Can the Brain be Wired for Religious Ecstasy? (article)

note: decent summary of neuro-therapies being attenpted, all doomed to failiure in my opinion, when measured against the potential for direct relationship with the Life Force. – Michael

HOW TO WIRE YOUR BRAIN FOR RELIGIOUS ECSTASY
By John Horgan
Slate
April 26, 2007

http://www.slate.com/id/2165004

Eight years ago, I flew to Laurentian University in Midwestern Canada to
test a gadget that some journalists called the “God machine”
<http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=236>. The device consisted of
computer-controlled solenoids that fit over the skull and stimulate the
brain with electromagnetic pulses. Its inventor, neuroscientist Michael
Persinger, claimed that it could induce mystical experiences, including, as
Wired magazine put it
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/persinger_pr.html>, visions of
“Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit.”

I sat in a ratty armchair in a soundproof chamber and pulled the God machine
onto my head as, outside the chamber, a graduate student tapped a computer
keyboard. As he bombarded my brain with electromagnetic bursts patterned
after brain waves of epileptics in the throes of religious visions, I waited
for God or even a minor deity or demon to appear — in vain. Persinger told
me later that the device doesn’t work on skeptics, implying that it “works”
merely by exploiting subjects’ suggestibility.

Persinger is one of the more colorful characters in the fast-growing, flakey
field of neurotheology
<http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/god-experiments/>, which studies what
is arguably the most complex manifestation — spirituality — of the most
complex phenomenon — the human brain — known to science. Given that brain
researchers have no idea how I conceived and typed this sentence, I doubt
they will ever account for religious experiences in all their vast diversity
and subtlety. Nor will they solve the riddle of whether God actually exists
or is a figment of our evolved imaginations, like unicorns or superstrings.
Neurotheology may nonetheless have a profound social impact, by yielding
more potent, reliable methods of inducing spiritual experiences.

Surveys suggest that only about one in three people has ever had a mystical
experience, defined by one poll as the sensation of “a powerful spiritual
force that seemed to lift you out of yourself.” Humans have long sought such
experiences through meditation, yoga, prayer, guru-worship, fasting, and
flagellation, but these methods are unreliable, notes James Austin, author
of Zen and the Brain, one of the best books on neurotheology. Austin hopes
that neurotheology will eventually yield much more potent, precise methods
of inducing transcendent experiences, from fleeting feelings of
connectedness all the way up to “the full moon of enlightenment.”
Persinger’s God machine may not have done much for me, but here’s a brief
status report on four mystical technologies with potential:

Mystical Brain Chips

In the 1950s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, while preparing
epileptic patients for surgery, stimulated their exposed brains with
electrodes. Some patients heard voices or music and saw apparitions when
their temporal lobes were stimulated <http://primal-page.com/penfield.htm>.
Upon learning about Penfield’s experiments, Aldous Huxley wrote: “Is there,
one wonders, some area in the brain from which the probing electrode could
elicit Blake’s Cherubim?”

One still wonders. A Swiss team recently induced out-of-body experiences
<http://home.comcast.net/~neardeath/nde/001_pages/31.html> in an epileptic
patient about to undergo surgery by stimulating her right angular gyrus,
which underpins spatial awareness. Other groups have shown that implanted
electrodes can trigger euphoria, and in fact they are now being tested as
treatments for severe depression (as well as paralysis, tremors, and
epilepsy). In principle, implants would provide the most precise, powerful
means of inducing religious ecstasy. Indeed, self-described “Wireheads”
<http://www.wireheading.com/> look forward to the day when these devices
will vanquish mental suffering and deliver ecstasy on demand. But for now,
this technology — which requires inserting wires into the brain through
holes drilled in the skull — remains too risky for all but the most
desperate patients.

Magic Wands

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is noninvasive and hence safer
and easier to test than implants. Researchers have reported success in
treating depression
<http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/MH00115>
and other disorders with this method, which often employs electromagnetic
“wands” as well as headsets. Persinger insists that TMS, properly used, can
also induce intense mystical experiences.

