Science and Spirituality meet up after work for a beer (and people protest outside?)
The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the brain. An early contender was the brain's temporal lobe, a large section of the brain that sits over each ear, because temporal-lobe epileptics suffering seizures in these regions frequently report having intense religious experiences. One of the principal exponents of this idea was Vilayanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, who asked several of his patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral words while measuring their levels of arousal and emotional reactions. Religious words elicited an unusually high response in these patients. Andrew Newberg, from the University of Pennsylvania, injected radioactive isotope into Buddhists at the point at which they achieved meditative nirvana. Using a special camera, he captured the distribution of the tracer in the brain, which led the researchers to identify the parietal lobes as playing a key role during this transcendental state.
Published in PLOS One, their study examines how the parts of the brain responsible for empathy and analytical reasoning are linked to faith and spiritual thinking. It suggests religious beliefs and scientific thinking clash because different brain areas are involved in both cognitive processes. People who believe in the supernatural appear to suppress areas associated with critical thinking. In previous research, Jack and colleagues had identified, thanks to fMRI scans, two networks of neurones that competed with each other to let individuals see the the world either in religious or in scientific terms. They say the brain has an analytical network of neurons which triggered critical thinking and a social network which enabled empathy towards other and spiritual thinking.
In each experiment, the researchers found that both spiritual belief and empathic concern were positively associated with frequent religious practice. The more a person was religious, the more he or she is likely to suppress the analytical network in the brain, and to show empathy. The study also points out that some of the great scientists of our times were also very spiritual men. "Far from always conflicting with science, under the right circumstances religious belief may positively promote scientific creativity and insight," says Jack "Many of history's most famous scientists were spiritual or religious. Those noted individuals were intellectually sophisticated enough to see that there is no need for religion and science to come into conflict." According to the scientists, the individuals who manage to use both networks and avoid suppression of one or the other are better equipped to understand the world and come up with scientific discoveries.
“When people speak in tongues, they’re gone, they’re in a completely altered state. But most of the time they’re normal people like us, with jobs and children – they don’t show any sign of being delusional,” says Newberg. “Scans of their brains – when they’re ‘possessed’ – show very different results to scans of Buddhist monks or Carmelite nuns in prayer or meditation. There you see increased frontal lobe activity in the areas concerned with concentration, but the speakers in tongues had decreased activity in the same area, which would give them the sensation that someone else was ‘running the show’.”
During brain scans of those involved in various types of meditation and prayer, Newberg noticed increased activity in the limbic system, which regulates emotion. He also noted decreased activity in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for orienting oneself in space and time. “When this happens, you lose your sense of self,” he says. “You have a notion of a great interconnectedness of things. It could be a sense where the self dissolves into nothingness, or dissolves into God or the universe.”
“I get attacked by everyone,” says Patrick McNamara, associate professor of neurology at Boston University and author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. “Atheists hate me because I’m saying religion has some basis in the brain and fundamentalist Christians hate me because I’m saying religion is nothing but brain impulses.” If religion is merely a product of the mind, then perhaps its effects can be simulated artificially – with potentially powerful results. In the Nineties, Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger invented a “God helmet”, which, he claimed, simulated religious experiences by directing complex magnetic fields to the parts of the brain that include the parietal lobe. Evangelical Christians demonstrated outside the lab where Persinger tested the helmet, outraged at his suggestion that God could be replicated via a machine. But more than 80 per cent of those who wore the helmet reported sensing a presence in the room that many took to be their deity. They also became deeply emotional and, after the experiment, were filled with a sense of loss.
Another, more recent, study by researchers at Auburn University in Alabama showed that subjects who perceived supernatural agents at work in their daily lives tended to use brain pathways associated with fear when asked to contemplate their religious beliefs. Those with beliefs based on doctrine tended to use pathways associated with language. On the other hand, atheists tended to use pathways connected with visual imagery. The researchers also found individuals with a stronger ability to attribute mental states – such as beliefs, desires and intents – to themselves and to understand that others may have different mental states from their own. This ability, known as the “theory of mind”, is thought to have evolved in humans over thousands of years – suggesting religion is a by-product of human evolution.
Spirituality, after all, serves a vital human purpose. Numerous studies show that religious belief is medically and psychologically (not to mention socially) beneficial. Reports have shown that churchgoers live an average seven years longer than heathens. They report lower blood pressure, recover quicker from breast cancer, have better outcomes from coronary disease and rheumatoid arthritis, have greater success with IVF and are less likely to have children with meningitis. Patients with a strong “intrinsic faith” (a deep personal belief, not just a social inclination to go to a place of worship) recover 70 per cent faster from depression than those who are not deeply religious.
Changes in brain chemistry can also make people lose their religion. McNamara has used MRI scans on people with Parkinson’s disease. “We discovered a subgroup who were quite religious but, as the disease progressed, lost some aspects of their religiosity,” he says. Sufferers’ brains lack the neurotransmitter dopamine, making McNamara suspect that religiosity is linked to dopamine activity in the prefrontal lobes. “These areas of the brain handle complexity best, so it may be that people with Parkinson’s find it harder to access complex religious experiences.” “When religion is operating the way it ought – when we’re not talking about fanatics blowing up non-believers – it strengthens the prefrontal lobes, which helps inhibit impulses better,” McNamara says. “Religious activities such as prayer, ritual, abstaining from alcohol, strengthen the ability of frontal lobes to control primitive impulses.”
Interestingly, those who describe themselves as born-again do not show any evidence of this particular benefit in experiments. On the contrary, recent research by the Centre for the Study of Ageing at Duke University, North Carolina, revealed that there was significantly greater hippocampal atrophy (brain damage associated with depression, Alzheimer’s and dementia) in people who reported a life-changing religious experience, compared to religious people who did not describe themselves as born again.The human psyche hates any form of cognitive dissonance – or challenge to ingrained beliefs – and so scientists think the struggles through which born-again Christians go in order to overcome their old modes of thinking cause severe stress to their brains.
Posted Jun 3, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC