GodinBrain

In search of God
21 Apr 01

                                Are our religious feelings just a product of how the brain works?
                                Bob Holmes meets the researchers who are trying to explain our
                                most sacred thoughts

                                EINSTEIN felt it. It's what draws people to church, prayer, meditation,
                                sacred dance and other rituals. Chances are you've felt something like
                                it too-in the mountains, by the sea, or perhaps while listening to a
                                piece of music that's especially close to your heart. In fact, more
                                than half of people report having had some sort of mystical or
                                religious experience. For some, the experience is so intense it
                                changes their life forever.

                                But what is "it"? The presence of God? A glimpse of a higher plane of
                                being? Or just the mystical equivalent of dÉjÀ vu, a trick the brain
                                sometimes plays on your conscious self? At some level, of course, all
                                our thoughts and sensations-however unusual-must involve the brain.
                                Indeed, experiments on the brain have led neuroscientists to suggest
                                that the capacity for religion may somehow be hardwired into us. If
                                so, why do people's religious experiences differ so profoundly, moving
                                some so deeply while leaving others cold?

                                Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in
                                Philadelphia, has been fascinated by the neurobiology of religion for
                                more than a decade. He admits it's an awkward role for a scientist. "I
                                always get concerned that people will say I'm a religious person
                                who's trying to prove that God exists, or I'm a cynic who's trying to
                                prove that God doesn't exist," he says. "But we try to approach it
                                without bias." Earlier this month he published a book, which lays out
                                the most complete theory to date of how mystical or religious
                                experiences can be generated in the brain.

                                Together with the now deceased Eugene d'Aquili, a colleague from
                                Penn, Newberg was keen to study the sensations that are unique to
                                religious experiences but shared by people of all faiths. One of these
                                is the sense of "oneness with the Universe" that enthralled Einstein.
                                The other is the feeling of awe that accompanies such revelations and
                                makes them stand out as more important, more highly charged, and in
                                a way more real than our everyday lives.

                                But Newberg realised that rare, fleeting revelations would be almost
                                impossible to study in the lab. It meant he had to ignore the one-off
                                experiences that strike out of the blue and focus instead on
                                meditation and prayer-sedate, but at least reproducible.

                                Through a colleague who practised Tibetan Buddhism, Newberg and
                                d'Aquili managed to find eight skilled meditators who were willing to
                                undergo brain imaging. The volunteers came to the lab one at a time,
                                and a technician inserted an intravenous tube into one arm. Then the
                                volunteer began to meditate as normal, focusing intently on a single
                                image, usually a religious symbol. The goal was to feel their everyday
                                sense of self begin to dissolve, so that they became one with the
                                image. "It feels like a loss of boundary," says Michael Baime, one of
                                the meditators and also a researcher in the study. "It's as if the film
                                of your life broke and you were seeing the light that allowed the film
                                to be projected."

                                Hidden in the next room, Newberg and d'Aquili waited. When the
                                meditator felt the sense of oneness developing-usually after about an
                                hour-they would tug on a string. This signalled the researchers to
                                inject a radioactive tracer through the intravenous line. Within
                                minutes the tracer bound fast to the brain in greater amounts where
                                the blood flow, and hence brain activity, had been higher. Later a
                                scanner would measure the distribution of the tracer to yield a
                                snapshot of brain activity at the time of binding. The technique,
                                called Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography, or SPECT,
                                allowed the subjects to meditate in the relative peace of the lab
                                rather than the claustrophobic whirr of a scanner. Once the tests
                                were completed, Newberg and d'Aquili compared the activity of the
                                subjects' brains during meditation with scans taken when they were
                                simply at rest.

                                Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found intense activity in the
                                parts of the brain that regulate attention-a sign of the meditators'
                                deep concentration. But they saw something else, too. During
                                meditation, part of the parietal lobe, towards the top and rear of the
                                brain, was much less active than when the volunteers were merely
                                sitting still. With a thrill, Newberg and d'Aquili realised that this was
                                the exact region of the brain where the distinction between self and
                                other originates.

