Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [144]
13 Albert A. Kurland et al., “Psychedelic Drug Assisted Psychotherapy in Patients with Terminal Cancer,” in Psychopharmacological Agents for the Terminally Ill and Bereaved, I. K. Goldberg, S. Malitz, and A. H. Kutscher, eds. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973).
14 Ibid., p. 102.
15 Her case is not unique. In a study of sixty cancer patients who were treated with LSD or a gentler psychedelic called DPT, 29 percent saw dramatic improvement, and 42 percent saw moderate improvement in their pain. Some cancer patients even returned to work after the experience. S. Grof et al., “LSD-Assisted Psychotherapy in Patients with Terminal Cancer,” International Pharmacopsychiatry 8 (1973): 129-44.
16 Kurland et al., “Psychedelic Drug Assisted Psychotherapy,” 113.
CHAPTER 7. SEARCHING FOR THE GOD SPOT
1 For example, a group of scientists in Sweden tried to replicate his findings, going so far as hiring the engineer who built Persinger’s “God helmet” to make one for them. They then tested it on eighty-nine people, using a double-blind method. They concluded that some test subjects experienced a “sensed presence”—but it had nothing to do with the magnetic fields generated by the helmet. The relevant factor turned out to be personality. “Suggestible people”—those who were easily hypnotized, for example, or those who lived “a New Age lifestyle”—were far more likely to be transported by the helmet. See Pehr Granqvist et al., “Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields,” Neuroscience Letters 379 (2005): 1-6. The Swedes concluded that since people most responsive to the helmet score high on suggestibility, “placing the helmet on their heads in a sensory deprivation context might have the anticipated effects, whether or not the cord is plugged in” (p. 5).
In response, Persinger reanalyzed data from 407 subjects and reiterated his claim that the magnetic configurations, not the subjects’ exotic beliefs or suggestibility, were responsible for sensing a presence. But, he conceded, the subjects’ histories of sensed presences experienced before the experiment were “moderately” correlated with exotic beliefs and temporal lobe sensitivity. See M. A. Persinger and S. A. Koren, “A Response to Granqvist et al.: ‘Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak magnetic fields,’ ” Neuroscience Letters 380 (2005): 346-47.
2 For an excellent synopsis, see J. Saver and J. Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry 9 (1997): 498-510.
Among the religious figures who supposedly had epilepsy are: Moses, Ezekiel (Jewish prophet), Saint Paul, Muhammad, Joan of Arc, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Catherine de’ Ricci, Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, Emanuel Swedenborg (founder of the New Jerusalem Church), Ann Lee (leader of the Shaker movement), Joseph Smith (founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism), Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Ellen G. White (founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church), and Hieronymus Jaegen (German mystic).
3 Acts 9:3-5 (King James Version).
4 K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, “Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” British Journal of Psychiatry 117 (1970): 497-507.
5 W. G. Lennox, in Epilepsy and Related Disorders, vol. 2 (London: Churchill, 1960).
6 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; originally published 1902), pp. 14-15.
7 This