Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [46]
Then, the scientists asked the nuns to relive a profound emotional experience they’d had with another human being. Interestingly, the activity recorded in these scans was markedly different.
In short, Beauregard and Paquette concluded that while there is no single “God Spot” in the human brain, no one discrete region that’s activated when we’re engaged in religious or spiritual thoughts, there are—at least among those with strong religious beliefs—different patterns of activity when thinking about religion and when thinking about other human beings. As the next part of our study would show, when it comes to religion and faith, a number of integrated, interconnected brain regions work simultaneously and in tandem. Or, as a quote I once stumbled across said, “Trying to draw strict borders around consciousness is like trying to stick Post-it notes on the ocean.”
THIS STUDY WAS part of my inspiration for my next brain-scan research experiment. But it wasn’t as if my theory about brands and spirituality had come out of nowhere. Consider the following story:
One early winter afternoon in 2007, a small, excited crowd gathered at the storage bin at Port Newark in New Jersey, awaiting the arrival of a simple container. Most of the onlookers were formally dressed in white gloves, long black coats, and wide-brimmed hats. A rabbi stood in the center of the group, while a few photographers snapped away. At last, the hatch of the ship’s hold opened, and from the darkness a fastidiously dressed man emerged carrying a silver tray containing packages of…dirt.
But this wasn’t ordinary dirt. This was holy dirt, brought to our shores courtesy of Holy Land Earth, a Brooklyn-based company, the first business in the world to export soil directly from Israel to the United States. But what do people want with Israeli dirt, you might be wondering? Well, as it turns out, a handful of soil from the Holy Land can add a perfect touch of the sacred to religious burials. It can also be used to bless plants and trees, houses and buildings.
Among the assembled throng was Holy Land Earth’s founder and president, Steven Friedman, who addressed the dockside crowd. Many religions consider the ground of Israel to be sacred, he explained; his company was now importing this divine soil to anyone who wanted a small piece of the Holy Land in their lives. In fact, the soil had the official stamp of approval from Rabbi Velvel Brevda, the director of the Council of Geula in Jerusalem. “This is the culmination of many years of hard work,” Friedman proclaimed. “It took quite a bit of effort to not only satisfy import regulations, but to make sure our product had the endorsement of recognized Jewish religious leaders.” But it was all worth it, Friedman concluded.
Steven Friedman was hardly the first person to dabble in sacred dirt. In the late 1990s, an Irish immigrant named Alan Jenkins spent nine years securing U.S. government approval to import soil from Ireland. His reasoning? When the Irish came to America, they brought with them their churches, schools, and music—the only thing they had to leave behind was their soil. So, teaming up with an agricultural scientist, he doggedly petitioned both the U.S. Customs Department and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to make Irish soil legally exportable, and eventually won.
To date Alan Jenkins has shipped more than $3 million worth of Irish soil—sold in 12-ounce plastic bags labeled Official Irish Dirt—to the United States. For Irish immigrants, the soil of their native land has an almost religious significance because, like many Jews, quite a few Irish immigrants pine to be buried in the soil of their homeland. An eighty-seven-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, originally from Galway, recently bought $100,000 worth of Irish dirt to fill up his American grave. Another Irishman hailing from County Cork spent $148,000 on a few tons to spread under the New England house he was building. Funeral directors and florists have ordered the topsoil by the ton.