• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

God On The Brain

Like I said, I've had experiences which I recognised as 'Christian' and 'religious' but felt that my brain was probably kindly re-arranging a random event into something significant.
Brains do that.
 
escargot said:
Like I said, I've had experiences which I recognised as 'Christian' and 'religious' but felt that my brain was probably kindly re-arranging a random event into something significant.
Brains do that.

I don't disagree but does this invaladate the experence (I just started a thread on something like this subject if you're interested.)
 
Yup Virgin Queen, I see where you're coming from on that, it's like a sort of scepticism with knobs on!

I am certainly interested in your thread and would like to see a link (being Wicked and Lazy.)
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I Hear Voices, It's The Clangers! Th

Butterfly said:
In the link I posted earlier, the following information is given. Note that all of the suggested causes are unnatural ones. My interpretation of this is that the so-called "God-organ" is merely a result of abnormal functioning of the temporal lobes and so the question of "What is it for?" becomes academic, IMVHO.
Well that just about wraps it up for God. :D

Of course, maybe it's not merely down to 'abnormal functioning' at all. That interpretation seems highly speculative to me. Yes, the spiritual/supernatural feelings can be induced, accidentally, or on purpose.

However, as to whether this condition, or special sub-node, of the temporal lobes, has a useful function, under normal, healthy conditions, by accident, or design (evolutionary, or otherwise), I'd have to ask What Would Fort Do?

Isn't it a Fortean's first task to guffaw at scientist's attempts to flatten the Universe into an enamelled, tin, biscuit barrel, whenever possible?

Seems to me, that to believe the scientist with his wonderful magnetic helmet and prosaic explanation for feelings of wonder also takes a certain amount of faith.

;)
 
brian ellwood said:
Alduous Huxley had plenty to say about this years ago....was it in "the doors of perception...heaven and hell" ? perhaps someone can post the correct info as I no longer have the books to hand. Also on another thread there was discussion about a tv prog in which an intense local magnetic field was used to stimulate these areas of the brain, resulting in feelings of religious euphoria in the subjects - and sometimes experiences of revelations etc.
I read 'Doors of Perception,' decades ago. Back when I was trying desperately to imagine what being stoned and having a trip might be like (having no recourse to the psycho-active substances necessary for such adventures).

Huxley used plenty of mescaline in his experiments and seemed to think he was switching off some kind of internal 'censor' mechanism in his brain, opening it up to a fuller, unfiltered and uncensored experience of external reality. He reckoned that if it were not for this censor mechanism then we would be so overwhelmed by the undiluted reality reaching our senses, we'd be unable to do anything, except gawp.

Perhaps, the temporal lobe God sensor/node is such a mechanism?

Speculating, even more, perhaps it is something that has evolved with us humans and our consciousness, to filter out everything other creatures experience, full on? Making us in some ways the poorer? A thing inside our heads that says, thinking good, experiencing bad, thoughtful good, sensual bad. :(
 
I think it's odd that some experiences, be they religious or otherwise enlightening in some way, are seen as some sort of aberration, as if something's going wrong. Of course, some experiences are no doubt linked to odd brain function, but I don't think that that knocks all revalatory experiences on the head (if you pardon the pun). Such experiments only point to the way the human brain experiences some things like this, but not all of them. I think it's an error to assume both that all such things are an abberation or are the hand of God or gods at work. I wonder what would happen if someone was to claim that Archimedes' 'Eureka!' experience was some sort of mental short circuit?

I think Huxley may have been saying that the 'normal' day to day function of our brains and senses is not to flood our perception of it with massive amounts of meaning or symbolism. The effects of psychoactives tend to remove the filters we have to process and clean this flood - the one side effect being that our recall of what we experience gets put into our memory, rather than our concious thought processes. This is different from a religious or similar experience because it cannot be switched on without more drugs. Drug experiences can be enlightening, but in a different way to how it is so with a religious experience IMHO. Someone who has a strong belief can switch on the thing inside them just by thinking about their faith or belief, which has a knock on effect on their psyche - this counts for scientists as well as devoted christians (or example).
 
Religion -- epilepsy

I'm a priest and, yes, I have left temporal-lobe epilepsy.

I've had one visiony sort of experience, but it did not involve a religious sense, except to say that it might have been hell or something. There was darkness and stars (deep space, I'd guess), and an incredibly large, grinding machine barely visible by starlight. The machine was the soul grinder and that's just what it was doing.

I suspect too many SciFi movies.

I do have a sense of a Presence, but it's not wildly overwhelming.

I am a priest because I firmly believe that the community offered by the church is highly necessary in this age of family dislocation and individual isolation, and that the values of the Judeo-Christian culture are worth preserving (humility, charity, and so on), and that ritual is a reminder of these values (if you don't take the bread/body wine/blood bit too literally, or turn the Bible into a object of worship).

(However, if my bishop ever asks me point blank about my beliefs in Jesus Christ, the atonement, etc., I'm cooked.)

Nonetheless, Dr. Persinger is one of my favorite researchers. He even went so far as to photocopy one of his out-of-print books and mail it to me. So, I say, "Onward, Dr. Persinger, experimenter upon graduate students and unsuspecting journalists. Keep up the good work!"
 
WRT Persinger - I think he has a database of Fortean events, which (if true) would be great to see published. AFAIK, he used these to correlate such events with things like seismic disturbances (and the resulting electormagnetic problems for us humans).
 
Re: Re: Re: I Hear Voices, It's The Clangers! They Have A Me

AndroMan said:
But, what's the God sense organ (or node), for? Is it an earthquake detector, a kind of gyroscopic-stabilisor, a divining rod-like sensor, a pigeon-style direction finder, what? Maybe it's for telepathy? ;)
I found this link which goes into a little more detail and contains this quote . "There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion," the University of California team reported. "This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society.":D
 
That is your answer;
it is to do with the establishment of dominance in a social species...
most mammals and birds have a heirarchy within social groups in order to allow fow the group to function as an extended individual.
The god spot could be the location of that mechanism which regulates the relationship between the individual and the alpha male/female in the herd/band/pack, and the well being of the pack as a whole.
You have to learn to respect the leader of the pack - obviously it is hardwired into our operating system.
It is the biological locus of awareness of the extended individual in other words.
You probably wouldn't find much of a god spot in a solitary animal such as a wolverine.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: I Hear Voices, It's The Clangers! They Have

Butterfly said:
I found this link which goes into a little more detail and contains this quote . "There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion," the University of California team reported. "This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society.":D
That's 'Behaviourists' for you. :hmph:

Ring my bell, oooh eeh oooh ooh.
Ring my bell. Ding dong ding!
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
:D

Above, I detect a political, rather than, scientific interpretation of said God spot/node/sensor. Why, for example, is it so sensitive to electromagnetic fields?
 
Well, that puts me in the naughty file with a dangerous malfuntion of the lobes:D
I have an inherent distrust of all leaders and absolutely no sense of god. However, I'd like to think that I have acceptable moral codes and still contribute to society in some way, whilst remaining an anarchist.
In the 60's, like many people I took acid etc. and discovered that far from overloading the sensory input it was possible to control this and 'manage' the trip. Often one could be fixated on microscopic details like the beauty in a raindrop on a flower etc. which gave a sense of purpose and euphoria, also that feeling of one-ness with the universe. The heightened colour saturation I gained has remained though I have not touched anything other than alcohol for years ( which tends to depress these attributes imo).
 
I have never touched LSD or anything like that, but from what I hear it doesn't allow the taker to experience anything that I don't already.
Obviously I have no real problem with others' leadership; it's the lack of it where it is required that bugs me.
 
What I found interesting about the more detailed link was that it gave the information that the non-religious participants in the experiment were aroused by sexual imagery, as opposed to religious ones.

I'm wondering if this area of the brain has something to do with physical attraction/falling in love and therefore mating. Its a long, long time since I fell in love :rolleyes:, but I seem to remember being blinded to the other person's faults, having an almost worshipful reverence of the person, and also finding them aesthetically pleasing. And these are all traits shared by fervent believers in God.

I wish no disrespect to those who have strong religious beliefs, but isn't it true that devout worship of a God equates with being in love with a concept, rather than a person? I suspect I'll get some flak for this, and probably haven't thought it through properly. So fire away.

Incidentally, in this theory, the sensitivity to the EM current would be necessary for establishing the chemistry between two people, preferable for successful propagation of the genes. :D
 
You should try it then IJ, as the way you've described it does it no justice. Unless of course, you're on some permanent brain-induced trip, which doesn't seem to be the case ;) It's one of those things that's hard to descibe accurately. What Brian says about it is much the same as I experienced, along with waves of a certain kind of euphoria that I'd not really experienced before. I hate to sound slushy, but the best approximation I can give is that it was the same sort of pit of your stomach feeling you get when in love. Odd as it may sound, that's what happened to me. I didn't get the 'oneness with the Universe' thing tho'.
 
Butterfly said:
Incidentally, in this theory, the sensitivity to the EM current would be necessary for establishing the chemistry between two people, preferable for successful propagation of the genes. :D
Only if sitting very close to the computer's CRT and indulging in cybersex, I'd have thought! Or, are you suggesting some form of telepathy?

