Neuro-Theology: Can Magnetic Fields Cause “God on the Brain”?

Neuro-Theology: Can Magnetic Fields Cause “God on the Brain”?

Note: This is a transcript from a very interesting BBC show. The brain research basically upholds the Taoist energetic model of three core channels, but it shows it in terms of brain function.

When the left and right temporall lobes are weakened during experiments, our sense of time and space (yin-yang functions in left /right core channel) disapepars and we shift into the core of the brain. Once we shift to the core (yuan chi), a sense of “presence” is often felt and/or people, depending on their belief filters, have mystical experiences. Sex loses it power as a stimulus. Results of tests done on a catholic, a buddhist, and a famous aetheist are compared.

These results are mainly interpreted in terms of the standard science of evolution of the brain vs. religious faith in God beyond the brain debate, and not considering the results as supportive evidence confirming the possibilities of a Spiritual Science that integrates the two.

In my view, these experiments merely suggest that left/right brain/energy channels regulate our post-natal experience, and core opens the portal to our pre-natal self. The “presence” felt is just another level of our self, you could call it soul or give it labels for the more primal levels of the collective Self (called God by religionists) beyond the soul. Taoists are essentially pan-theistic, i.e. God/Divine is equally everywhere.
-Michael

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BBC DOCUMENTARY: ‘GOD ON THE BRAIN’
BBC
April 2003

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml

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Watch An Excerpt On YouTube:

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GOD ON THE BRAIN – PROGRAMME SUMMARY

Rudi Affolter and Gwen Tighe have both experienced strong religious visions.
He is an atheist; she a Christian. He thought he had died; she thought she
had given birth to Jesus. Both have temporal lobe epilepsy.

Like other forms of epilepsy, the condition causes fitting but it is also
associated with religious hallucinations. Research into why people like Rudi
and Gwen saw what they did has opened up a whole field of brain science:
neurotheology.

The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious feeling
has led one Canadian scientist to try stimulating them. (They are near your
ears.) 80% of Dr Michael Persinger’s experimental subjects report that an
artificial magnetic field focused on those brain areas gives them a feeling
of ‘not being alone’. Some of them describe it as a religious sensation.

His work raises the prospect that we are programmed to believe in god, that
faith is a mental ability humans have developed or been given. And temporal
lobe epilepsy (TLE) could help unlock the mystery.

Religious leaders

History is full of charismatic religious figures. Could any of them have
been epileptics? The visions seen by Bible characters like Moses or Saint
Paul are consistent with Rudi’s and Gwen’s, but there is no way to diagnose
TLE in people who lived so long ago.

There are, though, more recent examples, like one of the founders of the
Seventh Day Adventist Movement, Ellen White. Born in 1827, she suffered a
brain injury aged 9 that totally changed her personality. She also began to
have powerful religious visions.

Representatives of the Movement doubt that Ellen White suffered from TLE,
saying her injury and visions are inconsistent with the condition, but
neurologist Gregory Holmes believes this explains her condition.

Better than sex

The first clinical evidence to link the temporal lobes with religious
sensations came from monitoring how TLE patients responded to sets of words.
In an experiment where people were shown either neutral words (table),
erotic words (sex) or religious words (god), the control group was most
excited by the sexually loaded words. This was picked up as a sweat response
on the skin. People with temporal lobe epilepsy did not share this apparent
sense of priorities. For them, religious words generated the greatest
reaction. Sexual words were less exciting than neutral ones.

Make believe

If the abnormal brain activity of TLE patients alters their response to
religious concepts, could altering brain patterns artificially do the same
for people with no such medical condition? This is the question that Michael
Persinger set out to explore, using a wired-up helmet
designed to concentrate magnetic
fields on the temporal lobes of the wearer.

His subjects were not told the precise purpose of the test; just that the
experiment looked into relaxation. 80% of participants reported feeling
something when the magnetic fields were applied. Persinger calls one of the
common sensations a ‘sensed presence’, as if someone else is in the room
with you, when there is none.

Horizon introduced Dr Persinger to one of Britain’s most renowned atheists,
Prof Richard Dawkins. He agreed to try his techniques on Dawkins to see if
he could give him a moment of religious feeling. During a session that
lasted 40 minutes, Dawkins found that the magnetic fields around his
temporal lobes affected his breathing and his limbs. He did not find god.

Persinger was not disheartened by Dawkins’ immunity to the helmet’s magnetic
powers. He believes that the sensitivity of our temporal lobes to magnetism
varies from person to person. People with TLE may be especially sensitive to
magnetic fields; Prof Dawkins is well below average, it seems. It’s a
concept that clerics like Bishop Stephen Sykes give some credence as well:
could there be such a thing as a talent for religion?

Brain imaging

Sykes does, though, see a great difference between a ‘sensed presence’ and a
genuine religious experience. Scientists like Andrew Newberg want to see
just what does happen during moments of faith. He worked with Buddhist,
Michael Baime, to study the brain during meditation. By injecting
radioactive tracers into Michael’s bloodstream as he reached the height of a
meditative trance, Newberg could use a brain scanner to image the brain at a
religious climax.

The bloodflow patterns showed that the temporal lobes were certainly
involved but also that the brain’s parietal lobes appeared almost completely
to shut down. The parietal lobes give us our sense of time and place.
Without them, we may lose our sense of self. Adherants to many of the
world’s faiths regard a sense of personal insignificance and oneness with a
deity as something to strive for. Newberg’s work suggests a neurological
basis for what religion tries to generate.

Religious evolution

If brain function offers insight into how we experience religion, does it
say anything about why we do? There is evidence that people with religious
faith have longer, healthier lives. This hints at a survival benefit for
religious people. Could we have evolved religious belief?

Prof Dawkins (who subscribes to evolution to explain human development)
thinks there could be an evolutionary advantage, not to believing in god,
but to having a brain with the capacity to believe in god. That such faith
exists is a by-product of enhanced intelligence. Prof Ramachandran denies
that finding out how the brain reacts to religion negates the value of
belief. He feels that brain circuitry like that Persinger and Newberg have
identified, could amount to an antenna to make us receptive to god. Bishop
Sykes meanwhile, thinks religion has nothing to fear from this neuroscience.
Science is about seeking to explain the world around us. For him at least,
it can co-exist with faith.

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GOD ON THE BRAIN – QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrainqa.shtml

What are the temporal lobes of the brain?

The temporal lobe controls hearing, speech and memory. The brain has two
temporal lobes, one on each side of the brain, located near the ears. The
two are interchangeable so if one is damaged the other is usually able to
take over the other’s function.

What is temporal lobe epilepsy?

It is a condition in which the patient suffers repeated seizures when there
is abnormal electrical activity in the temporal lobes of the brain. These
seizures may be simple partial seizures without loss of awareness or they
can be complex partial seizures with loss of awareness. The patient loses
awareness during a complex partial seizure because the seizure spreads to
both lobes, causing memory loss. The condition was first recognised in 1881.

What percentage of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy suffer from
religious hallucinations?

It is difficult to say because unless the doctor brings up the subject
directly with the patient, they may never know if the patient has religious
hallucinations. Estimates vary between 10 and 70% , but most neurologists
believe only a minority of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy suffer from
hallucinations.

Are scientists arguing that all religious experiences can be related to
temporal lobe epilepsy?

Not at all. While studies have clearly shown a relationship between
religious experience and temporal lobe epilepsy. This does not explain all
religious experience by any means. Religious and spiritual experiences are
highly complex, involving emotions, thoughts, sensations and behaviours. But
scientists do believe that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, who
experience religious hallucinations may provide a valuable model in showing
how certain types of religious experience effect the human brain.

Does this work suggest there is a specific ‘god spot’ in the brain?

Although the temporal lobes are clearly important in religious experience,
they are not the whole story. Already the work of Dr Andrew Newberg has
shown that a part of the brain called parietal lobes are important.
Additionally, very different patterns of brain activity may appear,
depending on the particular experience the individual is having. For
example, a near death experience might result in different activity patterns
from those found in a person who is meditating. Scientists now believe that
a number of structures in the brain need to work together to help us
experience spirituality and religion.

Are we ‘hardwired’ for god?

The term ‘hardwired’ suggests that we were purposefully designed that way.
Neuroscience can’t answer that question. However what it can say is that the
brain does seem to predisposed towards a belief in spiritual and religious
matters. The big mystery is how and why this came about.

How does Dr Persinger induce artificially religious experiences in his
patients?

Dr Persinger has designed a helmet that produces a very weak rotating
magnetic field of between ten nanotesla and one microtesla over the temporal
lobes of the brain. This is placed on the subject’s head and they are placed
in a quiet chamber while blindfolded. So that there is no risk of
‘suggestion’, the only information that the subjects are given is that they
are going in for a relaxation experiment. Neither the subject nor the
experimenter carrying out the test has any idea of the true purpose of the
experiment. In addition to this, the experiment is also run with the field
switched both off and on. This procedure Dr Persinger claims will induce an
experience in over 80% of test subjects.

What sort of experiences do subjects report?

This is very dependent on the belief system of the individual subjects. Dr
Persinger talks about his subjects feeling a ‘sensed presence’ — feeling
that somebody was in the chamber with them. Subjects who are strongly
religious are likely to interpret this presence as god. Whereas, atheists
may also report a ‘sensed presence’ but attribute the phenomena to a trick
of brain chemistry, perhaps comparable to when they have taken drugs in the
past.

Could it be there is a genetic component to religious belief?

Religious behaviour is so complex it is very unlikely that there will be a
single gene for religious activity, but it does seem as if there is some
sort of as yet unidentified genetic component. Several studies of identical
twins separated at birth and brought up separately have measured
religiosity. Religiosity is defined as the intensity of religious belief.
These studies have shown that there appears to be about a 50% component to
religiosity.

Clearly, what religion you are brought up in is largely dependent upon the
culture into which you are born, but what appears to have a significant
genetic component is your level of religious intensity.

Will any of this research ever be able to establish whether god exists or
not?

Whether god exists or not is something that neuroscience cannot answer. For
example, if we take a brain image of a person when they are looking at a
picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the
visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there is
actually a picture ‘out there’ or whether the person is creating the picture
in their own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of
reality. Getting to what is real is the tricky part.

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SAMPLE EXCERPTS:

NARRATOR: Temporal lobe epilepsy has one very unusual side effect. In a
minority of patients it can induce religious hallucinations. These visions
have led scientists to ask questions that have never been asked before. Rudi
has always been a confirmed atheist, but even so, when he was 43 years old
he had a powerful religious vision.

RUDI: I was lying on my bed in the wards in Crawley Hospital when suddenly
it seemed to me that everything was changing. The room was still the same
size but it was becoming something else. I thought that I had to fight
against this at first and I tried very hard mentally to bring myself back to
normal because I thought that I was going mad. I thought that I had died and
I had gone to hell. I was told that I had gone there because I had not been
a devout Christian, a believer in god. I was quite shocked to find that the
Christian religion was the correct one. I was very depressed and very
alarmed, very worried at what had happened, and at the thought that I was
going to remain here forever.

………….

BERNY: Gwen had a lovely pregnancy, nothing seemed to be going wrong.

GWEN: We went to the car and just as we got in the car my waters broke then,
and after that I can’t remember anything.

BERNY: Got to the actual birth and Charles — that’s our son — got about
half way out and his head was coming out, the umbilical cord was wrapped
around his neck and he was strangling a bit. She was too late to have a
caesarean but they were able to get Charles out eventually, no damage to
him. She was just sitting there smiling I think would be the best
description. And I was sitting there and she turned around and said: “Isn’t
it nice to be part of the Holy Family.” I thought — Holy Family? It then
turned out she thought I was Joseph, she was Mary and little Charlie was
Christ! And I was basically told if she didn’t agree to go into the local
psychiatric hospital they’d section her. At the time it was extremely scary.
I didn’t know where I was going. I’ve got to be honest.

GWEN: Now looking back on it, it is rather a strange, to say the least,
thing to have happen… been in my thoughts at the time. I don’t know why I
said it.

………….

NARRATOR: The girl was having terrible trouble sleeping. Every night she was
visited by the most horrific supernatural experience. She would become more
and more terrified, convinced that a spirit was in the room with her.
Increasingly traumatised, she dreaded going into her bedroom. So Dr
Persinger decided to visit the house. He was convinced that the girl’s
hallucinations had to be the result of hidden, fluctuating, electromagnetic
fields. These could be caused, perhaps, by an overhead pylon or an
underground fault line. The challenge for Dr Persinger and his colleague,
Stan Koren, was to track down the source of these fields. The team used
their specially adapted measuring equipment — a plastic milk crate and a
roll of copper wire…

NARRATOR: Initially the readers the team found were inconclusive, but then
they noticed a clock radio in the girl’s bedroom.

PERSINGER: We went over and measured and we found that she slept near a
clock, and we measured the clock, and the clock had a particular, unusual
pattern to it. It was the same basic pattern that we were using to generate
the presence in the laboratory. The clock was removed, the phenomena itself
terminated.

NARRATOR: Dr Persinger’s story sounds almost unbelievable, but there is some
evidence that backs up the idea of a connection between supernatural visions
and electromagnetic fields. The spectacular Northern Lights are produced
when solar storms occur on the sun. These storms can also alter the earth’s
magnetic fields, and whenever this happens, an increased number of ghostly
sightings are reported. And several other scientists have claimed that these
fluctuating fields can cause seizures in the brain.

PERSINGER: We know geomagnetic activity influences the temple lobes because
when we look at correlational data there’s an increase in seizures, temporal
lobe seizures and convulsions when there’s an increased global geomagnetic
activity all over the earth.

NARRATOR: Controversially Dr Persinger argues that most, if not all,
spiritual and religious experience can be explained away by the effect of
electromagnetic fields on the temporal lobes of the brain.

…………

NARRATOR: This strange sensation of a loss of self is central to religious
feelings in all the world’s faiths. Buddhists seek a feeling of oneness with
the universe, Hindus strive for the soul and God to become one and the
Catholics search for the Unio Mystica. Dr Newberg wondered if these very
different religions might actually be describing the same thing. To test
this theory he took scans of Franciscan nuns at prayer to see if there was
any similarity between what was going on in their brains and those of
Buddhists.

NEWBERG: Interestingly when we look at the Franciscan nuns we see a similar
decrease in the orientation part of the brain as we saw with the Tibetan
Buddhists.

NARRATOR: Even though Buddhists and Catholics may come from very different
religious traditions, how their minds react to deep meditation or prayer
seems, in terms of brain chemistry, to be exactly the same process. Dr
Newberg’s research shows the first clear scientific evidence that there are
a number of different areas in our brain involved in religious belief.
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GOD ON THE BRAIN – FULL TRANSCRIPT

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbraintrans.shtml

RUDI: I thought that I had died and I had gone to hell.

GWEN: I was almost thinking of my son as god.

BERNY: It then turned out she thought I was Joseph, she was Mary and little
Charlie was Christ.

NARRATOR (BARBARA FLYNN): These people suffer from one of the strangest of
all brain disorders. It makes them think they have been touched by god. But
their unusual condition is giving scientists a unique insight into faith and
the human mind. As a result researchers are now asking one of them most
explosive questions of all — could it be that the physical makeup of our
brain programmes us to believe in god?

RUDI: These are my temporal lobes where my epilepsy is situated.

NARRATOR: Rudi Affolter has suffered from a severe form of temporal lobe
epilepsy all his life, so severe that he almost died from his seizures when
he was just 18 months old. Seizures occur when there is abnormal electrical
activity in the temporal lobes of the brain.

RUDI AFFOLTER: For a few minutes you will be unaware and you’re then quite
often a bit giddy. It goes on until you collapse to the ground and you’re
writhing about for perhaps for a few minutes. You might remain conscious or
you might then be completely unconscious.

NARRATOR: Temporal lobe epilepsy has one very unusual side effect. In a
minority of patients it can induce religious hallucinations. These visions
have led scientists to ask questions that have never been asked before. Rudi
has always been a confirmed atheist, but even so, when he was 43 years old
he had a powerful religious vision.

RUDI: I was lying on my bed in the wards in Crawley Hospital when suddenly
it seemed to me that everything was changing. The room was still the same
size but it was becoming something else. I thought that I had to fight
against this at first and I tried very hard mentally to bring myself back to
normal because I thought that I was going mad. I thought that I had died and
I had gone to hell. I was told that I had gone there because I had not been
a devout Christian, a believer in god. I was quite shocked to find that the
Christian religion was the correct one. I was very depressed and very
alarmed, very worried at what had happened, and at the thought that I was
going to remain here forever.

NARRATOR: Fortunately for Rudi, his vision ended and he has never had
another one. He remains a firm atheist. But Gwen Tighe has suffered from
hallucinations which have recurred over a number of years. Unlike Rudi, she
is a strong believer, a devout Roman Catholic. Over the years her husband,
Berny, has been there to witness the effect of these visions, the first of
which appeared just after their honeymoon when Gwen was in hospital.

BERNY TIGHE: And she wanted to whisper to me that the lady across the ward
was the devil, and that’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. She was.. the
lady she was green skinned apparently, a green colour — the devil!

GWEN TIGHE: It just was in my mind the devil and it looked frightening. It
was brighter lights, not the dark lights like people would usually associate
with devil-like creatures. It was very bright but overpowering and very
frightening.

BERNY: Crikey! (laughs) What do I… what’s going on? After that she had
occasions when she’d have a number of seizures or her medication would go
slightly wrong and she would be confused then, and then she’d start talking
about the devil.

NARRATOR: After several years the visions stopped completely but then Gwen
became pregnant.

BERNY: Gwen had a lovely pregnancy, nothing seemed to be going wrong.

GWEN: We went to the car and just as we got in the car my waters broke then,
and after that I can’t remember anything.

BERNY: Got to the actual birth and Charles — that’s our son — got about
half way out and his head was coming out, the umbilical cord was wrapped
around his neck and he was strangling a bit. She was too late to have a
caesarean but they were able to get Charles out eventually, no damage to
him. She was just sitting there smiling I think would be the best
description. And I was sitting there and she turned around and said: “Isn’t
it nice to be part of the Holy Family.” I thought — Holy Family? It then
turned out she thought I was Joseph, she was Mary and little Charlie was
Christ! And I was basically told if she didn’t agree to go into the local
psychiatric hospital they’d section her. At the time it was extremely scary.
I didn’t know where I was going. I’ve got to be honest.

GWEN: Now looking back on it, it is rather a strange, to say the least,
thing to have happen… been in my thoughts at the time. I don’t know why I
said it.

NARRATOR: Rudi and Gwen’s hallucinations may seem very odd, but there is a
growing belief amongst researchers that their condition could help give
answers to one of the deepest philosophical questions of all. Where does
religious belief come from? Divine revelation is crucial to all the great
faiths. Visions for mystics and seers have produced creeds that people have
lived and died for. Believers are convinced that such revelations come from
god; atheists that they are no more than the product of superstition and
social conditioning. What neither side has ever thought is that religion
might actually be as fundamentally a part of us as the desire to eat, sleep
or have sex. But now that view may be changing, and temporal lobe epilepsy
is turning out to be key. The condition is being used to help explain the
start of at least one of the world’s most thriving religious groups — the
Seventh Day Adventist Movement which currently has over 12 million members.
Locked within the archives of the church lies the story of how it all began,
with the revelations of a young woman called Ellen White.

MERLIN BURT (Ellen G. White, Estate Branch Office, Loma Linda): Ellen White
is one of the principal founders of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. She
had unique visionary experiences that gave guidance to the movement in what
they understood to be a supernatural way. The religious visions remain
critically important to the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

NARRATOR: Ellen White was born in 1827 and during her life wrote about
100,000 pages about her religious faith, believing she was inspired by god
she laid out a strict moral code which lectured on everything from the sins
of tea drinking to masturbation. She also gave detailed accounts of hundreds
of intense religious visions that she’d experienced.

ELLEN WHITE: While I was praying there was — as has been a hundred times or
more — a soft light circling around in the room, and a fragrance like the
fragrance of flowers, and I knew god was close.

NARRATOR: These visions so convinced her followers that they believed she
had to be a prophet from god. But when scientists began to study Ellen’s
past, they started to wonder if instead she had been a sufferer of temporal
lobe epilepsy. Because one day, something happened that might have induced
the condition. When she was 9 years old Ellen was chased home from school by
an older girl.

ELLEN: I turned to see how far she was behind me, and as I turned a stone
hit me on the nose. A blinding, stunning sensation overpowered me and I fell
senseless. My mother says that I noticed nothing but lay in a stupid state
for three weeks. As I roused to consciousness it seemed to me I had been
asleep. I was shocked. Every feature of my face seemed changed.

NARRATOR: Ellen was so severely affected by the injury she was never able to
return to school. Her personality changed dramatically. She became highly
religious and moralistic. And for the first time in her life she began to
have powerful religious visions.

PROF GREGORY HOLMES (Dartmouth Medical School): Typically the visions began
suddenly, she would have a change in facial expression, she would often
stare upward. During her vision she was really unaware of what was happening
around her, and often she would have what are called automatisms of
repetitive movements from which the patient has very little memory for after
the event.

NARRATOR: Professor Gregory Holmes, one of the world’s leading experts in
paediatric neurology believes the fact that Ellen White’s visions followed
the head injury is no coincidence.

HOLMES: The bones behind the eyes are quite weak and brain tissue behind the
eyes is quite susceptible to an injury due to the fragile nature of these
bones. Often someone that’s hit in the face with a stone will have an actual
shifting of the brain, you know.. the head will be hit very hard, it’ll
bounce back, and the brain is bouncing back and forth.

NARRATOR: The personality changes, the highly religious tone, and the
visions convinced Holmes there could be only one diagnosis for Ellen White’s
condition.

HOLMES: Her whole clinical course to me suggests a highly probability that
she had temporal lobe epilepsy. This would indicate to me that the spiritual
vision she was having would not be genuine, would be due to the seizure.

NARRATOR: This is a shattering diagnosis for the Seventh Day Adventist
Movement who still insist that Ellen White was divinely inspired. Their
spokesman, a neurologist as well as a Seventh Day Adventist dismisses
Professor Holmes’ claim.

DR DANIEL GIANG (Loma Linda University Medical Center): The reasons why I
don’t feel that Ellen White’s visions were the result of temporal lobe
seizures are several. One is that her injury was clearly to the nose area
and this would be quite far away from the temporal lobes, another would be
that the visions started 8 years after the head trauma and we’d expect most
people with seizures following head trauma to have their seizures start 1 to
3 years after the head trauma. Finally, in Ellen White’s visions last from
15 minutes to 3 hours or more. She never apparently had any briefer visions.
That’s quite unusual for seizures.

NARRATOR: It is impossible to prove absolutely that Ellen White had temporal
lobe epilepsy, but the length of her visions and the fact that they started
8 years after the accident are consistent with the disorder.
Controversially, it is now being suggested that other religious leaders too
may have suffered from this condition.

PROF VILAYANUR RAMACHANDRAN (University of California, San Diego): It’s
possible that many great religious leaders had temporal lobe seizures and
this predisposes them to having visions, having mystical experiences.

NARRATOR: St Paul is a case in point. He famously encountered god who
appeared to him in a blinding flash on the road to Damascus.

RAMACHANDRAN: Many religious mystics, including St Paul, some of the
experiences they describe sound quite similar to the sorts of things you
hear from patients, so it’s quite possible that he had seizures.

NARRATOR: And what about Moses, the bringer of the Ten Commandments,
believed he heard the voice of god speak to him from a burning bush.

RAMACHANDRAN: It’s possible that even Moses did, and many religious mystics
in India may have had seizure activity in the brain that predisposed them to
such beliefs and enriched their mental lives enormously as a result.

NARRATOR: Bishop Stephen Sykes believes that thousands of years on its
almost impossible to know for sure whether past religious figures had
temporal lobe epilepsy.

BISHOP STEPHEN SYKES (University of Durham): The description of their states
of mind is by people of their times, and their frames of ref are very
different from ours, and I like to be gently sceptical, I mean it’s very
easy to say in the past they thought that these people were having religious
experience, now in our infinite wisdom we know that in fact they were
suffering from a form of epilepsy. Well I just think a bit of humility
wouldn’t go amiss actually.

NARRATOR: We may never learn the truth about Moses or St Paul, but Professor
Ramachandran of the University of California decided to pursue the link
between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious experience. So he set
up an experiment to compare the brains of people with and without temporal
lobe epilepsy.

RAMACHANDRAN: What we did was first take normal volunteers who did not have
epileptic seizures. Put two electrodes on their finger tips to measure the
changes of skin resistance. This essentially measure how much they sweat
when they look at different words on the screen. In a normal person, if I
flashed the word ‘table’ the person will not sweat. But if I flash the word
‘sex’ then the person starts sweating and this registers as a change of
resistance called the ‘galvanic skin response’. Now the question is, what
would happen if you do the same experiment with patients with temporal lobe
epilepsy?

NARRATOR: The epileptic patients were given three different groups of words:
sexually loaded words, neutral words and religious words. Professor
Ramachandran found that the neutral words, as expected, produced little
emotional effect, but was astonished by the response he got when he started
showing patients sexual and religious words.

RAMACHANDRAN: What we found to our amazement was, every time they looked at
religious words like ‘god’ they get a huge big galvanic skin response.
Conversely, if you showed them a sexually loaded word, these patients showed
a slightly lower response. In other words, their response was higher to
words about god and religion and lower to sexual words, whereas in most
normal people it’s the other way around.

NARRATOR: This was the very first piece of clinical evidence revealing that
the body’s physical response to religious imagery was definitely linked to
activity in the temporal lobes of the brain.

RAMACHANDRAN: So what we suggested was, there are certain circuits within
the temporal lobes which have been selectively activated. Their activity is
selectively heightened in these patients, and somehow the activity of these
specific neural circuits is more conducive to religious belief and mystical
belief. It makes them more prone to religious belief.

NARRATOR: Scientists now believe what happens inside the minds of temporal
lobe epileptic patients may just be an extreme case of what goes on inside
all our brains, for everyone. It now appears that temporal lobes are key in
experiencing religious and spiritual belief. This explosive research
studying how religious faith affects the brain is the inspiration for a
completely new field of science — neurotheology. In a remote region of
Northern Canada a scientist put this controversial new science of
neurotheology to the test. Dr Michael Persinger claims that by stimulating
the temporal lobes he can artificially induce religious experience in almost
anyone. Dr Persinger has developed a device which produces an
electromagnetic field across the temporal lobes. He says he can induce a
moment that feels just like a genuine religious revelation with a machine
unlike any other.

DR MICHAEL PERSINGER (Laurentian University): The helmet was basically
designed to generate weak magnetic fields across the hemispheres,
specifically the temporal lobe. So the way it’s set up is that each pair of
the solenoids are connected so that at any given time a magnetic field
passes through the helmet and hence through the brain.

NARRATOR: Before the experiment could go ahead, Dr Persinger took his
subjects into a silent room where they were blindfolded. Don Hill had little
idea of what he was about to go through as he entered the testing chamber.

DON HILL: In the chamber I had a number of experiences: my hands getting
very clammy, waves of fear inexplicable that I couldn’t put my finger on,
tingling effects, rushes of energy up and down my spine, burping (laughs)
which is kind of embarrassing, and a general feeling of malaise.

NARRATOR: But as Dr Persinger manipulated the magnetic fields, Don began to
get a very strange feeling, a feeling that perhaps he was not alone.

HILL: My shoulders are very tense up to my ears right now.

It’s not so much I felt like there was somebody or something in the chamber
with me because my commonsense to me that this could not be. But I could not
get rid of the feeling that there was something there. It was lurking, it
was watching me. I felt like I was under surveillance. And it was.. felt
like coming from behind.. you know.. like what’s over there. That’s what it
felt like. Yeah, how could this be? There’s nothing there. I’m in a space
that’s safe.

NARRATOR: Don had experienced one of the most common and bizarre effects in
the chamber, a feeling that someone else was in there with him. Dr Persinger
called this feeling the “sensed presence”.

PERSINGER: The fundamental experience is the sensed presence, and our data
indicate that the sensed presence, the feeling of another entity of
something beyond yourself, perhaps bigger than yourself, bigger in space and
bigger in time, can be stimulated by simply activating the right hemisphere,
particularly the temple lobe.

NARRATOR: To ensure that it was genuinely the electromagnetic field that
caused the sensed presence, Dr Persinger ran the experiment with the field
switched both off and on. Crucially no one was told what the true purpose of
the experiment was, merely that it was to do with relaxation. When the
results came back, they were impressive. When the machine was on, 80% sensed
something. Dr Persinger has taken his research a stage further. He believes
naturally occurring electromagnetic fields might also be capable of
generating the sensed presence. This, he argues, could explain not just our
sense of god, but perhaps other supernatural experiences too — like ghosts.

PERSINGER: We were called by an individual who was concerned about her
daughter who was having an experience and people were concerned that she was
crazy.

NARRATOR: The girl was having terrible trouble sleeping. Every night she was
visited by the most horrific supernatural experience. She would become more
and more terrified, convinced that a spirit was in the room with her.
Increasingly traumatised, she dreaded going into her bedroom. So Dr
Persinger decided to visit the house. He was convinced that the girl’s
hallucinations had to be the result of hidden, fluctuating, electromagnetic
fields. These could be caused, perhaps, by an overhead pylon or an
underground fault line. The challenge for Dr Persinger and his colleague,
Stan Koren, was to track down the source of these fields. The team used
their specially adapted measuring equipment — a plastic milk crate and a
roll of copper wire.

PERSINGER: What’s your beat frequency for the gigahertz — 15?

KOREN: 15 kilohertz — that’s right.

PERSINGER: In certain situations electromagnetic fields are being generated
that overlap at what the brain normally generates. Certain individuals, if
their brains are sensitive, their brains can interact with these fields to
produce all kinds of powerful, very meaningful, experiences that can be
called a god, or a haunt, depending upon their interpretation.

Talk about quietude!

So we walk about the house trying to find out where the areas are that may
be the sources of the signals. Usually the people tell us on the basis of
their experience, they’ll say: “This is where it happens.”

NARRATOR: Initially the readers the team found were inconclusive, but then
they noticed a clock radio in the girl’s bedroom.

PERSINGER: We went over and measured and we found that she slept near a
clock, and we measured the clock, and the clock had a particular, unusual
pattern to it. It was the same basic pattern that we were using to generate
the presence in the laboratory. The clock was removed, the phenomena itself
terminated.

NARRATOR: Dr Persinger’s story sounds almost unbelievable, but there is some
evidence that backs up the idea of a connection between supernatural visions
and electromagnetic fields. The spectacular Northern Lights are produced
when solar storms occur on the sun. These storms can also alter the earth’s
magnetic fields, and whenever this happens, an increased number of ghostly
sightings are reported. And several other scientists have claimed that these
fluctuating fields can cause seizures in the brain.

PERSINGER: We know geomagnetic activity influences the temple lobes because
when we look at correlational data there’s an increase in seizures, temporal
lobe seizures and convulsions when there’s an increased global geomagnetic
activity all over the earth.

NARRATOR: Controversially Dr Persinger argues that most, if not all,
spiritual and religious experience can be explained away by the effect of
electromagnetic fields on the temporal lobes of the brain.

PERSINGER: Most of my colleagues tell me why do you study this because
you’ll never get grant money, why do you study this because your reputation
will be put on the line because you’re looking at things that should not be
studied, religious experience, paranormal experiences, they should never be
studied because they’re outside of science. And my question is: why not, why
shouldn’t we study them? The experimental method is the most powerful tool
that we have, that’s how we find truth and non-truth.

NARRATOR: So Horizon decided to set Dr Persinger’s theories and his machine
the ultimate test, to give a religious experience to one of the world’s most
strident atheists — Professor Richard Dawkins. In Professor Dawkins’
opinion the struggle of atheism against religion is nothing less than the
battle of truth against ignorance. Will Dr Persinger succeed where the Pope,
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama have failed?

PROF RICHARD DAWKINS (University of Oxford): If I were turned into a devout
religious believer, my wife would threaten to leave me. I’ve always been
curious to know what it would be like to have a mystical experience. I’m
looking forward to the attempt this afternoon.

NARRATOR: Dr Persinger planned to apply a range of different magnetic fields
across Richard Dawkins’ brain.

DAWKINS: I’ve so far experienced nothing unusual at all.

NARRATOR: The fields must be adjusted because Dr Persinger’s work suggests
that different shapes of field and whether they’re applied over the left or
right temporal lobe can make a difference to whether the subject experiences
god or not.

DAWKINS: I’m slightly dizzy.

NARRATOR: Initially Dr Persinger applied a field to the right-hand side of
Richard Dawkins’ head.

DAWKINS: Quite strange.

NARRATOR: Then to increase the chances of feeling a sensed presence, Dr
Persinger started to apply the magnetic field to both sides of the head.

DAWKINS: Sort of a twitchiness in my breathing. I don’t know what that is.
My left leg is sort of moving, right leg is twitching.

NARRATOR: So after 40 minutes had Richard Dawkins been brought closer to
god?

DAWKINS: Unfortunately I didn’t get the sensation of a presence. It pretty
much felt as though I was in total darkness with a helmet on my head and
pleasantly relaxed, and occasionally feeling the sensations which I
described as they occurred into the microphone. But I would be hard put to
it to swear that those were not things that could happen to me any time on a
dark night. I’m very disappointed. It would have been deeply interesting to
me to have experienced something of what religious people do experience in
the way of a mystical experience, a communion with the universe. I would
have liked to have experienced that.

NARRATOR: But Dr Persinger believes that there was a particular reason why
the experiment failed for Richard Dawkins.

PERSINGER: We developed a questionnaire a few years ago called temporal lobe
sensitivity and what we found is a continuum of sensitivities from people
who are not temporal lobe sensitive to those who are very sensitive, and the
experience end being the temporal lobe epileptic. In the case of Dr Dawkins
his temporal lobe sensitivity is much, much lower than most people we run
than the average person, much, much lower.

BISHOP STEPHEN SYKES (University of Durham): It may not be open to everybody
in the same degree to have particular kinds of religious experience. There
is a very interesting dispute at the moment about whether one can have a
talent for religion and whether that is something like a musical talent
which some people have and other people don’t have.

NARRATOR: Despite the setback with Professor Dawkins, Dr Persinger’s
research on over 1000 human guinea pigs has gone further than any other to
establish a clear link between spiritual or religious experience and the
temporal lobes of the human brain. It has put his research at the very
cutting edge of neurotheology. But religious believers argue that there is a
world of difference between a motorcycle helmet that induces feelings and a
genuine religious experience.

BISHOP SYKES: If I thought that my mind had been manipulated into having a
certain set of experiences, and that somebody was out there doing it to me,
then I would be very inclined, I think rationally, to think that although
the experience might be pleasurable, have good consequences, relaxing,
whatever, whatever, I would want to say I wouldn’t think it had much to do
with religion, with my faith.

NARRATOR: What is almost certainly true is that religious experience is far
more complex than can be explained simply by activity in one area of the
brain. Dr Persinger’s work is only the beginning. Many scientists now
suspect there must be far more to the relationship between the brain and
belief. A research team has come up with a unique way of exploring this
relationship. They examined what happened at the precise moment the brain
had a genuine religious experience. It was the mind of Michael Baime that
provided the moment of insight.

DR MICHAEL BAIME: You could describe this experience of meditation, of
really deep meditation, as a kind of a oneness.

NARRATOR: Michael is a Buddhist, a faith that requires its followers to
enter into the spiritual through medication.