                                Broadly speaking, the left-hemisphere side of this region deals with
                                the individual's sense of their own body image, while its
                                right-hemisphere equivalent handles its context-the space and time
                                inhabited by the self. Maybe, the researchers thought, as the
                                meditators developed the feeling of oneness, they gradually cut these
                                areas off from the usual touch and position signals that help create
                                the body image.

                                "When you look at people in meditation, they really do turn off their
                                sensations to the outside world. Sights and sounds don't disturb them
                                any more. That may be why the parietal lobe gets no input," says
                                Newberg. Deprived of their usual grist, these regions no longer
                                function normally, and the person feels the boundary between self
                                and other begin to dissolve. And as the spatial and temporal context
                                also disappears, the person feels a sense of infinite space and
                                eternity.

                                More recently, Newberg has repeated the experiment with Franciscan
                                nuns in prayer. The nuns-whose prayer centres on words, rather than
                                images-showed activation of the language areas of the brain. But
                                they, too, shut down the same self regions of the brain that the
                                meditators did as their sense of oneness reached its peak.

                                This sense of unity with the Universe isn't the only characteristic of
                                intense religious experiences. They also carry a hefty emotional
                                charge, a feeling of awe and deep significance. Neuroscientists
                                generally agree that this sensation originates in a region of the brain
                                distinct from the parietal lobe: the "emotional brain", or limbic system,
                                lying deep within the temporal lobes on the sides of the brain.

                                The limbic system is a part of the brain that dates from way back in
                                our evolution. Its function nowadays is to monitor our experiences and
                                label especially significant events, such as the sight of your child's
                                face, with emotional tags to say "this is important". During an intense
                                religious experience, researchers believe that the limbic system
                                becomes unusually active, tagging everything with special
                                significance.

                                This could explain why people who have had such experiences find
                                them so difficult to describe to others. "The contents of the
                                experience-the visual components, the sensory components-are just
                                the same as everyone experiences all the time," says Jeffrey Saver, a
                                neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, the
                                temporolimbic system is stamping these moments as being intensely
                                important to the individual, as being characterised by great joy and
                                harmony. When the experience is reported to someone else, only the
                                contents and the sense that it's different can be communicated. The
                                visceral sensation can't."

                                Plenty of evidence supports the idea that the limbic system is
                                important in religious experiences. Most famously, people who suffer
                                epileptic seizures restricted to the limbic system, or the temporal
                                lobes in general, sometimes report having profound experiences during
                                their seizures. "This is similar to people undergoing religious
                                conversion, who have a sense of seeing through their hollow selves or
                                superficial reality to a deeper reality," says Saver. As a result, he
                                says, epileptics have historically tended to be the people with the
                                great mystical experiences.

                                The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, wrote of
                                "touching God" during epileptic seizures. Other religious figures from
                                the past who may have been epileptic include St Paul, Joan of Arc, St
                                Theresa of Avila and Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century founder
                                of the New Jerusalem Church.

                                Similarly, neurosurgeons who stimulate the limbic system during
                                open-brain surgery say their patients occasionally report experiencing
                                religious sensations. And Alzheimer's disease, which is often marked
                                by a loss of religious interest, tends to cripple the limbic system
                                early on, says Saver.

                                The richness that limbic stimulation brings to experience may explain
                                why religions rely so heavily on ritual, claims Newberg. The deliberate,
                                stylised motions of ceremony differentiate them from everyday
                                actions, he says, and help the brain flag them as significant. Music,
                                too, can affect the limbic system, Japanese researchers reported in
                                1997, driving it towards either arousal or serene bliss. Chanting or
                                ritual movements may do the same. Meditation has also been shown
                                to induce both arousal and relaxation, often at the same time.
                                "Sometimes people refer to it as an active bliss," says Newberg. That
                                marriage of opposites, he thinks, adds to the intensity of the
                                experience.

                                Even if these feelings of oneness and awe fall short of the personal
                                experiences of God that many people report, anyone who still doubts
                                the brain's ability to generate religious experiences need only visit
                                neuroscientist Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in the bleak
                                nickel-mining town of Sudbury, Ontario. He claims almost anyone can
                                meet God, just by wearing his special helmet.

                                For several years, Persinger has been using a technique called
                                transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce all sorts of surreal
                                experiences in ordinary people (New Scientist, 19 November 1994, p
                                29). Through trial and error and a bit of educated guesswork, he's
                                found that a weak magnetic field-1 microtesla, which is roughly that
                                generated by a computer monitor-rotating anticlockwise in a complex
                                pattern about the temporal lobes will cause four out of five people to
                                feel a spectral presence in the room with them.

                                What people make of that presence depends on their own biases and
                                beliefs. If a loved one has recently died, they may feel that person
                                has returned to see them. Religious types often identify the
                                presence as God. "This is all in the laboratory, so you can imagine
                                what would happen if the person is alone in their bed at night or in a
                                church, where the context is so important," he says. Persinger has
                                donned the helmet himself and felt the presence, though he says the
                                richness of the experience is diminished because he knows what's
                                going on.

                                Not everyone accepts that Persinger's apparitions could equal what
                                religious devotees experience. "That is quite detached from anything
                                that's a genuine religious experience, in the same way that
                                psychoactive drugs can affect mood, but not in a legitimate way,"
                                says Julian Shindler, a spokesman for the Chief Rabbi's office in
                                London. "It's not the genuine article, somehow."

                                Whatever their validity, Persinger's experiments show that mystical
                                experiences consist of not only what we perceive, but also how we
                                interpret it. "We fit it into a niche, a pigeonhole," says Persinger. "The
                                label that is then used to categorise the experience will influence how
                                the person remembers it. And that will happen within a few seconds."
                                There's a third aspect, too: the reinforcement that humans, as social
                                animals, get from sharing religious rituals with others.

                                "Religion is all three of those, and all three are hardwired into the
                                brain," says Persinger. "We are hardwired to have experiences from
                                time to time that give us a sense of a presence, and as primates
                                we're hardwired to categorise our experiences. And we crave social
                                interaction and spatial proximity with others that are the same.
                                What's not hardwired is the content. If you have a God experience
                                and the belief is that you have to kill someone who doesn't believe as
                                you do, you can see why the content from the culture is the really
                                dangerous part."

                                So where does all this leave us? For whatever reason-natural or
                                supernatural-our big, powerful brains clearly allow a novel sort of
                                experience that we call religion. But it's difficult to say much more
                                than that. "In a sense, biology evolving has discovered something new
                                about the Universe," says Charles Harper, executive director of the
                                Templeton Foundation, a private institution that explores the
                                interaction between religion and science. "Almost all cultures have this
                                religious sense," he says. "Does that offer any insight for
                                understanding the grain of the Universe? That's a haunting question."

                                Sceptics of religion are quick to claim that the brain's hardwiring
                                proves that God has no real existence, that it's all in the brain. "The
                                real common denominator here is brain activity, not anything else,"
                                says Ron Barrier, a spokesman for American Atheists based in
                                Cranford, New Jersey. "There is nothing to indicate that this is
                                externally imposed or that you are somehow tapping into a divine
                                entity."

                                But Newberg isn't so sure. "We can't say they're wrong," he says. "On
                                the other hand, if you're a religious person, it makes sense that the
                                brain can do this, because if there is a God, it makes sense to design
                                the brain so that we can have some sort of interaction. And we can't
                                say that's wrong, either. The problem is that all of our experiences are
                                equal, in that they are all in the brain. Our experience of reality, our
                                experience of science, our mystical experiences are all in the brain."

                                In fact, he goes on, practically the only way we can judge the reality
                                of an experience is by how real it feels: "You can have a dream and it
                                feels real at the time, but you wake up and it no longer feels as real.
                                The problem is, when people have a mystical experience, they think
                                that is more real than baseline reality-even when they come back to
                                baseline reality. That turns everything around." To Newberg, it means
                                that reductionist science, powerful as it is, has its limitations.

                                Religious experts agree. "You could say Shakespeare's sonnets are
                                nothing but a combination of pencil lead and cellulose," says Harper.
                                "But you could also say this is the outflow of a great soul, and that
                                would also be true." He says there are different levels of explanation
                                which are each true at their own level, but which don't offer a
                                comprehensive explanation.

                                Just as physicists cannot fully understand the electron as either a
                                particle or a wave, but only as both at once, says Newberg, so we
                                need both science and a more subjective, spiritual understanding in
                                order to grasp the full nature of reality.