The God part of the Brain - www.ezboard.com

>

SRF Walrus

Mt. Washington, Ca

Open discussions about SRF

SRF Walrus > In the news > The God part of the Brain
	<< Prev Topic \| Next Topic >>

Author	Comment
username Registered User (2/27/03 4:58 pm) Reply	The God part of the Brain Spirituality and the Brain Does Research Show New Evidence for Faith, or a Challenge to Religion? By Michel Martin W A S H I N G T O N, Jan. 14 — Believers from every tradition and around the world have reported similar sensations of religious experience — a feeling of completeness, absence of self, or oneness with the universe, feelings of peace, freedom from fear, ecstatic joy, visions of a Supreme Being. With the aid of new technology that allows them to watch the brain in action, a group of scientists — sometimes described as "neurotheologists" — have tried to explain how such experiences occur and perhaps even why. "There are certain [brain] patterns that can be generated experimentally that will generate the sense, presence and the feeling of God-like experiences," says professor of Neuroscience Michael Persinger of Ontario's Laurentia University. "The patterns we use are complex but they imitate what the brain does normally." Persinger originally set out to explore the nature of creativity and sense of self. But his research into patterns of brain activity led him to delve into the nature of mystical experiences as well. To do this Persinger puts his subjects in a quiet room, depriving them of light and sound, so that the nerve cells typically involved in seeing and hearing are not stimulated. Then he applies a magnetic field pattern over the right hemisphere of the brain. Persinger was asked if his work leads him to conclude that "God," or the experience of God, is solely the creation of brain-wave activity. "My point of view is, 'Let's measure it.' Let's keep an open mind and realize maybe there is no God; maybe there might be," says Persinger. "We're not going to answer it by arguments — we're going to answer it by measurement and understanding the areas of the brain that generate the experience and the patterns that experimentally produce it in the laboratory." Mind, Body and Belief To others who have thought deeply about religion, that is a conclusion that far outstrips the evidence — a scientific leap of faith, if you will. "They have isolated one small aspect of religious experience and they are identifying that with the whole of religion," says John Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University. Religion "is not all meditative bliss. It also involves moments when you feel abandoned by God," says Haught. "It involves commitments and suffering and struggle.… Religion is visiting widows and orphans; it is symbolism and myth and story and much richer things." Persinger says he is less concerned with trying to prove or disprove the existence of God than with understanding and documenting the experience. However, in his view, "if we have to draw conclusions now, based upon the data, the answer would be more on the fact that there is no deity." He is clear about an underlying motivation of his work — a fear that unscrupulous people might use techniques to provoke a spiritual experience to control people. But Persinger also acknowledges a more positive possibility: "If you look at the spontaneous cases of people who have God experiences and conversions, their health improves," he says. "So if we can understand the patterns of activity that generate this experience, we may also be able to understand how to have the brain — and hence the body — cure itself." What Prayer Does That search for the mind-body connection also motivates the work of other researchers, such as Professor Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania. "Whether there is a God or not in some senses isn't as relevant to the kind of research we're doing so much as understanding why those feelings and experiences are important to us as human beings," he says. Newberg observed the brains of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns as they engaged in deep prayer and mediation by injecting radioactive dye, or "tracer" as the subject entered a deep meditative state, then photographing the results with a high tech imaging camera. He found that "when people meditate they have significantly increased activity in the frontal area — the attention area of the brain — and decreased activity in that orientation part of the brain." Many of these changes occur whether people are praying (focusing on oneness with a deity) or meditating (focusing on oneness with the universe). But there are differences, in that prayer activates the "language center" in the brain, while the "visual center" is engaged by meditation. Either way, Newberg finds that the sense of "unity," or "oneness" experienced by his subjects is a real, biological event. And he acknowledges the limits of his own work: He currently lacks a means to measure the neurological events associated with other religious practices — such as caring for the poor or ecstatic worship. "Our work really points to the fact that these are very complex kinds of feelings and experiences that affect us on many different levels," says Newberg. "There is no one simple way of looking at these kinds of questions." Science and the Afterlife Across the country, at the University of Arizona, professor of Neurology and Psychiatry Gary Schwartz would probably say: "Amen" to that. Perhaps the most controversial of the group of researchers dedicated to studying the "God spot" in the brain, Schwartz explores the question of whether consciousness survives death with the help of mediums (people who demonstrate unusual accuracy in describing intimate attributes of the dead to those who knew them well). His experiments compare the brain waves and heart rates of both the medium and the person for whom he or she is trying to contact the dead. "One of the fundamental questions is, 'How does a medium receive this kind of information?'" he explains. "To what extent are they using specific regions of the brain which are purportedly associated with other kinds of mystical or religious experiences?" Schwartz says his research "is actually a window or a doorway, if you will, to a much larger spiritual reality which integrates ancient wisdom with contemporary science." He concludes that the human brain is wired to receive signals from what he calls a "Grand Organizing Design," or G.O.D. "Survival of conscience tells us that consciousness does not require a brain, that our memories, our intentions, our intelligence, our dreams? all of that can exist outside of the physical body," says Schwartz. "Now, by the way, that's the same idea that we have about God — that something that is "invisible," that is "bigger than all of us," which we cannot see, can have intellect, creativity, intention, memory and can influence the universe." The Quest for Larger Things Like the other researchers interviewed for Nightline, Schwartz suggests that his work has taken him on a personal spiritual journey, requiring him to ask himself hard questions about science, faith, and reason. And Schwartz says that rather than diminishing faith, inquiries like his should enlarge the world's understanding of it. On that point, he and theologian John Haught agree. "Faith is the sense of being grasped by this higher dimension, or more comprehensive, or deeper reality," says Haught. "If we could come up with clear proof or an absolutely mathematically lucid proof or verification of deity, then that would not be deity — it would be something smaller than us.…" — Nightline producer Joe O'Connor contributed to this report.
username Registered User (2/27/03 5:00 pm) Reply	Re: The God part of the Brain This Is Your Brain on God Michael Persinger has a vision - the Almighty isn't dead, he's an energy field. And your mind is an electromagnetic map to your soul. By Jack Hitt Over a scratchy speaker, a researcher announces, "Jack, one of your electrodes is loose, we're coming in." The 500-pound steel door of the experimental chamber opens with a heavy whoosh; two technicians wearing white lab coats march in. They remove the Ping-Pong-ball halves taped over my eyes and carefully lift a yellow motorcycle helmet that's been retrofitted with electromagnetic field-emitting solenoids on the sides, aimed directly at my temples. Above the left hemisphere of my 42-year-old male brain, they locate the dangling electrode, needed to measure and track my brain waves. The researchers slather more conducting cream into the graying wisps of my red hair and press the securing tape hard into my scalp. After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God. I'm taking part in a vanguard experiment on the physical sources of spiritual consciousness, the current work-in-progress of Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a "sensed presence." Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations - describing the presence as one's grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story. It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism, pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal - aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it. To those of us who prefer a little mystery in our lives, it all sounds like a letdown. And as I settle in for my mind trip, I'm starting to get apprehensive. I'm a lapsed Episcopalian clinging to only a hazy sense of the divine, but I don't especially like the idea that whatever vestigial faith I have in the Almighty's existence might get clinically lobotomized by Persinger's demo. Do I really want God to be rendered as explicable and predictable as an endorphin rush after a 3-mile run? The journey from my home in Connecticut to the mining district north of Lake Huron is, by modern standards, arduous. Given what's in store, it's also strangely fitting. When you think of people seeking divine visions, you imagine them trekking to some mountainous cloister. The pilgrimage to Persinger's lab is the clinical counterpart. The trip involves flying in increasingly smaller puddle-jumpers with increasingly fewer propellers until you land in the ore-rich Ontario town of Sudbury, a place that's been battered by commerce, geography, and climate. Jags of red rock and black iron erupt from the landscape, often bolting right out of the pavement. The weather-beaten concrete exteriors of the city's buildings speak of long, harsh winters. A short car ride through stony suburbs ends at a forlorn cluster of a dozen buildings: Laurentian University. Near Parking Lot 4, I am met by Charles Cook, a grad student of Persinger's. He leads me into the science building's basement, then to the windowless confines of Room C002B, Persinger's lair. Waiting there is Linda St-Pierre, another graduate student, who prompts me to sit down, then launches into a series of psychological questions. I answer a range of true-or-false statements from an old version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test designed to ferret out any nuttiness that might disqualify me from serving as a study subject. When read individually, the questions seem harmless, but as a group they sound hopelessly antiquated, as if the folks who devised the exam hadn't checked the warehouse for anachronisms in five decades: I like to read mechanics magazines. Someone is trying to poison me. I have successful bowel movements. I know who is trying to get me. As a child, I enjoyed playing drop-the-handkerchief. I'm escorted into the chamber, an old sound-experiment booth. The tiny room doesn't appear to have been redecorated since it was built in the early '70s. The frayed spaghettis of a brown-and-white shag carpet, along with huge, wall-mounted speakers covered in glittery black nylon, surround a spent brown recliner upholstered in the prickly polymers of that time. The chair, frankly, is repellent. Hundreds of subjects have settled into its itchy embrace, and its brown contours are spotted with dollops of electrode-conducting cream, dried like toothpaste, giving the seat the look of a favored seagulls' haunt. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Hitt is the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain.
username Registered User (2/27/03 5:11 pm) Reply	Re: The God part of the Brain God in the Brain Saturday, August 10, 2002 BY TONY SEMERAD THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE To those who believe, prayer can be a mysterious distillation of adoration, gratitude, pain and hope. Science prefers what is "real," and thus subject to measurement, analysis and explanation. Now two Pennsylvania researchers have put worship to scientific scrutiny and found in the recesses of the brain evidence of a "machinery of transcendence" that gives the faithful a glimpse of the divine. Using high-tech imaging techniques to chart brain activity during spiritual experiences, Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili zeroed in on portions of the brain and concluded that God may actually be hardwired inside our skulls. "Science has surprised us,'' Newberg and D'Aquili write in Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and The Biology of Belief. "Our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something." The authors are adamant that their findings do not purport to confirm the existence of God, but, remarkably for scientists, they do not rule it out. ''This has made us somewhat unique,'' Newberg said in an interview. ''We hope to encourage people, the layperson if you will, to explore their own feelings and beliefs about religion and science, and deepen their understanding of both.'' Newberg, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and D'Aquili, associate professor of psychology at U. of Penn. until his death in August 1998, spent nearly six years researching brain physiology for the book. They have compiled data using radioactive dyes to trace clusters of activity in the brains of praying Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists in meditation, capturing images while subjects were at the height of religious devotion. This SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) imaging allowed them to pinpoint areas of neuronal activity during spiritual experiences. When combined with existing science that links specific functions to specific locales of the brain, the authors say, these experiments have major implications for how we understand world religions, myth, ritual and mysticism. Perhaps Newberg and D'Aquili's most startling finding: Parts of the brain said to be responsible for defining the borders between the self and the world seem to change dramatically in those approaching deep spiritual states. Brain scans indicate that worshippers have their sense of self gradually wiped away or made limitless, and they seem to experience a sense of infinite space and eternity, or a timeless, spaceless void. This, of course, coincides closely with the sensations commonly described by those recounting their feelings when prayer or meditation brings them closer to God or a higher reality. The scientists go further. In monitoring two small areas of the cerebral cortex, called the attention-association area and the orientation-association area, they noticed varying degrees of this selfless, spaceless and timeless sensation, implying a spectrum as worshippers move deeper into spiritual experience. At the endpoint of this spectrum, they contend, is a ''state of pure mind, of an awareness beyond object and subject,'' which they call ''Absolute Unitary Being.'' Newberg and D'Aquili speculate that all world religions may trace their origins back through culturally diverse interpretations of this same mental state. ''All religions, therefore, are kin. None of them can exclusively own the realist reality, but all of them, at their best, steer the heart and the mind in the right direction.'' And, the authors contend, the evidence suggests the brain does not invent this supreme religious state, but instead finds it. Standard thinking among most psychologists and sociologists, the authors say, has been that religion arises from "a cognitive process, based on faulty logic and incorrect deductions: In very simple terms, we feel fear and we long for comfort so we dream up a powerful protector in the sky. "A neurological approach, however, suggests that God is not the product of a cognitive, deductive process, but was instead 'discovered' in a mystical or spiritual encounter made known to human consciousness through the transcendent machinery of the mind,'' they write. First published by Ballantine Books in 2001 to widespread media coverage, the book was re-released in April 2002 with a new epilogue. Written with freelance author Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away is among the first mass-market books dealing with the new field of neurotheology, which blends studies in neurology and theology. The two have not mixed well; science traditionally has viewed mysticism as the product of deluded or distorted minds. The revelations retold by Islam's Mohammed, the religious visions of the Catholic mystic St. Teresa of Avila and the conversion experience of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith have at times been ascribed by scientists to illness or seizure. But research indicates far from malfunctioning, the human mind is instead "mystical by default,'' write Newberg and D'Aquili. "We believe this sense of realness strongly suggests that the accounts of the mystics are not indications of minds in disarray, but are the proper, predictable neurological result of a stable, coherent mind willing itself toward a higher spiritual plane,'' they write. Brain physiology also may reveal much about how religious myths are formed and account for why, as noted by scholar Joseph Campbell, the myths of separate cultures have been strikingly similar throughout history. Newberg and D'Aquili contend that creation of these common patterns of myth -- virgin births, expulsions from paradise, dead and resurrected heroes -- stems from applying to higher questions the same brain tools that humans use to make sense of the physical world. Much of it is a survival mechanism. As it often does with earthly challenges, the brain reacts to human existential fears by reducing them to systems of opposites -- man vs. leopard, life vs. death, heaven vs. hell, good vs. evil. Explanations that reconcile such opposites bring relief, even elation. These breakthroughs, the authors say, are then reinforced by positive emotional responses sparked by the brain's primitive limbic region, which controls emotion. "We believe that all lasting myths gain their power through neurologically endorsed flashes of insight,'' they write. Cross-cultural similarities in rituals also may have origins in the brain. Rhythmic noises, repetition of phrases, such as mantras or prayers, extraordinary physical gestures and even certain smells seem to draw reactions from parts of the brain that trigger spiritual feelings, the authors write. "When religious ritual is effective, and it is not always effective,'' they write, "it inclines the brain to adjust its cognitive and emotional perceptions of the self in a way that religiously minded persons interpret as closing the distance between the self and God.'' In its own way, Why God Won't Go Away seeks to bridge the gulf between faith and science. It is part of a larger trend of interdisciplinary study that increased markedly in the last decades of the 20th century in fields ranging from cosmology, quantum mechanics and biology to mathematics and medicine. That may account for some of the criticism the book has received. While some have called it "groundbreaking," critics have faulted it for being neither a work of philosophy or a linear scientific treatise. One called the book a hybrid, "with something in it to offend everyone.'' Some atheists have welcomed the book to the extent that it relegates religious experience to pure biology, which it only partly does. But they also feel the authors have demonstrated a bias in favor of religion. Nor are all of the book's assumptions about how parts of the brain work widely accepted by the scientific community. "This is a fascinating field that needs to be entered with extreme caution and a rigorous scientific approach," Pietro Pietrini, a professor of clinical biochemistry and psychiatry at the University of Pisa in Italy, said of the book in an April 2001 interview with WebMD. "Anything we do or feel, from a simple activity like moving a finger to the deepest passion like love or rage, has its own characteristic pattern of brain activity," Pietrini said. In the new epilogue, Newberg and D'Aquili acknowledge the controversy. "One of the goals of our work, and the message we've tried to communicate in this book, is that science and religion do not have to be incompatible," they write. "One need not be wrong for the other to be right.''Neurotheology
soulcircle Registered User (3/14/03 11:47 am) Reply	good post username the long and short of it I read the post above with interest username, thanks much In the August 12th San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday ... maybe if shows up at sfgate.com was the following full page: It cost Yoko Ono as much as $40,000 and the same day she placed it in L A in a free paper and in Village Voice in New York and one other paper at least Again this was a full page in the front section, a full page with two large black ink words: ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Imagine Peace ~~~~~~~~~~~

<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>

Add Reply

Email This To a Friend

Email This To a Friend
Topic Control Image

Topic Control Image

Click to receive email notification of replies

Click to stop receiving email notification of replies

jump to:

- SRF Walrus - In the news -

Powered By ezboard® Ver. 7.32
Copyright ©1999-2005 ezboard, Inc.