Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [72]
While neurologists are not certain what those abnormalities mean, one thing is clear: the brains of people with temporal lobe epilepsy are physically different from yours or mine. And the physical differences are probably dwarfed by the functional differences.
I thought of Jeffrey Saver’s theory, that the repeated spiking in the temporal lobe’s limbic system can place an exclamation mark after ordinary events, tagging them with cosmic meaning. For most of us, August 15 is just August 15, but for Mary it is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And at some point, this cosmic interpretation of events becomes the norm.
When you have occasional spikes from seizures, the UCLA neurologist explained, that extra electrical activity creates new connections between nerve cells. The more seizures, the stronger the connections. Eventually, the nerve cells form habits, like knee-jerk reactions of the brain. If your brain during a seizure tells you that certain events (or all events) have “God’s will” stamped on them, then you will see God’s will everywhere all the time, even when your brain is running normally.
This kind of brain, Saver told me,“is predisposed to have these types of experiences even between their seizures, because that brain had become more tailored toward religious experience.”
Mary had no doubt her brain was attuned to religious experience. “I know I’m very intuitive,” she said, and I sensed she felt this was a divine gift, not the result of neural circuitry.“I have a friend who’s a psychiatric social worker and she told me once, ‘Mary, you can’t enter into prayer with big groups of people. It’s not safe for you.’ She said, ‘People like you are like very loosely woven screens. You need to protect yourself.’ ”
I looked up from my furious scribbling, reminded of Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve.”
Mary smiled at me, then continued. “And I do. Because I pray for people and I start getting their symptoms. I prayed for a girl who’s addicted to cocaine and other substances, and I woke up, and”—Mary pulled up her left sleeve, revealing marks and bruises covering the underside of her arm—“I had all these bruises.”
She covered her arm quickly, then gazed at me.
“Mary,” I said, a little flustered, “say I didn’t believe in God. Say I thought this was just an electrical storm in your head. What would you say?”
Mary smiled kindly. “Well, I have a gift of faith. And I’m going to pray that you receive that gift, too.”
A God Who Transmits
Many scientists would say that Jordan Sinclair and Mary are cursed with faulty wiring in their brains. If God is an electrician in this case, He miscalculated the voltage with tragic results. On a regular basis, the electricity in their temporal lobe surges and the circuit breaker flips on. The visions or transcendent feelings that the faulty wiring creates are nothing more than hallucinations.
But suppose the proper analogy is not an electrical storm but a radio transmission, in which the brain is a radio receiver. This thought did not originate with me. Several scientists I interviewed proposed the idea. In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program to varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low—in the case of an atheist, so low it’s inaudible. Many hear their favorite programs every now and again. Others, through no fault of their own, have the volume turned up too high, or they are receiving a cacophony of noise that makes no sense, as if they were tuning in to stations transmitting from Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, while they drive through rural