Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [75]
Spiritual Experience for Bubba
Most of us have never suffered an epileptic seizure and resulting visions. But most have enjoyed some more run-of-the-mill moments of transcendence. I wondered: How do neurologists explain the experiences of “normal” people?
According to Michael Persinger at Laurentian University, people’s spiritual experiences fall along a spectrum, with an atheist like Sigmund Freud sitting at one end and a mystic like Joan of Arc at the other. Somewhere in between are you, me, and anyone else who has shivered with a numinous experience. Persinger hypothesized that a person’s spirituality correlates to his brain-wave activity. The more “temporal lobe signs” a “normal” person shows, the more likely he or she is to encounter God.
Persinger studied more than 1,000 people over ten years, comparing “normal populations” and “special normal populations” and clinical populations.21 “Special normal populations” included creative people: artists, drama students, writers, and (oddly, I thought) women who experienced the psychological symptoms of false pregnancies. Clinical populations included people with epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder. He found a continuum of brain activity. The nonartistic drone showed average brain-wave activity, like the cold porridge of the mama bear. The artistic people showed more spike bursts: “theta” activity over the temporal lobes, which is a relaxed state of consciousness. They also presented discrepancies between the right side of the brain and the left. Persinger concluded that artists’ elevated activity sparked creativity—the porridge was just right. But the clinical populations—they were too hot, and their brains’ excessive temporal lobe activity brought anxiety, thoughts of suicide, and an intense, dominating, and often intrusive fantasy life.
What Persinger’s work suggests is that anyone with a temporal lobe has a gateway to the divine, or at least to divine feelings. How strong those feelings are depends on the way your brain fires.You don’t have to be crazy to feel “God.” You just have to be human.
I asked Orrin Devinsky about my own mystical experience, a little baby experience, to be sure, but one that is seared into my memory and changed my view of the world. I told him about the incident eleven years earlier, when I had been interviewing a woman about her cancer and her religious faith.
“And suddenly I felt this numinous presence all around us,” I recounted. “She felt it, too. Do you have any idea what would explain that?”
“I think the way you’re wired, what was going on in your brain at that time, your past history—combined with that woman’s story—profoundly affected you at some level,” he speculated. “Maybe it kindled or reawakened a neural state that exists dormantly within your mind, and it triggered the right frequencies, and the right resonances, and the right connections, to reawaken that feeling. And the way that manifested itself within your nervous system was to trigger a specific type of religious experience.”
“Does that exclude the possibility that there might have actually been something spiritual?” I asked.“I mean, does the fact that we might be able to explain it with brain function eliminate the possibility that there might actually be something spiritual going on?”
“No!” Devinsky said, and I was surprised by the heat of his answer. “I think the two can clearly exist together. Say there was a man and a woman who loved each other and when they looked at each other, they experienced that emotion that we refer to as love. There would be a change in their brain state, and probably a change in the temporal lobe as well. Does that negate the presence of true love between them? Of course not.When you get to spirituality,