BAIME: As you relax more and more and let go of the boundary between oneself
and everything else begins to dissolve, so there’s more and more of a
feeling of identity with the rest of the world and less and less
separateness.

NARRATOR: Researcher Dr Andrew Newberg set up a brain imaging system that
could for the very first time track exactly what happened inside Michael’s
brain as he meditated.

DR ANDREW NEWBERG (Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania): When the
subject first comes into our laboratory, what we normally do is bring them
into a fairly quiet room. They would then begin the mediation. We were
normally not even in the room so that we would actually minimise any kind of
distractions to them. The only way that we had some kind of contact with
them is that they had a little piece of string that would sit next to their
side. They would tug on this string a little bit which meant that now they
were beginning to head towards their peak of meditation.

NARRATOR: The pulling of the string was the cue for the team to inject a
radioactive tracer into Michael’s body. This tracer was then carried in the
bloodstream up to the brain producing an accurate freeze-frame picture of
the blood flow in Michael’s brain just moments after injection at the
highpoint of his meditative climax. The scans measured blood flow with red
showing the areas with highest flow and yellow the areas with lowest. The
results revealed that as in other experiments the temporal lobes were
certainly involved, but they showed something else. As Michael’s meditation
reached its peak an area of the brain called the parietal lobes had less and
less blood flowing into them. They seemed almost to be shutting down. This
was significant new information. The parietal lobes help give us our sense
of time and place.

NEWBERG: This part of the brain typically takes all of our sensory
information and uses that sensory information to create a sense of
ourselves. When people meditate they frequently describe a loss of that
sense of self and that’s exactly what we did see in the meditation subjects
was that they actually decreased the activity in this parietal or this
orientation part of the brain.

NARRATOR: This strange sensation of a loss of self is central to religious
feelings in all the world’s faiths. Buddhists seek a feeling of oneness with
the universe, Hindus strive for the soul and God to become one and the
Catholics search for the Unio Mystica. Dr Newberg wondered if these very
different religions might actually be describing the same thing. To test
this theory he took scans of Franciscan nuns at prayer to see if there was
any similarity between what was going on in their brains and those of
Buddhists.

NEWBERG: Interestingly when we look at the Franciscan nuns we see a similar
decrease in the orientation part of the brain as we saw with the Tibetan
Buddhists.

NARRATOR: Even though Buddhists and Catholics may come from very different
religious traditions, how their minds react to deep meditation or prayer
seems, in terms of brain chemistry, to be exactly the same process. Dr
Newberg’s research shows the first clear scientific evidence that there are
a number of different areas in our brain involved in religious belief.

NEWBERG: The results from our study really point to the fact that there is a
large network of different structures in the brain communicating with each
other during these spiritual experiences, and I think our results do show
that there are lots of different parts of the brain that get turned on or
turned off suggesting that there really is an overall network of structures
that seems to be involved in these types of practices.

NARRATOR: The implications of Dr Newberg’s research, along with that of Dr
Persinger, are huge. They suggest that how or what we believe is deeply
controlled by the basic physical makeup of our minds. It begs the question:
why have we developed this ability? Perhaps there is a simple evolutionary
explanation. Studies have shown that believers live longer, are healthier,
even that they may have lower levels of cancer and heart disease. Could it
be we somehow evolved religious belief as a survival mechanism?

DAWKINS: If you ask the question ‘what’s the survival value of religious
belief?’ it could be that you’re asking the wrong question. What you should
be doing is asking what’s the survival value of the kind of brain which
manifests itself as religious belief under the right circumstances.

NARRATOR: But if religious faith is somehow a by-product of evolution, does
that mean belief in a god can be dismissed as a quirk of nature? The fact
is, it is much too early to think of neurotheology as a means of explaining
away people’s faith. Although there is evidence to show that our brains are
hardwired for religions, this doesn’t mean that god can be dismissed as just
a trick of brain chemistry.

RAMACHANDRAN: Just because there are circuits in your brain that predispose
you to religious belief does not in any way negate the value of a religious
belief. Now it may be god’s way of putting an antenna in your brain to make
you more receptive to god. Nothing our scientists are saying about the brain
or about neural circuitry for religion in any way negates the existence of
god, nor negates the value of religious experience for the person
experiencing it.

BISHOP SYKES: It would be very surprising if we didn’t discover more about
the physics and chemistry of those parts of our bodies which are a process,
the various bits of enjoyment we receive from religious belief. I think
Christians and maybe other religious believers have absolutely nothing to
fear from further investigation, indeed should be keen on it and canny when
it comes to the interpretation of it.

NARRATOR: What is beyond doubt is that the origins of religion are even more
complex than had been thought. The science of neurotheology has revealed
that it is too simplistic to see religion as either spiritually inspired or
the result of social conditioning. What it shows is that for some reason our
brains have developed specific structures that help us believe in god.
Remarkably it seems whether god exists or not, the way our brains have
developed, we will go on believing.

DAWKINS: The human religious impulse does seem very difficult to wipe out,
which causes me a certain amount of grief. Clearly religion has extreme
tenacity.

NEWBERG: Because the brain seems to be designed the way it is, and because
religion and spirituality seem to be built so well into that kind of
function, the concepts of god and religion are going to be around for a
very, very long time.

…………