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God On The Brain

Interesting to see they showed some of the footage from a pervious Horizon of Dr. Susan Blackmore undergoing Persinger's test (the programme was about her ideas on alien abduction).
 
damn!!:mad: missed the prog. but from looking at the beeb's website it is being shown again in the sign zone on 23 april, so for any other unlucky ft'ers like me there's another chance to video.
 
escargot said:
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.
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The device is called a 'Koren Helmet'. I remember seeing a website page a while back which stated that it had been patented.

This search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q="Koren+Helmet"&btnG=Google+Search

Leads to:
http://www.innerworlds.50megs.com/neuromag.htm

Inventing Shakti - A New Technology for Spiritual process.

Todd Murphy
Researching Behavioral Neuroscientist
Laurentian University Behavioral Neurosciences Program
Associate researcher.

Drugs are just sooo passé :spinning
 
Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention, but was the programme makers' claimed intent to turn Richard Dawkins into a religious believer through artificially inducing a visionary experience within his brain? What does that have to do with belief in the reality of the supernatural? It was interesting that he ended up experiencing less than the average experimentee.

"Persinger says a prior test showed that Dawkins has low sensitivity in the temporal lobes, which the helmet stimulates."
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Does that make him as biased and deluded as someone with high sensitivity in the temporal lobes? Perhaps the very reason why he is such an extreme atheist is because he is mentally ill and has something that is, effectively, the opposite to temporal lobe epilepsy. Or is he at the other end of the natural diversity spectrum?

I haven't read Pascal Boyer's work but I think we have done more than develop a 'protective belief in hidden spirits'. Personally, I have no problem accepting that the religious or spiritual ideas of the last few thousand years are responses to those ancient instincts that enabled our pre-human ancestors to survive long enough to pass on their genes. They helped them anticipate the presence of dangerous animals lurking in the shadows, but were later supplanted by learned knowledge about those predators.

Also, this facillity seems to be naturally varied and diverse across individuals, and not the result of disease or injury. These impulses, in some more than others, for something unseen has since, it seems to me, evolved further into something genuinely functional enabling people to deal with stuff like the stress of knowing about death and for uniting populations too. How does that sound?

Both science and religion are essentially engaged in the same thing, aren't they? That is, the attempt to make sense of and explain the world? Were not the religious explanations of the past just like the scientific ones of today: the best possible guess at that time?

What else? There wasn't any mention of Persinger's interest in earthquake lights, just auroras apparently have.
 
The idea was not to turn Richard Dawkins into a religious believer. It was to find out what happens when the 'religion' sites in a non-believer's brain are stimulated.

I'd like to try this helmet. As I've said, I have had experiences which have been construed by others as religious or even holy, but to me they were meaningless though interesting events.
 
Hi all. For those who want to know more about this type of experience it may be worth checking out the 'meaning of life' thread for another slant.
Briefly, there are two main types of event - one is where the experiencer becomes aware of a 'presence/god' and/or strong religious imagery. The second type - which is far more common - happens both spontaneously or within meditation where the subject actually feels that they BECOME what others may describe as god, but the subject usually will not. Personger is looking at the former, not the latter.

Regards,
NEttinetti
 
Ahhhh...type in haste, repent at liesure. What I should have said in my very ambiguous posting above, is that there is no religious imagery present in the meditative/spontaneous experiences I talk about. A key aspect of the events that Persinger is researching is the 'presence' and religious fervour (which he frequently mistakes for religious experiences) - neither of which occurs in Enlightenment Experiences. The latter are far more common than their religious counterparts - though no less deep nor intriguing - with around 54% of us experiencing one to some degree during our lifetimes.
Nettinetti
 
Is God merely a function of the brain?

It has been proved in tests that stimulating the temporal lobes of the brain can induce religious visions and feelings of being outside of the body. Some religious visions have been put down to seizures in the temporal lobes, is religion therefore merely a function of part of the brain?
Dose this mean that there really is no God, perhaps He's an evolutionary device to help the human mind cope with the idea that after their span of eighty years that's it, no more existence. Having the hope that after death there may be some other world or dimension that the 'soul' can exist independently in is perhaps some protection for the reasoning mind against what might otherwise be feelings of futility, hopelessness, mortality etc.
I'd be interested to know what others think.
 
No. If we accept that all religion is illusory (and I'm not suggesting that we should other than for the sake of this argument), then it is mostly cultural.

If we manipulate someone's temporal lobes, we can induce religious experiences, or other mystical experiences (alien abductions, for example). The form these illusory experiences take is shaped by what the subject expects. If they expect to see God, than they may well see God, or something related to God. If they expect little green men, then they will probably see little green men. If they expect to see Pan dancing with Liberace while Elvis plays the Theremin, then they'll most likely interpret their experience that way. (And they should seek therapy.)

Maybe I've wandered off from the point a bit, but I would argue that religion is a cultural phenomenon, not a neurological phenomenon. Different people relate to the same type of stimulus in different way, largely due to their cultural background.
 
Yes I take your point, but it still does not alter the original idea I was trying to get across.
The fact that the results of the activity of the temporal lobes may be interpreted differently due to cultural conditioning does not alter the fact that at source it's still just the result of brain activity and not something external to the brain, nothing to do with a higher being or some other plane.
 
Perhaps this part of the brain is the area responsible for 'god sensing' and certain people are naturally more inclined to have a better ability in this?

We know other areas of the brain help with understanding the world around us, right hand side seems to understand patterns and colours better, while the left seems more anylitical in its perceptions.

Hey its just a theory... admitedly this would need more work.
 
Having a part of the brain dedicated to colour sensation does not imply that colour does not exist - rather it suggests an adaptation in response to stimulus.

So a part of the brain dedicated to sensations of numinosity suggests... ;)
 
The portions of our brain dedicated to vision allow us to detect light, the portions of our brain dedicated to hearing allow us to detect "sound", and so on and so forth. Each of these areas, when artificially stimulted, will produce internal representations in relation to the purposes they serve (e.g. flashes of light, noises and voices).

So here we have an area of the brain that produces a mystical or god-like experience (and it is always a mystical experience, not just any type of fantasy) then it's logical to assume that its purpose is to enable communication with some other aspect, or level, of our universe that we don't currently correspond with on a regular basis.

Evolution dictates that all attributes of an organism are there for a purpose, and have evolved due to need. So in order to refute the above point of view, another reason would have to provided for such a brain function to exist. A few have been put forward, but without exception they are inadequate. I tend to think that the "god spot" area of the brain allows communication with the "real reality", unencumbered by the abstraction and trivia of everyday life, i.e. it's the natural state of existence that has been gradually superceded by the shallow, abstract lifestyle of modern humans.

Of course, another explanation would be that evolution is not the cause of this brain function, which means that it was a result of intelligent design, which in turn means that the whole argument is moot.
 
Dose this mean that there really is no God, perhaps He's an evolutionary device to help the human mind cope with the idea that after their span of eighty years that's it, no more existence. Having the hope that after death there may be some other world or dimension that the 'soul' can exist independently in is perhaps some protection for the reasoning mind against what might otherwise be feelings of futility, hopelessness, mortality etc.
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Of course, this is another explanation, but can easily be refuted by the knowledge that atheists do not have any shorter longevity than those that believe in God, and that those that believe in God rarely do so as a result of a mystical experience. In other words, it doesn't affect evolution.
 
Agreed, it is an open question. The neuroscience, superb though it is, takes us no further towards a solution. The field is now open to philosophy.

I certainly agree that the arguement which runs 'if I can stimulate a mystical experience, all mystical experience lacks reference beyond itself' doesn't hang together. A part of the brain seemingly adapted to receive stimulus suggests the existence of a stimulus in the first place.

I believe that it is a truly Fortean topic as here we have an instance of arguably one of the most reductive disciplines among the life sciences unwittingly hoist on its own petard, then refusing to come to terms with it. Conclusive evidence of the reality of a source of mystic experience beyond the unconscious it ain't - however, highly suggestive it is, and worthy of assimulation into the mainstream. That does not seem likely to happen in the near future, though, as it cuts against the grain of learned opinion.
 
Having a part of the brain dedicated to colour sensation does not imply that colour does not exist - rather it suggests an adaptation in response to stimulus.
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But colour doesn't exist, it's a gross simplification of a range of wavelengths of light which would otherwise be too complex for the brain to interpret.


Evolution dictates that all attributes of an organism are there for a purpose, and have evolved due to need. So in order to refute the above point of view, another reason would have to provided for such a brain function to exist.
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Traits that are useless or even a survival disadvantage in some cases can arise as a consequence or side effect of the evolution of a useful trait - the relationship between malaria resistance and sickle cell anaemia is a good example of that.

Don't forget too that there may be all sorts of evolutionary throwbacks in there, traits that might have been useful to any of our precursors and which have never been removed from the genome because they never became a disadvantage in themselves.

Stimulating the temporal lobes a la Persinger gives some results in some people and no result in others, we should remember though that when it gives a result it is a natural responce to an un-natural stimulus (and considered quite similar to what happens during TLE).

If we were looking for an alternative explanation of why the brain may be able to percieve a godlike presence, the best that I can think of is that it might be a feature to help babies bond to their mother (who is to someone of that age, the nearest thing to god-like).
 
Nice idea - but a bit of a reduction. Mystical experience and maternal affection are not really the same, and in anycase such bonding is surely the function of other parts of the brain.

True, colour as such doesn't exist - but the stimulus does.

The existence of a mysterious something that stimulates the mystical does not confirm any particular religious paradigm - an existentialist could lay as strong a claim as a deist of any hue. All it does is hint at mystical experience originating outside of us - which is worth examining.
 
Re: Is God merely a function of the brain?

ringwraith said:
It has been proved in tests that stimulating the temporal lobes of the brain can induce religious visions and feelings of being outside of the body. Some religious visions have been put down to seizures in the temporal lobes, is religion therefore merely a function of part of the brain?
Dose this mean that there really is no God, perhaps He's an evolutionary device to help the human mind cope with the idea that after their span of eighty years that's it, no more existence. Having the hope that after death there may be some other world or dimension that the 'soul' can exist independently in is perhaps some protection for the reasoning mind against what might otherwise be feelings of futility, hopelessness, mortality etc.
I'd be interested to know what others think.
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Lots of people who believe strongly in a god haven't had any kind of religious experience such as visions etc.
Many people end up believing in a god through peer pressure or parental pressure, or the pressures of the society they find themselves in.
 
There's a book out called The God Part of the Brain. Heard the author on Art Bell a few years. He made an interesting case.

Website for the book: http://godpart.com/
 
Unfortunately the premise of this author is demonstrably nonsense. He says essentially that the part of the brain responsible for "spiritual awareness" arose because humans realised that death was inescapable and this led to a state of constant anxiety, which, of course, could not be allowed to continue. This fails to explain how over 60% of the world's population get by on a day to day basis without being overcome by horror and desolation but hey, no theory's perfect!* It also doesn't appear to address the fact that most life-changing spiritual experiences occur at the point of death, and it's only due to recent medical advances that more people are brought "back to life" to recount them. Hardy something that could be classed as a survival trait.

edit* Neither does it explain why the concept of the judgement of a person's life would occur in the after-life (hardly something to look forward to), which is a feature of most religions. Nor the concept of hell, etc. etc.
 
Although I find the concept of my own non-existance as horrifying as anyone would, there is also something relieving and beautiful about it - ahh, no more me, that's so nice:blissed:. I have what could be called a "spiritual awareness" - a sense of the "oneness" of everything and my connection to it - but I have a hard time accepting the concept of life after death; it feels counterintuitive to me.
 
In "The Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (a very intimidating title for a book that is actually a pretty easy read), Julian Jaynes suggests that one hemisphere of the brain literally talked to the other in ancient man and that this was the basis of many ancient religions. Or something like that - its been a good few years since I read it. Anyway, I've popped in a link in case anyone's interested:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618057072/


(Edit)

Should've said - that's ancient man in historical terms, not evolutionary ones. So not really that long ago.
 
Tests of faith

Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe? Ian Sample reports

Thursday February 24, 2005
The Guardian

First for some figures. Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world.

Faith has long been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition, faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry. In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief to a hunch. It places the assumptions at the heart of many religions on the rockiest of ground.

So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.

One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist turned psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history. Others maintain that religious belief is too modern to have made any difference.

"What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer.

Psychological tests Boyer has run on children go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe. "If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done. It's a false belief, but it's good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything," he says. "The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us."

Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. "When you're in a belief system, it's not that you stop asking questions, it's that they become irrelevant. Why don't you ask yourself about the existence of gravity? It's because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where's the motivation to question it?" he says. "In belief systems, you tend to enter this strange state where you start thinking there must be something to it because everybody around you is committed to it. The general question of whether it's true is relegated."

While some continue to tease out the reasons for the emergence of religion and its persistent appeal, others are delving into the neuroscience of belief in the hope of finding a biological basis for religious experience. As a starting point, many studies focused on people with particular neural conditions that made them prone to experiences so intense, they considered them to be visions of God.

At the University of California in San Diego, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran noticed that a disproportionate number of patients - around a quarter - with a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy reported having deeply moving religious experiences. "They'd tell me they felt a presence or suddenly felt they got the meaning of the whole cosmos. And these could be life-changing experiences," says Ramachandran. The feelings always came during seizures, even if the seizures were so mild, they could only be detected by sensitive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Between the seizures, some patients became preoccupied with thoughts about God.

Ramachandran drew up three explanations he thought might explain why the patients with epilepsy seemed so spiritual. First, he considered that the upwelling of emotion caused by the seizure might simply overwhelm, and patients made sense of it by believing that something extremely spiritual was going on. Second, the seizure might prompt the left hemisphere to make up yarns to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions. The ability of the brain's left hemisphere to "confabulate" like this is well known to neuroscientists. Third, he wondered whether seizures disrupted the function of part of the brain called the amygdala which, among other tasks, helps us focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial.

Ramachandran decided to test a couple of patients using what is called the galvanic skin response. Two electrodes are used to measure tiny changes in the skin's electrical conductivity, an indirect measure of sweating. In most people, conductivity goes up when they are shown violent or sexual pictures, or similarly loaded words. In the test, Ramachandran found that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy responded very differently from others. Violent words such as "beat" and sexual words produced not a flicker, but religious icons and the word "God" evoked a big response.

With only two patients involved in the study, Ramachandran says it is impossible to draw any conclusions, but if the results stand up to future testing, it might indicate that seizures in the temporal lobe strengthen certain neural pathways connected to the amygdala, meaning we attribute significance to the banal objects and occurrences. "If those pathways all strengthen indiscriminately, everything and anything acquires a deep significance, and when that happens, it starts resembling a religious experience," he says. "And if we can selectively enhance religious sentiments, then that seems to imply there is neural circuitry whose activity is conducive to religious belief. It's not that we have some God module in our brains, but we may have specialised circuits for belief."

At the University of Pennsylvania, radiologist Andrew Newberg has cast a wider net to scan the brains of people performing all manner of spiritual activities. By injecting radioactive tracers into the veins of nuns, Buddhists and others, he has constructed brain maps that show how different practices affect neural processing. "What comes out is there's a complex network in the brain and depending on what you do, it is activated in different ways," says Newberg. "If someone does Tibetan Buddhist mediation they'll activate certain parts of their brain, but if you have a nun praying they'll activate slightly different parts, with someone doing transcendental mediation activating other areas again."

Newberg uncovered the neural processing behind the religious experience of "oneness" with the universe. Blood flow drops off in the parietal lobe, a brain structure that helps us orient ourselves by giving us a sense of ourselves. "We think this latter step is critical," says Newberg. "What seems to be happening is that as you block sensory information getting into the parietal lobe, it keeps trying to give you a sense of self, but it no longer has the information to do so. If that happens completely, you might get this absolute feeling of oneness."

Newberg has been criticised for his investigations into the essence of spiritual experience - the most vehement attacks coming from atheists. "Some people want me to say whether God is there or not, but these experiments can't answer that. If I scan a nun and she has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what's going on in her brain, but I can't tell you whether or not God is there," he says. Religious groups point out that there is more to religion than extreme experiences. It is a criticism Newberg acknowledges. "The problem is, the people who have these experiences are so much easier to study," he says.

As neuroscientists unpick the biological mechanisms behind religious experience, others are considering what to do with the information. At Laurentian University, Todd Murphy and Michael Persinger are developing devices they think can stimulate parts of the brain to enhance spiritual experiences. Others see the possibility for drugs designed to boost spirituality. Newberg says this would be underpinning a practice that has existed for hundreds of years with scientific understanding. "If you talk to a shamen who takes a substance so they can enter into the spirit world, they don't think that diminishes the experience in any way," he says.

Intriguingly, many scientists, while stressing that they have set out to explore religion rather than disprove its basis, say that no matter what they uncover about the nature of spiritual experiences, mass religious belief will continue. The fastest growing religions in the US are the Mormon church and Scientology, both popular, according to Boyer largely because they are new. In other parts of the world, more fundamentalist religions succeed because they give a clear vision of the world.

"For two centuries, there's been competition between churches and in the free market of religion, the products get better and better as people want different things," says Boyer. "Will science be the death of religion? As neuroscience, it's interesting to see how brains can create very strange states of consciousness, but in terms of threatening religion, I think it'll have absolutely no effect."

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Further reading

Darwin's Cathedral , University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226901351
David Sloan-Wilson argues religion is evolution at work

Religion Explained ,Vintage, ISBN 0099282763
Pascal Boyer on religion as a tool for social integrity

Brain-wise Bradford Book, ISBN 026203301
Patricia Smith Churchland on the neural basis of religion

What Is Good? ,Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 0297841327
AC Grayling on humanity's search for a moral code

www.andrewnewberg.com

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· Todd Murphy will be speaking on the evolution of God at the Art and Mind Festival, Religion, Art and the Brain, March 10-13, Theatre Royal, Winchester. Box office 01962 840440 or www.artandmind.org
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March 05, 2005

Body&Soul

Ghosts in a machine

What is it that triggers the brain to produce a religious experience?

Jerome Burne investigates

Jim lives in California and he’s into an extreme sport. But he’s not testing his limits with gravity or exhaustion. His equipment consists of a darkened room, a blindfold, heavy-duty earplugs and eight magnetic coils, linked to a PC and attached to his head with a Velcro headband.

Jim’s arena is inner space. The envelope he’s pushing is consciousness, using a set of experiences more commonly thought of as religious or spiritual. The coils and computer program, known as a Shakti headset, transmit magnetic pulses that stimulate regions of his brain linked with altered states of consciousness. At various times over the past year, Jim claims to have had out-of-body experiences, felt a state of “oceanic bliss” and sensed presences near by.

Next weekend the inventor of the Shakti headset, Todd Murphy, will be one of the speakers at the Religion, Art and the Brain festival in Winchester, along with Sufi dancers, the music of John Tavener, psychologists, neuroscientists and pharmacologists. The focus of their talks will be: “The evolution, experience and expression of the religious impulse — what triggers the brain to produce it and why?”

For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or “intimations of the divine”, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore “altered states”. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn ’t the experience of being “at one with the universe” just be the result of brain cells firing?

Traditionally, one of the ways to stimulate these experiences has been with hallucinatory or psychedelic herbs and drugs — a route that has been declared legally off-limits for individuals and researchers since the 1960s. But that is changing, too. Recently licences have been granted in the USA to study the medical benefits of using such outlawed drugs as Ecstasy and the peyote mushroom to treat psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It may be a sign of the times that just before Christmas the US Supreme Court ruled that members of the New Mexico branch of a Brazilian church, Uniao Do Vegetal, should be allowed to use the hallucinatory herbal concoction ayahuasca in ceremonies. Ayahuasca has long been used by South American shamans and is renowned for the snake visions it induces.

The poet Allen Ginsberg tried it in the 1950s in an attempt to expand his consciousness. “I rushed out and began vomiting,” he wrote, “all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, coloured serpents in an aureole around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe.”

Uncovering how a complex chemical stew triggers something as specific as serpentine visions would be a daunting scientific challenge, let alone identifying precisely which regions of the brain were involved. But for at least 100 years neurologists have been recording the bizarrely detailed altered states produced by very specific activity in the brains of epileptics. Recently, observations on epileptics have provided clues to the neural mechanism underlying out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

“I was in bed and about to fall asleep when I had the distinct impression that I was at ceiling level looking down at my body,” began an article in the British Medical Journal last December. According to the author, Olaf Blanke, a the Swiss neuroscientist, 10 per cent of people experience OBEs but because epileptics, who have them as part of their seizures, keep on having them, it is possible to identify the brain regions involved. He concluded that they are the results of “an interference with the tempro-parietal junction of the brain”. This is the place, on both sides of the head, where two brain regions controlling vision and spatial awareness meet.

The discovery that the uncontrolled firings of neurons in epileptics’ brains can trigger a range of altered states inspired Dr Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at the Laurentian University in Ontario, to see if he could replicate them in his laboratory by stimulating subjects’ temporal lobes with magnetic impulses. He designed and built Room C002B, otherwise known as the “Heaven and Hell” chamber, back in the mid-Eighties , in which over 1,000 subjects have now been induced to experience ghostly presences.

Persinger’s chamber — one of whose visitors was the British arch-atheist Professor Richard Dawkins (he experienced nothing) — is what might be called a “mainframe” version of the portable Shakti equipment that Todd Murphy will be demonstrating at the conference.

What others have experienced in Room C002B depended on their cultural or religious beliefs. Some saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad, or the Sky Spirit. Others, with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell of something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story.

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The radical element of the Shakti headset is that it puts brain stimulation back in the hands of the individual rather than being something done to people in a lab. This may be the way of the future. As an American chronicler in this field, John Horgan, has remarked: “Trying to understand mystical experiences without having one, is like a eunuch trying to understand sex.”

So far Murphy has sold about 100 headsets at about £130 each, including accessories, mainly to men aged 40 to 60 who are interested in “general consciousness exploration”. Most of them are not looking for extreme experiences like Jim. Instead, Murphy says: “They just want to feel better or to deepen regular spiritual practices like meditation.”

Apparently, this particular route to religious experience isn’t so popular with women, who make up only about 15 per cent of his clients.

Now that religious experiences are edging into mainstream neuroscience, theories about what is going on are coming thick and fast. Dr Andrew Newberg, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, for instance, believes that the patterns of activity that show up on the brain scans of people praying or meditating fit well with the sort of experiences they report.

The deeper the meditation, he says, the more active are the areas involved with both attention and powerful emotions. At the same time, an area at the back of the brain that orients you in time and space quietens down. “The result is that the boundaries of the self fall away, creating an intense feeling of being at one with the universe,” he says.

So the big question for the conference becomes: Is the whole human range of spiritual and paranormal experiences no more than unusual patterns of brain activity? Persinger and Murphy seem to disagree on this one.

Persinger was quoted recently in Time magazine as saying that: “God is an artefact of the brain,” while Murphy, interviewed for this article, was keen to emphasise that his aim was to “enhance spirituality, not to replace it”.

Rita Carter, a scientific advisor to the festival and author of a popular book on neuroscience entitled Mapping the Mind, has described an occasion when she became “at one” with the gas fire and then the whole room and finally the entire universe. So was this no more than unstable temporal lobes in the same way that epilepsy is thought to be caused by instability in the brain — or was there more to it than that?

“What researchers are finding is that there seem to be common brain pathways underlying all transcendental experiences,” she says. “It’s the cultural interpretations that vary. But what’s really challenging is that the research evidence is very strong that what we think of normal everyday reality is actually a construction of the brain.

“However, it is quite clear that the brain is also able to construct a version of reality that is quite unlike the survival-orientated ‘normal’, one. Now why on earth should it have evolved to do that and why is our culture so dead set against exploring it?”

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Religion, Art and the Brain is at Theatre Royal, Winchester, March 10-13; 01962 840440, www.artandmind.org

Further reading: Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality, by John Horgan (Mariner Books)
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Source
 
I feel we are long-overdue for a re-examination of Persinger's work, including the "God Helmet" experiments, coupled with a review of some of the earlier content from this intriguing 'God on the Brain' thread (which shares it's name with the eponymus edition of the 'Horizon' tv documentary programme.

Hence my attempt at multiple quoted citations from the thread (so far...)

Anonymous said:
(New Scientist's article) is focused on the brains ability to generate 'religious experience'. It discusses Micheal Persinger of Laurentian University, Ontario and his 'ghost hat'.
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Surely this area of repeatable scientific research has been getting worked upon, in detail, over the last 15 years or longer?

Anonymous said:
and the fact that Alzheimer's disease
is often marked by a loss of religious interest, tending to cripple the limbic system early on.
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I've personally witnessed this in two deeply-religious people. One was following a serious head injury, the other (a priest with early-onset Alzheimer's syndrome). In both cases, their religiosity was reset to zero within days/weeks. So much so, that I've always meant to post about it here, on the forum.

escargot1 said:
A relative of mine told me about her BF's strange religious experiences- he would sometimes fall to his knees in a sort of ecstasy surrounded by bright invisible (!) light.
Erm, I said, is any member of his family epileptic?
Turns out his mother is.
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@escargot1 please can you expand on this. And also on your own personal experiences (if you can, and despite your subsequent atheism)

Anonymous said:
On another point. Perhaps the design of certain Holy Places (anything from the caves of Lascaux and Stonehenge, to Gothic Cathedrals), is intended to affect and stimulate, the organs of 'God sense?'
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So whilst there can be unaguable accoustic effects experienced at these loxations, are we implying that there are also EM concentrations being repeatably & perhaps measurably experienced there, too? Hmm....

Jerry_B said:
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.
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Well...perhaps. But if you/we do genuinely reveal mechanism, perhaps we also exorcise inherrent meaning.

Jerry_B said:
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
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Does anyone know if/where Persinger stores or publishes this data?

butterfly27 said:
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...............
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.
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This I find intriguing- a possible physiological justification (indeed, a procreative inter-individual path) for possessing such a 'God-centre'. To optimise the making of more people with such functionality. Perhaps I join too many dots here. I'll try again to explain my point here, but don't lose this. Almost gets into the realms of telepathy for telegenetics

escargot1 said:
The idea was not to turn Richard Dawkins into a religious believer. It was to find out what happens when the 'religion' sites in a non-believer's brain are stimulated.

I'd like to try this helmet. As I've said, I have had experiences which have been construed by others as religious or even holy, but to me they were meaningless though interesting events.
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@escargot1 me too. And I've accidently been exposed to a slightly-similar effect (not a pleasant experience, it was when my head was briefly degaussed....but let's not be side-tracked by one of my many laboratory mishaps).

(More to follow on this, please, FTMB membership)
 
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There's a well-known connection between epilepsy and spirituality. Epilepsy itself has even been called 'sacred'. We have threads on epilepsy.
 
I feel sure that this 'God Helmet' could be used to 'cure' religiosity. That is, if we start to treat it as a form of mental illness. That and 'de-programming' techniques could be used to treat Islamic extremists, bringing them back to rational normality.
 
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