Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [152]
Indeed, Jansen himself has shifted his position, suggesting that a ketamine-like chemical may be one trigger of authentic spiritual experience, while coming close to death may be another. He no longer rules out the possibility that people are catapulted—chemically or traumatically—into other worlds, and that these worlds might be, in fact, real. “I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience,” he wrote. “It exists when we begin and may persist when we end. Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist.” See K. L. R. Jansen, “Response to Commentaries on ‘The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-methyl-D-asparate Receptor,’ ” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 79-95. Blackmore insists that nothing, including consciousness, can separate from the body and survive. In fact, she asserted, “If . . . truly convincing paranormal events are documented then certainly the theory I have proposed will have to be overthrown.” See Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (New York: Prometheus, 1993), p. 262.
7 Peter Fenwick, “Science and Spirituality: A Challenge for the 21st Century,” paper presented at International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2004 Conference, Evanston, Illinois.
8 Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette, “Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns,” Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006): 186-90.
9 Specifically, one area that lit up in the brains of both nuns and near-death experiencers was a region of the temporal lobe called the middle temporal gyrus. Having considered reports by clinical neurologists and research on people with temporal lobe epilepsy, Beauregard said, “I hypothesize that this activation is related to the subjective perception of contacting a spiritual reality.”
Another curiosity concerned the caudate nucleus, which is involved with feelings of intense love. “We just finished a study on unconditional love and we found out that this caudate nucleus was crucially involved with unconditional love. But it’s also involved in other forms of love, like romantic love and maternal love. The major puzzle involved the parietal lobe, the area that helps you determine your body schema. In the nuns’ brains, this area showed unusual activity, suggesting they were being absorbed into a larger being. The near-death experiencers showed no unusual activity at all, even though they talked about walking toward the light. “I’ll have to think about this,” was all Beauregard would say.
10 It is unlikely that a brain would rewire itself in an instant, Andrew Newberg told me. Newberg has puzzled over this, and says that if further research shows that a person’s brain structure or brain-wave patterns do in fact behave differently as a result of a near-death or other experience, he can imagine a couple of mechanisms. Perhaps the jolting experience suddenly taps into unconscious areas of the brain; or perhaps it activates and strengthens weak connections in the brain, and the newly robust connections create a new pattern of brain activity that becomes the norm.
11 William James recognized this phenomenon a century ago. Mystical states, he wrote, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; originally published 1902), allow the mystic to become one with the Absolute, and to be aware of that oneness—a tradition that defied “clime or creed.” “In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal