Home / Faith & Spirituality /Featured / God or the Brain?
Author: Carmelo Santos
Brain science is progressing by leaps and bounds. Phenomena previously assumed to be beyond the purview of the natural sciences are now been effectively probed and analyzed by the methods of what is broadly known as cognitive neuroscience. Spirituality is one such phenomenon.
Throughout the centuries people interested in plumbing the spiritual depths of reality would rely on the writings of great spiritual figures and mystics to guide them through the labyrinthine paths leading to what Teresa de Avila called the Interior Castle,1 that inner point where the human dissolves into the divine. Even those interested in the objective study of spirituality or mysticism as a psychological or social phenomenon did so mostly by reading the testimonies and descriptions composed by those claiming to have had such experiences. However, those interested in the study of spirituality today are able to read more than just books; they are now able to read the brains of mystics too.
With the advent and increased sophistication of scanning techniques it is now possible for neuroscientists to correlate brain areas with physical, cognitive and even emotional activities.2 Glucose and oxygen function as fuel for the brain. The neurons that do the hard work of the brain need that fuel in order to do what they do, that is to send and receive electrical pulses through biological wires (axons and dendrites) and chemicals (e.g., neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, etc.). By tracing the relative amounts of glucose or oxygen in brain regions it is possible to determine which areas of the brain have a significant change (increase or decrease) in activity. Computer programs can use that information to draw beautiful pictures of the active brain, sometimes in near real time. Thus, for example, scientists can read the brain of a person as that person reads and (by comparing “reading” scans to “non-reading” scans) draw a map of what areas of the brain are involved in the activity of reading.
That is how neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania could claim to have taken a photograph of God; by scanning the brains of people engaged in meditation at the point when they said they felt immersed in a spiritual reality.3 Sensationalism aside, their study deserves attention by anyone seriously interested in spirituality whether as an object of intellectual curiosity or as a matter of existential import. That is so because their experiments, and others that followed4, seem to show a link between brain function and spiritual experiences. They found that areas of the brain whose job appears to be to draw the boundaries between the body and its surroundings became under-active. At the same time that neuronal system that controls attention became very active. They concluded that with practice meditators (and mystics) had become proficient at blocking impulses traveling from the body to the posterior superior parietal lobe, the area responsible for orientating the self in relation to the rest of the world. Without external input that part of the brain feels as if there are no boundaries dividing the self from the rest of the world, there is no object-subject distinction, I versus you, there is only one oceanic reality which underlies everything that exists. Newberg calls that reality the Absolute Unitary Being.
There is much more going on in the spiritual brain than what can be covered in this brief piece. What makes this study and other similar ones relevant for those of us engaged in the study and practice of religion is that it shows spirituality to be the result of the workings of healthy brains. Spirituality is not pathological and faith is not an illness even if it can be contagious. It could even be claimed that our brains are wired for God, or at least for some kinds of spiritual experiences, although not all brains actualize that potentiality.
But such studies also raise the question: God or the brain? Are spiritual experiences neurologically real in the sense that mirages and hallucinations are neurologically real, or are they based on an objective reality “out there?” Unfortunately that question is not easy to answer in a straightforward way, for two main reasons: God is not an object, and objects aren’t just “out there.” Brain scanning has helped us understand that the brain is not a mere receptacle of images that get imprinted on it but it is an active participant in the construction of the reality it perceives. Thus the color red, for instance, is an electromagnetic wave that flows from certain objects “out there” but without the creative workings of certain neurons in the back of the brain it would not “look red.” Interestingly, some people have the strange capacity of seeing colors when they hear certain sounds, which means that they would “see red” in the absence of the electromagnetic waves we call red light.5 Similarly, if we read the testimonies of the great mystics and spiritual leaders, and not just their brains, we learn that God is a reality that transcends the categories with which we comprehend the world, such as the –you, and object-object divisions, as mentioned above. Before jumping to conclusions on either side we must acknowledge that reality is turning out to be more complex and rich than we previously thought.
In the end faith and spirituality are a matter of grace, and risk. Why can’t it be both, God and the brain?
Image by killermonkeys (rights)
September 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.