Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [57]
Here is the “oceanic boundlessness” of Franz Vollenweider’s heaven—the serenity, the unity with all things, past, present, and future. Here is the deep meditation of a Buddhist monk, the joyful vision of a Catholic mystic. In this state, you are flooded with happiness and peace.You feel no boundaries and are at one with the universe. When Vollenweider scanned people’s brains, he found they experienced heaven when the chemicals stimulated the front of the brain. The frontal lobes keep you alert and processing information. At the same time, Vollenweider found that during good drug trips, the parietal lobes, which help you perceive personal boundaries (where your body ends and the rest of the world begins), were also stimulated.5 Meanwhile, the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotions, anger, and fear—is dozing. The result is a mellow, blissful party.
As Mike narrated his story, I realized his “heaven” was woven together with visions, or, as Vollenweider would have it, “visionary re structuralizations.”
“The candles were extra-radiant,” Mike continued. “The colors were very rich. The shadows were very dense. These sorts of substances do bring out elements of our perception that we don’t normally access. Some people would say it’s a hallucination, whereas I don’t believe that. I tend to agree with Aldous Huxley that our perception is actually widened, and not just altered or twisted. It was also very tactile in the way my body felt opened up as if every pore was expanded, and it’s hard to say whether the experience was more physical or mental or emotional, because it was so profoundly all of those at one time.”6
If the Swiss neuroscientist had been watching Mike’s brain in the scanner, he might explain that visions (or “visionary restructuraliza tions”) refer to altered perception—hearing voices, seeing colors more brightly, even hallucinating.7 Visions materialize, Vollenweider speculates, when the drug stimulates the striatum. That is a part of the brain that processes sights, sounds, tastes, touch; stimulating this area makes those senses richer, more acute, more colorful—but not so much that it terrifies. Ordinary things seem remarkable. Oh, wow, look at that doorknob.
Dave Nichols, a pharmacologist at Purdue University, speculated that Mike’s brain was experiencing a torrent of events as he gazed at the candles. The part of the brain that detects colors was stimulated, and the frontal cortex, which makes sense of the world, was in overdrive, over-processing the colors and making them appear richer. At the same time, Nichols believed, a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus was firing out signals in bursts. This part of the brain is nicknamed the “novelty detector”—because it tells you, “Oh! Someone just walked into the room! Pay attention.”
“Say someone takes psilocybin and they look at a flower, and they say, ‘Oh my God, this is really beautiful,’ ” Nichols explained. On the one hand, the signals in your brain that say “red rose” are now being processed in overdrive, so the red looks much brighter and more saturated. At the same time, he said, the novelty detector is going overboard.
“The normal connotation placed on the flower is, ‘Well, that’s a flower, and I’ve seen a million of them in my life and it’s just a flower.’ But now you’ve shut off some of the processing that would come through and tell you that. And you’re also having this novelty detector saying, ‘Wow, this is a really interesting flower. Look at all those veins and petals.’ ”
The Brain as Spiritual Filter
As I worked through the chemistry of psychedelic experiences, one question nagged at me: Is a chemically induced experience a real spiritual experience?
Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea whether drugs trigger a genuine encounter with “God” or another reality. Nor does anyone else, incidentally, since that