A group at Uppsala University has tried and failed to replicate Persinger’s
results in a controlled, double-blind experiment. Todd Murphy, a
neuroscientist who has worked with Persinger, is nonetheless marketing a
version of the God machine called the “Shakti”
<http://www.shaktitechnology.com/rotating/index.htm> (a Hindu term for
divinity), which according to Murphy’s Web site “uses magnetic fields to
create altered states.”

Tweaking the God Gene

The work of Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute,
raises the prospect of genetically engineered mystics. Hamer claims to have
found a gene associated with “self-transcendence” or “spirituality” in a
group of 1,000 subjects who filled out surveys that probed their beliefs in
God, ESP, and so on. Hamer calls this gene “the spiritual allele” or, even
more dramatically, the “God gene” — which is also the title of the popular
book in which he describes his research. Francis Collins, director of the
Human Genome Project, has called Hamer’s claim “wildly overstated.”

Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, suggests
focusing on genes associated with dimethyltryptamine, the only psychedelic
known to occur naturally in the human brain. In his book DMT: The Spirit
Molecule, Strassman presents evidence that endogenous DMT underpins mystical
visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death
experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.

Our natural mystical capacity, Strassman speculates, might be enhanced with
genetic modifications that boost the production of DMT or of the enzymes
that catalyze its effects. A clever, unscrupulous geneticist might even
transform us all into mystics without our consent. “I can envision a
situation where a cold virus is tinkered with to turn on our methylating
enzymes,” Strassman says, “spreads around the world in a couple of years,
and there you have it.”

Good Old Psychedelics

Psychedelic (or entheogenic, literally God-containing) compounds such as LSD
and psilocybin represent by far the most mature mystical technology
available. Legal research into the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of
psychedelics collapsed in the late 1960s after the drugs were outlawed but
is now undergoing a renaissance.

Reseachers at UCLA, the University of Arizona, Harvard, and other
institutions are treating post-traumatic stress disorder,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety with psilocybin and MDMA (aka
Ecstasy). Last year, a team at Johns Hopkins University reported that
psilocybin had triggered profound spiritual experiences in two-thirds of a
group of 36 subjects
<http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html>.
“Psilocybin, the active ingredient of ‘magic mushrooms,’ expands the mind,”
the Washington Post noted drily. “After a thousand years of use, that’s now
scientifically official.”

Psychedelics still pose risks. Peyote triggers nausea, MDMA has been
associated with neurotoxicity, and psilocybin caused panic attacks in some
subjects in the Johns Hopkins study. Future research could identify regimens
and compounds that yield greater benefits with fewer side effects.
Independent chemist Alexander Shulgin has identified more than 200
psychotropic compounds that have potential as therapeutic and spiritual
catalysts.

Our current mystical technologies are primitive, but one day,
neurotheologians may find a technology that gives us permanent, blissful
self-transcendence with no side effects. Should we really welcome such a
development? Recall that in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA funded research on
psychedelics because of their potential as brainwashing agents and truth
serums <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/04/20/09>.

Even setting aside the issue of control, mystical technologies raise
troubling philosophical issues. Shulgin, the psychedelic chemist, once wrote
that a perfect mystical technology would bring about “the ultimate
evolution, and perhaps the end of the human experiment.” When I asked
Shulgin to elaborate, he said that if we achieve permanent mystical bliss,
there would be “no motivation, no urge to change anything, no creativity.”
Both science and religion aim to eliminate suffering. But if a mystical
technology makes us immune to anxiety, grief, and heartache, are we still
fully human? Have we gained something or lost something? In short, would a
truly effective mystical technology — a God machine that works — save us,
or doom us?

………….

John Horgan, author of The End of Science and Rational Mysticism and a
science correspondent for Bloggingheads.tv, directs the Center for Science
Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology.