that our circumstances are bigger than God rather than God being bigger than our circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

When a child is doing things and is not changing too fast, we tend to raise the vo volume. Do we really have to do that? How can we effectively communicate with our children?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Yeah, sometimes raising our voice is effective. Most of the time it's not. Um sometimes our kids need us to raise our voice. They need to know we're serious, that the situation maybe is dangerous or something. But I think that's a technique that's definitely overused by parents. I certainly raised my voice too much when my kids were growing up. What happens is we get frustrated. And when we get frustrated, we're back in that emotional part of the brain again. We're not up here with reasoning and logic and decision making and empathy, those things that we talked about. We're back in the emotional part of the brain. And when we do that, when we start parenting from that part, that's where our kids go. And so our kids go into that emotional part of the brain while we're yelling at them. And so now we've actually interrupted their ability to learn from us why we don't want them to make a choice. One of the things we we opened this podcast today talking about neuroplasticity. That's the term for the brain being able to change or rewire itself. Well, when a person is stressed, it actually disrupts the neuromodulator that makes neuroplasticity possible. So when we stress out our kids, we can't expect them to learn from us because we're interrupting that process. So it's important for us to catch ourselves and to then, you know, get down on their level, look them in the eye, talk to them calmly, directly, sternly if you have to, but calmly and say, I need you to listen to me right now and re-explain it. And then if they're not listening, to ask them, I need you to tell me why this is so difficult for you right now. Help me understand why this is difficult. Because once they get stuck in that fear cycle, they're reacting to the fear sometimes or the the frustration more than they are what you're asking them to do. So you want to help them get unstuck so that they can learn from you and you can better disciple them also. I think it helps to be a parent to understand who God is as a father. I think that's tremendously helpful. When you are bringing up your children, you only want the best for them. And your best for them is, you know, way better than what they can imagine. You know, they think the best is, you know, being able to have a chocolate candy bar for dinner. And of course, we know better, that's not what's best for them. And yet we are still so limited. You know, I wanted what was best for my children when I was raising them, and I still made a ton of mistakes. And yet we have a heavenly father who loves us, who loves us so much. He sent his son to die in our place so that he would not have to spend eternity separated from us. And he designed us, he knows what's best for us, and he knows that with perfection. So while there were times when I was raising my kids, I thought I knew what was best for them. There, I did make mistakes. Our Heavenly Father doesn't make those mistakes. He is, I think the essence of who God is is a love that we don't understand. And in fact, I think to answer your question, I think maybe the most succinct way I know to say anything about the character of God, it would be this. His holiness and the holiness to which he's called us is so much more than we understand. And yet his love for us and the love to which he's called us is so much greater and deeper than we will understand on this side of eternity.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

How can we make sure that our brain's healthy in such a way that it leads to healthy relationships?

SPEAKER_00 16:44

I think that's great. Some of those things are just really practical. You need to eat right. Your brain is an organ. If it's bad for your heart, it's bad for your brain. That's just all there is to it. So things that are, you know, processed or high in the wrong kinds of fat, those kind of things will be bad for your brain. You need to be hydrated. The brain needs water to function and to carry nutrients around and oxygen. And you need to get enough sleep. That lack of sleep is very bad for our brains. But the other thing that is just really powerful and keeps your brain healthy, but will also have ripple effects for those in your relationships, is to practice the spiritual disciplines. Pray, meditate on God's word, and practice gratitude in all things to the best of your ability.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Thank you so much. You know, that is the advice you would have to pay a lot of money to listen to. And you are giving it to us here, free of charge. If you don't mind, your final encouragement message, and then we cross.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

I the what pops in my head is count it to all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work in you, that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing. That's from James chapter one, and there's a lot to unpack there, but I'll just say this. If we learn to count it to all joy when we fall into various trials, the end product for our brains and our spirits will baffle those around us, bring glory to God, and bring us peace and joy.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Thank you very much. Obviously, there are many people like me who will be looking for more of those insights on your website. So tell us where we can find your website or your books.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Okay, so you can find my website. It's just my name, Angela Doolan.com, or you can find me on YouTube. I have a lot of this kind of content on my YouTube channel, which is Dr. Angela Doolin.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure hosting you here. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Thank you for having me.