Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [70]
As Jeffrey Saver, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, put it,“These patients give us clues as to what parts of the human brain are involved when all of us have a numinous experience.”
Studies suggest that when pollsters interview Americans in depth, some 60 percent report that they have had an experience of the presence of God or a “patterning” of events in their life that persuades them that they are part of a cosmic design.17
“We know that this is a universal response across cultures,” Saver continued. “And patients with these disorders give us an insight into the biologic hardwiring that underpins this universal human experience.”
“So are you saying that if there were a God who wanted to communicate with us,” I asked,“He or She would use the temporal lobes?”
“There have been two general hypotheses about how God might communicate with us,” Saver explained, smoothly adopting my God terminology. “One is that there’s some specific sensory organ that exists only to have contact with the divine. And so far we have no evidence that that sense organ exists. The other view is that we encounter the divine through our usual sensory faculties—through taste, smell, vision, our usual senses—but that when we encounter the divine, that contact is touched by, stamped by, some additional marker indicating that it is of special meaning, of special ultimacy. And the part of the human brain that stamps events as having these special qualities is the temporal limbic system. So that would be the way that a divine presence would manifest itself—if there were such a contact,” he added hastily.
Let’s look a bit closer at this part of the brain, and the “temporal limbic system.” From the side, the brain looks like a boxing glove, and the temporal lobes are where the thumbs would be, covering the ears. The temporal lobes are the gateway for, among other things, ideas and emotions, particularly about yourself. Their brief includes hearing (remember, the lobes are close to the ears), language comprehension, conceptualizing, memory, and attaching meaning and significance to events. Within the temporal lobes is the limbic system. Think of it as a loop that performs a certain function, like the cooling system under the hood of a car. There are more than half a dozen regions involved in the limbic loop, but for our purposes, we will focus on two.
The hippocampus is the memory center, essential for the formation and storage of long-term memories. Next to the hippocampus is the amygdala, which serves as the fight-or-flight messenger: stimulate that area and you’re likely to scamper away in terror or snarl in aggression. Working together, the hippocampus and the amygdala stamp people, places, and things with meaning. A woman who was bitten by a dog when she was a girl will shrink from my yellow Lab because her memory of dogs has been stamped with a particular emotional meaning (fear). But for someone like me, who grew up surrounded by dogs, my yellow Lab evokes only love and warm memories. Same dog, same parts of the brain, different meaning.
Now let’s look at what happens when a person suffers a seizure. At the start of the seizure, the cells in the brain begin to move in rhythm with one another, creating a powerful synchrony. The symptoms the person exhibits depend on the area of the brain in which this rhythmical spiking occurs. If the seizure zeroes in on the motor area of the brain, you might see the right thumb twitch or the left arm jerk around. If the electrical storm occurs in the temporal