Dawkins and his Almighty Genes! :D

Good point about the love thing though. I wonder more about the focus on tribal totems, as rallying points for groups and individuals, as well.

Still think it's only a tiny part of the picture though.
 
God and Love?

Anyone well versed in the Christian mistics? Particularly St. John of the Cross who's experences of God where well just a little erotic.
 
A 'god spot' could be a recessive mutation,in the biological sense, in the same way as humans cannot synthesise or store Ascorbic acid metabolically.

Also, in terms the history of various churches stamping out heretics by killing them, it could be regarded as something selectivey bred into the species by the species.

If you subscribe to the idea of 'mind viruses', its amazing how many competing 'God Memes' there are, all stuggling to be come dominant.Since they do behave in a virus like fashion, only the agressive ones can survive long term. If you can't seduce (assimiliate) you wipe the others out. An interesting exercise in positive feedback mechanisms.
 
God spot/sex spot

The Virgin Queen said:
God and Love?

Anyone well versed in the Christian mistics? Particularly St. John of the Cross who's experences of God where well just a little erotic.

Yes, there's quite a link between experiences of God and eroticism.

I realized that one when I was about 13 years old, and decided to not worry about it because ecstasy is ecstasy. (Probably depends on your age and hormone levels.)

In her biography "Through the Narrow Gate," Karen Armstrong also briefly addresses eroticism and conventional religious practice.

The sense of the presence of God needn't lead to constant ecstasy, and probably shouldn't, because that's just "being drunk on God" which is not extremely helpful to the individual or to the community.

Sufis regard that state of being as not acceptable, also.
 
I don't think that the God spot is especially sensitive to EM fields, - that is just an electrode free way of stimulating the brain, which would work on any medium sized brain location...

might be wrong tho.
 
Eburacum45 said:
I don't think that the God spot is especially sensitive to EM fields, - that is just an electrode free way of stimulating the brain, which would work on any medium sized brain location...

might be wrong tho.
And that's what makes it interesting! ;)
 
Eburacum45 said:
I don't think that the God spot is especially sensitive to EM fields, - that is just an electrode free way of stimulating the brain, which would work on any medium sized brain location...

might be wrong tho.
The outer door slammed firmly shut, and a deathly hush descended on the tiny red-lit, sound-proofed room in which I half lay, half sat, in a kind of dentist’s reclining chair. Half an hour alone in here might have seemed a pleasantly restful prospect - except for the converted motorcycle helmet on my head. Embedded in either side of it, just above my ears, were sets of solenoids about to deliver a pulsed magnetic field designed to mimic the firing patterns of the temporal lobes of my brain.

Persinger’s theory is that abduction-like experiences are caused by complex patterns of activity in the temporal lobes. People vary in how stable their temporal lobes are and he argues that those with the most unstable activity may have the experiences spontaneously.

In addition magnetic effects from earthquakes could set off the necessary firing. To test this he looked for, and found, a strong correlation between the dates of seismic events and claims of UFO sightings, abductions and other strange phenomena from past centuries. Interestingly the recent claims that earthquakes and thunderstorms can create visible lights might provide the link between UFOs and abduction experiences.

One last thought. Persinger applied a silent and invisible force to my brain and so created a specific experience for me. He claimed he was imitating the basic sequences of the processes of memory and perception and that, by varying those sequences, he could control my experience. Could he have done it from a distance? Could it be done on a wider scale? Suddenly prospects of magnetic mind control seem an awful lot worse than the idea of being abducted by imaginary aliens.

From this link (an article by Susan Blackmore)
 
Mmm, Hmm,

Does this tie in with the phenomenon of 'earthlights' in some way too?

Persinger's work certainly seems to be very interesting and has much wider implications than I had at first gathered from Blackmore's interpretation of it all.

It seems to give more creedence to such possible phenomena as, water divining and telepathy, rather than less.

After all, Volta passed a considerable amount of electricity through his frog's legs to get them to flex, when only micro-amps are reallly needed to make the muscles react.

Perhap's Persinger has really entered into the area where a lot of parapsychological phenomena are made possible, even whilst his work has been used to prove that they don't exist?
 
Persinger & Blackmore

That last link wasn't really relevant to the God spot, I know, but it had some relevance to Eburacum45's post.

I suspect, Andro, that all your speculations are spot on.
ie - direction-finding, telepathy, et alia.

I don't think that Persinger's work proves conclusively that the experiences of the percipients of paranormal phenomena are created subjectively. All it proves really is which part of the neural network is being acted on when the percipient has the experience.

And what about ghosts? Two or more people might see the same apparition, so they can't all have created the vision subjectively.

Its good to see someone working this way in the field of parapsychology though. ;)

The God Spot
Thinking about sherbet lemons can make your mouth water. So therefore, thinking about abstract things which are aesthetically pleasing must be able to fire the neural area which causes visions. In other words, after giving it some thought, I'd say the accidental visions must only occur in the case of the temporal lobe epilepsy. Sorry! I took some convincing! ;) :D
 
Technotelepathy.
Story
- how about a magnetic field to stimulate the septal nuclei? That could be useful...
 
I'm sure this has been covered elsewhere, but seeing as this article appeared in the Times today, and Horizon are doing a programme about it tonight, I thought I'd post it.


God on the brain: is religion just a step away from mental illness?
By Anjana Ahuja

Did God create us or did we create God? A controversial TV documentary tonight argues that a famous evangelist's "visions" were caused by epilepsy and that religious feelings are brain malfunctions



THE VIVIDNESS OF HER visions and the severity of her moral judgment marked out Ellen Gould White as more than just spiritually inclined. Among the godfearing American farming community into which she was born in 1827, her 2,000 religious experiences, details of which she noted almost obsessively, made her a prophet of God.
She married an Adventist minister and the couple founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which currently has 12 million followers around the world. The movement observes the Sabbath on a Saturday, and believes the Second Coming of Christ is imminent.

Now science has afforded a new spin on White’s spirituality. A leading neurologist who has studied White’s personal history and opus has concluded that, rather than being divinely inspired, her illusions stemmed from a form of epilepsy. “Her whole clinical course suggested to me the high probability that she had temporal lobe epilepsy,” says Gregory Holmes, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire. The multitude of visions, Holmes suggests, were actually epileptic seizures.

The retrospective diagnosis, which has lain quietly in the medical literature for 20 years, is aired in a TV documentary tonight. The programme explores the new and controversial subject of neurotheology, or the role that the brain plays in religious experience. The discoveries that are emerging from this fledgeling science are, depending on your religious views, either deeply fascinating or profoundly disturbing. They imply that the brain created God, not the other way round; that religious leaders throughout history were touched not by supreme beings but by mental illness; that moments of serenity common to ardent believers of all faiths are simply hiccups in brain chemistry. The findings suggest that our attitudes to religion are underpinned by biology — that some brains are physically built to be more receptive to divine thought, and that this explains why religion induces apathy in some and fervour in others. One scientist has even built a kind of “God helmet” — a headset that can induce the feeling of an unseen presence by bathing the temples in electromagnetic fields.

Holmes was moved to make his diagnosis of White on the strength of one incident in particular. When White was nine, she was hit on the head by a stone thrown by a classmate. She drifted in and out of consciousness — wavering between life and death — for three weeks. As well as being disfigured, she was unable to resume school, and buried herself instead in the Bible. Eight years later she began having visions. Witnesses are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of White immersed in these sacred moments.

One wrote: “In passing into vision, she gives three enrapturing shouts of ‘Glory!’ which echo and re-echo, the second, and especially the third, fainter. For about four or five seconds she seems to drop down like a person in a swoon, or one having lost his strength; she then seems to be instantly filled with superhuman strength. There are frequent movements of the hands and arms, pointing to the right or left, as her head turns. All these movements are made in a most graceful manner. Her eyes are always open, but she does not wink; her head is raised and she is looking upward, not with a vacant stare but with a pleasant expression,.”

To Holmes, these are the hallmarks of a partial-complex seizure, which are characterised by a heavenwards stare, a temporary loss of consciousness, automatisms (repetitive physical movements) and hallucinations. Even White’s meticulous note-taking — she produced 100,000 pages of notes during her lifetime — suggested hypographia, another feature common to patients undergoing partial-complex seizures.

The Seventh Day Adventist Church convened a series of nine scientists, all believers, to examine Holmes’s claim. They rejected it, saying that White’s injury was to the nose and forehead rather than the sides of the head, near the temporal lobes. The eight-year interval between injury and her first hallucination also weakened the association. But Holmes stands by his conclusion that “although it would be impossible to prove retrospectively that Ellen White suffered from partial-complex seizures, it appears possible that not only her visions, but also her writing and the nature of her revelations, may reflect temporal lobe dysfunction”. The British arm of the church seems less bothered by the claim. “If God chose someone with epilepsy or any other predisposing mental factor to reveal Himself, it doesn’t substantially change the nature of the revelations,” says John Surridge, communications director for the Seventh Day Adventist Church at its British headquarters in Watford, Herts. “If we look to the Bible, Moses was said to have a mental condition, and maybe that’s just the way God chose to work. In any case, while Ellen White was very influential, our beliefs don’t hang on just her writings. Our beliefs are based on the Bible.

