Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [66]
Later Persinger predicted I would feel a sense of evil—once again, on my left, since he was stimulating the right side of my brain. About a minute later, my voice broke the silence: I’m not sensing a presence per se, but there’s kind of a roiling darkness, like a battle of darkness, like waves breaking over each other, but it’s all dark, it’s off to my left.
Next Persinger narrated that he had changed the stimulation to a “burst firing pattern” to affect my amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers strong emotions, especially fear. As he was explaining this into the tape recorder, my voice interrupted: I see little apparitions like little skulls. A few seconds later: I have these strange visual images, kind of over to my left.The face of a ghostly young woman, and then followed by a black goblin, with those eyes that you see in Japanese cartoon characters—spider-like eyes.
Shortly after this, the battery died and the recording ended.
As I transcribed my words, I realized that in my skepticism, my memory had filtered out some of my responses to Persinger’s electromagnetic waves. Manipulating my temporal lobes had evoked mental images—and, who knows, perhaps the memory of my prophecy for Sheila. I conceded that I could not easily dismiss Michael Persinger’s work, nor his discomfiting assertion that God is all in one’s head.
The Sacred Disease
In 400 B.C., Hippocrates wrote one of the first texts on epilepsy, “On the Sacred Disease.” In his essay, the renowned physician of ancient Greece tackled the conventional wisdom of his day: namely, that epilepsy was a sacred disease bestowed by the gods. At the time, doctors believed it was a curse that threw its sufferer to the ground in paroxys mal fits; anyone who has seen a tonic-clonic (or grand mal) seizure knows it is a terrifying event to witness, and could look to a superstitious mind like demon possession. Alternatively, some ancient physicians believed epilepsy to be a divine blessing that conferred gifts of prophecy and spiritual visions. Not so Hippocrates. Hippocrates argued that epilepsy was brain dysfunction pure and simple, and that erratic brain activity, not the gods, sparked these fits.
Some 2,400 years later, the medical view of epilepsy has sided squarely with Hippocrates. It has vaulted from one extreme to the other—from superstition, where everything is attributed to divine whimsy, to reductionism, where everything is explained by brain chemicals and brain-wave activity. The vast majority of scientists now understand epilepsy to be a neurological disorder, a firestorm in the brain. Armed with evidence from brain scans and other technology, some modern neurologists are, like Michael Persinger, reframing religious history. The effect has been not to present the disease as sacred, but to present the sacred as a disease.
If scientific journals are to be believed, most of the world’s religious doctrine sprang from dysfunctional minds. The list of religious leaders who, neurologists say, might have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy is as long as it is impressive.2 The most intriguing and controversial figure is Saul of Tarsus. Before he became Saint Paul, who authored much of Christian doctrine, he was a fiery rabbi who had set out on the road to Damascus intent on persecuting the early Christians.We pick up the story in Acts, chapter 9.
“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus. And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”3
Was this a conversation with the Son of God, or “visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness,” as the renowned psychiatrists Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard surmised?4 Was it a divine appointment, or, as neurologist