<nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>]

A quick side-viewpoint on the genomics of the imagination.... 
phenotype/genotype - the structures encoded  in the hardware of how 
we live in the world. Corpus delecti.... Again, the idea becomes a 
modification of the body in an environment conditioned by culture AND 
nature. Trace the routes that people use language to map onto 
neurochemistry. Prosthetic Realism meets Ali Babba and the 40 
Thieves... Who speaks through you? Genomics should be fun, and 
probably will be soon....

Paul



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8545-2001Jun15.html

Tracing the Synapses of Spirituality

By Shankar Vedantam


In Philadelphia, a researcher discovers areas of the brain that are
activated during meditation. At two other universities in San Diego and
North Carolina, doctors study how epilepsy and certain hallucinogenic
drugs can produce religious epiphanies. And in Canada, a neuroscientist
fits people with magnetized helmets that produce "spiritual" experiences
for the secular.


The work is part of a broad new effort by scientists around the world to
better understand religious experiences, measure them, and even reproduce
them. Using powerful brain imaging technology, researchers are exploring
what mystics call nirvana, and what Christians describe as a state of
grace. Scientists are asking whether spirituality can be explained in
terms of neural networks, neurotransmitters and brain chemistry.


What creates that transcendental feeling of being one with the universe?
It could be the decreased activity in the brain's parietal lobe, which
helps regulate the sense of self and physical orientation, research
suggests. How does religion prompt divine feelings of love and compassion?
Possibly because of changes in the frontal lobe, caused by heightened
concentration during meditation.  Why do many people have a profound sense
that religion has changed their lives? Perhaps because spiritual practices
activate the temporal lobe, which weights experiences with personal
significance.


"The brain is set up in such a way as to have spiritual experiences and
religious experiences," said Andrew Newberg, a Philadelphia scientist who
authored the book "Why God Won't Go Away." "Unless there is a fundamental
change in the brain, religion and spirituality will be here for a very
long time. The brain is predisposed to having those experiences and that
is why so many people believe in God."


The research may represent the bravest frontier of brain research.  But
depending on your religious beliefs, it may also be the last straw. For
while Newberg and other scientists say they are trying to bridge the gap
between science and religion, many believers are offended by the notion
that God is a creation of the human brain, rather than the other way
around.


"It reinforces atheistic assumptions and makes religion appear useless,"
said Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "If you can explain religious
experience purely as a brain phenomenon, you don't need the assumption of
the existence of God."


Some scientists readily say the research proves there is no such thing as
God. But many others argue that they are religious themselves, and that
they are simply trying to understand how our minds produce a sense of
spirituality.


Newberg, who was catapulted to center stage of the neuroscience-religion
debate by his book and some recent experiments he conducted at the
University of Pennsylvania with co-researcher Eugene D'Aquili, says he has
a sense of his own spirituality, though he declined to say whether he
believed in God because any answer would prompt people to question his
agenda. "I'm really not trying to use science to prove that God exists or
disprove God exists," he said.


Newberg's experiment consisted of taking brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist
meditators as they sat immersed in contemplation. After giving them time
to sink into a deep meditative trance, he injected them with a radioactive
dye. Patterns of the dye's residues in the brain were later converted into
images.


Newberg found that certain areas of the brain were altered during deep
meditation. Predictably, these included areas in the front of the brain
that are involved in concentration. But Newberg also found decreased
activity in the parietal lobe, one of the parts of the brain that helps
orient a person in three-dimensional space.


"When people have spiritual experiences they feel they become one with the
universe and lose their sense of self," he said. "We think that may be
because of what is happening in that area – if you block that area
you lose that boundary between the self and the rest of the world. In
doing so you ultimately wind up in a universal state."


Across the country, at the University of California in San Diego, other
neuroscientists are studying why religious experiences seem to accompany
epileptic seizures in some patients. At Duke University, psychiatrist Roy
Mathew is studying hallucinogenic drugs that can produce mystical
experiences and have long been used in certain religious traditions.


Could the flash of wisdom that came over Siddhartha Gautama –  the
Buddha – have been nothing more than his parietal lobe quieting down?
Could the voices that Moses and Mohammed heard on remote mountain tops
have been just a bunch of firing neurons –  an illusion? Could
Jesus's conversations with God have been a mental delusion?


Newberg won't go so far, but other proponents of the new brain science do.
Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at Laurentian University in
Sudbury, Ontario, has been conducting experiments that fit a set of
magnets to a helmet-like device.  Persinger runs what amounts to a weak
electromagnetic signal around the skulls of volunteers.


Four in five people, he said, report a "mystical experience, the feeling
that there is a sentient being or entity standing behind or near" them.
Some weep, some feel God has touched them, others become frightened and
talk of demons and evil spirits.


"That's in the laboratory," said Persinger. "They know they are in the
laboratory. Can you imagine what would happen if that happened late at
night in a pew or mosque or synagogue?"


His research, said Persinger, showed that "religion is a property of the
brain, only the brain and has little to do with what's out there."


Those who believe the new science disproves the existence of God say they
are holding up a mirror to society about the destructive power of
religion. They say that religious wars, fanaticism and intolerance spring
from dogmatic beliefs that particular gods and faiths are unique, rather
than facets of universal brain chemistry.


"It's irrational and dangerous when you see how religiosity affects us,"
said Matthew Alper, author of "The God Part of the Brain," a book about
the neuroscience of belief. "During times of prosperity, we are contented.
During times of depression, we go to war. When there isn't enough food to
go around, we break into our spiritual tribes and use our gods as
justification to kill one another."


While Persinger and Alper count themselves as atheists, many scientists
studying the neurology of belief consider themselves deeply spiritual.


James Austin, a neurologist, began practicing Zen meditation during a
visit to Japan. After years of practice, he found himself having to
re-evaluate what his professional background had taught him.


"It was decided for me by the experiences I had while meditating,"  said
Austin, author of the book "Zen and the Brain" and now a philosophy
scholar at the University of Idaho. "Some of them were quickenings, one
was a major internal absorption – an intense hyper-awareness, empty
endless space that was blacker than black and soundless and vacant of any
sense of my physical bodily self. I felt deep bliss. I realized that
nothing in my training or experience had prepared me to help me understand
what was going on in my brain. It was a wake-up call for a neurologist."


Austin's spirituality doesn't involve a belief in God – it is more in
line with practices associated with some streams of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Both emphasize the importance of meditation and its power to make an
individual loving and compassionate – most Buddhists are
disinterested in whether God exists.


But theologians say such practices don't describe most people's
religiousness in either eastern or western traditions.


"When these people talk of religious experience, they are talking of a
meditative experience," said John Haught, a professor of theology at
Georgetown University. "But religion is more than that. It involves
commitments and suffering and struggle – it's not all meditative
bliss. It also involves moments when you feel abandoned by God."


"Religion is visiting widows and orphans," he said. "It is symbolism and
myth and story and much richer things. They have isolated one small aspect
of religious experience and they are identifying that with the whole of
religion."


Belief and faith, argue believers, are larger than the sum of their brain
parts: "The brain is the hardware through which religion is experienced,"
said Daniel Batson, a University of Kansas psychologist who studies the
effect of religion on people. "To say the brain produces religion is like
saying a piano produces music."


At the Fuller Theological Seminary's school of psychology, Warren Brown, a
cognitive neuropsychologist, said, "Sitting where I'm sitting and dealing
with experts in theology and Christian religious practice, I just look at
what these people know about religiousness and think they are not very
sophisticated. They are sophisticated neuroscientists, but they are not
scholars in the area of what is involved in various forms of
religiousness."


At the heart of the critique of the new brain research is what one
theologian at St. Louis University called the "nothing-butism" of some
scientists – the notion that all phenomena could be understood by
reducing them to basic units that could be measured.


"A kiss," said Michael McClymond, "is more than a mutually agreed-upon
exchange of saliva, breath and germs."


And finally, say believers, if God existed and created the universe,
wouldn't it make sense that he would install machinery in our brains that
would make it possible to have mystical experiences?


"Neuroscientists are taking the viewpoints of physicists of the last
century that everything is matter," said Mathew, the Duke psychiatrist. "I
am open to the possibility that there is more to this than what meets the
eye. I don't believe in the omnipotence of science or that we have a
foolproof explanation." Port:status>OPEN wildstyle access:
www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid 
Music and Art 245w14th st #2RC NY NY 10011





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