“But some people may use this to reduce religious experience to merely activity in the brain, and remove God completely. We would object to that. Religious experience is an encounter with God, not just a product of the brain.”

It would dismay Surridge to know that some scientists are tending to just this opinion — that God is an artefact of our evolved human minds, and that visions are symptoms of neurological abnormality. As well as Moses, experts are intrigued by St Paul, who famously encountered God in a blinding flash while on the road to Damascus, and St Teresa of Avila, who heard voices and is widely thought to have exhibited signs of schizophrenia.

Pascal Boyer, in his ambitious book Religion Explained, published in 2001, suggested that our ancestors had to be able to outwit unseen predators, and so we developed a protective belief in hidden spirits. This has transmuted today into a belief in the “airy nothing” of religion. For Boyer, an anthropology professor at Washington University, it is no coincidence that religion sprang up around 50,000 years ago, tallying approximately with the emergence of anatomically modern human beings. As soon as our brains became sufficiently evolved to embrace supernatural ideas, Boyer suggests, religion spread like a cerebral virus.

Studies of patients with brain injuries or neurological disorders certainly appear to support the contentious idea that the brain houses a “spirituality circuit”. A proportion of people who develop temporal lobe epilepsy become intensely religious. Tibetan Buddhist monks have had their brains scanned while meditating; some regions showed signs of springing into life while other parts of the brain quietened down. Activity was quelled in the superior parietal lobe, the area that allows a person to orientate himself. When it calms down, a person can feel “lost” in space and time, a common feeling among those engaged in intense religious thought.

However, the Pennsylvania scientists who carried out this pioneering study — Dr Andrew Newberg and the late Eugene d’Aquili — declined to conclude that religion was really all in the mind. Instead of these neurological changes creating divine experiences, they said diplomatically, the brain might be adjusting its activity in order more easily to detect a spiritual reality. One scientist who has perhaps done more than any other to elevate the field of neurotheology to controversial heights is Professor Michael Persinger, a neurologist at Laurentian University in Ontario. Persinger has built a magnet-laden helmet that surrounds the skull with a mild electromagnetic field. It induces a mystical experience — Persinger describes it as a “sensed presence” — in four out of five people who wear it. Importantly, volunteers aretold it is an experiment on relaxation rather than a spiritual experience.

Religious people who undergo the experiment, he says, tend to believe that God is with them; less religious guinea pigs feel as if a benevolent stranger is watching over them. Interestingly, Persinger tried his technique on Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and committed atheist. Dawkins did not have a mystical experience; Persinger says a prior test showed that Dawkins has low sensitivity in the temporal lobes, which the helmet stimulates.

The neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, who has just delivered this year’s Reith Lectures, has conducted his own fascinating experiments with temporal lobe epilepsy patients. He found they show a higher brain response to words with religious connotations than to sexually charged words, unlike the general population. For many, this has nailed the link between the temporal lobes and religious thought.

Ramachandran says such research does not devalue religious belief, and that such brain circuits “may be God’s way of putting an antenna in your brain to make you more receptive to Him”. Persinger, who says he is not religious, is bolder: “My research shows that religious experiences are created by the brain.” To Persinger, religion, which promotes the idea that a Creator is looking after us rather in the manner of a benign parent, is a “delusion”.

Persinger’s colleagues cannot understand why he pursues this work with such vigour; they tell him it will damage his reputation, alienate grant-giving bodies and legitimise study of the supernatural. He tells them: “My question is, why shouldn’t we study such questions? The experimental method is the most powerful tool we have. That’s how we find truth from non-truth.”


Horizon: God on the Brain is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm
 
This subject certainly has been discussed with great interest on here-

God On The Brain

The TV prog was postponed, I think, because of Iraq.
Well spotted! I will be watching with eyes like saucers.

Absolutely fascinating.

Religious people who undergo the experiment, he says, tend to believe that God is with them; less religious guinea pigs feel as if a benevolent stranger is watching over them. Interestingly, Persinger tried his technique on Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and committed atheist. Dawkins did not have a mystical experience; Persinger says a prior test showed that Dawkins has low sensitivity in the temporal lobes, which the helmet stimulates.


Where can I get a go of the 'God helmet'?!

I am interested in this partly because of work I used to do with epileptic people- I agree with the good doctor Gregory Holmes.
 
BBC2 Horizon: God On The Brain

I videoed the programme. It seemed packed with interesting phenomena, research, insights and views. Loads to take in and think about.

Definitely one of the better Horizons! ;)
 
Back
Top