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Recently a group of Swiss researchers was evaluating a twenty-two-year-old woman for possible brain surgery.20 She had no psychiatric history. The researchers were homing in on a particular spot in the brain—the junction of the temporal lobes (emotional self) and the parietal lobes (the area that orients your body in space and in relation to other objects). When the surgeon electrically stimulated that area, the patient felt the presence of another person behind her.When they increased the voltage, she saw the “person” was young, of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. In the next stimulation, she observed a “man” sitting behind her, clasping her in his arms, which, she allowed, was rather unpleasant. Finally the researchers stimulated her brain while she performed a naming test, holding a card in her right hand. She reported that the man, now behind her to her right, was getting pushy (probably smarting from her earlier rebuff) and trying to interfere with her task. “He wants to take the card,” she told the researchers. “He doesn’t want me to read.”

Stimulating alternate “realities” is a bit of a party trick. Making them disappear is far more common. Indeed, that is what epilepsy specialists are paid to do. It’s called treatment. They lesion, or cut into, the brain and remove the offending tissue, or they medicate the brain and tamp down the electrical spikes. Voilà, the spiritual experiences disappear.

In fact, New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky still remembers the day he made visions of Jesus go away. More than twenty years ago, when he worked as a resident at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Devinsky was called to consult on a woman who had a brain lesion.

“She was talking about Christ, and Christ was speaking to her, and she was in a state of religious fervor, just talking nonstop about this,” Devinsky recalls.

The brain scan showed an abnormality in her right temporal lobe, and her EEG showed that the region was experiencing continuous seizure.

“And when we used medications intravenously to shut down the seizure, the religious ideation stopped immediately,” he says. “So here is a woman with a known structural problem—a lesion on her right temporal lobe—who had a well-documented seizure on her EEG, who had religious ideation that she could not control, it was just coming out of her in an almost violent form—not quite psychotic, but verging on that—and it was shut down immediately by treating her with medication.”

You could conclude that if this woman’s relationship with Christ vanished with a dose of medication, that experience was merely brain activity, not a connection with another reality.

But you could also argue that this proves nothing about the existence of God. Consider, once again, the brain as a radio. Let’s say you open the lid and remove some components and wires: that’s called le sioning the brain. Or say you pour maple syrup over the connections: that’s called seizure medication. Either way, chances are the radio will not be picking up All Things Considered, even though the program is in fact broadcasting. In the same way, if there is an alternate reality, if there is a God who is constantly sending out signals, surgery or medication can destroy the ability to receive them—but God could still be speaking.

As I considered all I had learned about temporal lobe epilepsy, I realized I had circled back to the same irritating conundrum. Is the transcendent experience of an epileptic like music playing on a CD player—a closed loop dependent on nothing but the machinery? Or is it like a radio—tuning in to a hidden spiritual reality outside your physical brain?

Most scientists believe the question has been answered. It’s all in your head. But that points more to the nature of scientific inquiry than to truth. Neurologists cannot climb inside Terrance Ayala’s head and witness his alternate realities. Therefore under the rules of modern science—which require observation and precise