Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [146]
16 The day of discovering the God spot, I suspect, will arrive far sooner than the Day of Judgment. Recently I watched Susan Bowyer, a medical physicist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, create an image of a young woman’s brain using MEG, or magnetoencephalography. MEG is brain scanning on steroids. Other types of brain-scanning technology, like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), can record a static map of those areas of the brain that light up during a particular task. That would be like showing the route that O. J. Simpson took in his white Bronco when he fled the police. With the MEG, you can watch the brain work second by second, as if viewing the police chase live from a television news helicopter. Dr. Bowyer pointed to a computer that was recording the woman’s brain as she performed a word task.
“I can tell you what your brain is doing from the minute you see the stimulus to the time you push a button and make a decision,” she explained. “I can see it go from your visual cortex, to Wernicke’s area for language, to the frontal for memory, going back to Broca’s area before you say something, going on to the areas where you make the decision. So with MEG you can look at all the different areas and see which comes before which.”
“Would the MEG, theoretically, be able to map a person’s brain while she’s having religious thoughts?” I asked.
“Probably,” Dr. Bowyer said. “If you wanted to look at the religious areas [of the brain], you’d want to show a person maybe thirty religious icons, average them together, and see where they showed some activity.”
“So would you be able to locate a God spot in the brain?”
Dr. Bowyer pondered the question. “You could show religious people the religious images and see where that evoked a response. And then take people who are atheists or nonreligious and show them the same images and see if they evoked any kind of emotional response. And maybe you could see if there is a God spot in the brain. Yeah,” she said, nodding, “you could put together a study that might do that.”
17 Saver and Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,” 499. See also D. Hay, “The Biology of God: What Is the Current Status of Hardy’s Hypothesis?” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 4 (1994): 1-23.
18 J. Wuerfel et al., “Religiosity Is Associated with Hippocampal but Not Amygdala Volumes in Patients with Refractory Epilepsy,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 75 (2004): 640-42. See also L. Tebartz van Elst et al., “Psychopathological Profile in Patients with Severe Bilateral Hippocampal Atrophy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Evidence in Support of the Geschwind Syndrome?” Epilepsy & Behavior 4 (2003): 291-97.
19 L. Tebartz van Elst et al., “Amygdala Abnormalities in Psychosis of Epilepsy: An MRI Study of Patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” Brain 125 (2002): 593-624.
20 Ahahar Arzy et al., “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person,” Nature 443 (Sept. 21, 2006): 287.
21 M. A. Persinger and K. Makarec, “Complex Partial Epileptic Signs as a Continuum from Normals to Epileptics: Normative Data and Clinical Populations,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 49, no. 1 (1993): 33-45.
CHAPTER 8. SPIRITUAL VIRTUOSOS
1 A. Newberg, E. D’Aquili, and V. Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine, 2001).
2 A. Newberg, and M. R. Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe (New York: Free Press, 2006).
3 Since Newberg had already conducted brain scans of people meditating, engaging in centering prayer, chanting, and speaking in tongues, we thought we’d mix it up. Scott would pray for someone else in “intercessory prayer,” and Newberg would take brain scans of both Scott and the recipient of his prayers. That guinea pig turned out to be me, as there weren’t many people in Scott’s church eager to have a radioactive tracer coursing