How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [149]
This is an exceptionally important study that goes a long way toward providing a normal explanation for what has long been considered to be paranormal phenomena, associated not only with near-death experiences, but with remote viewing, alien abductions, auditory and visual hallucinations (particularly, for our purposes here, those affiliated with religious epiphanies), and other mental ephemera and psychological anomalies. This study should stimulate other neuroscientists to explore adjacent regions of the brain to see if they can replicate other such phenomena, such as alien abductions and visual and auditory hallucinations. Although caution is called for because the subject pool was only one, all our brains are wired in a similar manner so there is little reason to think that stimulation of this brain region in other patients will not corroborate the finding. In fact, last December the British medical journal Lancet published a Dutch study in which 344 cardiac patients were resuscitated from clinical death. About 12 percent reported Near-Death Experiences where they saw the light at the end of a tunnel. Some even reported speaking to dead relatives. If these studies are corroborated it means yet another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain, from pure neural activity. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain, and these studies are another step in the long historical tradition where mysterious phenomena are subsumed under the blanket of science and naturalism.
Paranormal beliefs in general, in fact, may be related to brain chemistry. The July 2002 issue of New Scientist magazine reported the proceedings from a meeting of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies in Paris, in which a study was presented showing that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. The research was conducted by neurologist Peter Brugger of the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Brugger’s subjects consisted of twenty self-professed believers and twenty self-confessed skeptics. His methodology was to briefly flash images on a screen to see if there was a difference between believers and skeptics on what they thought they observed. In one experiment real faces and scrambled faces were shown. In another experiment real and scrambled words were flashed. Brugger found that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one. Skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen. The dopamine variable was added when Brugger gave his subjects L-dopa, normally used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. (Dopamine is also involved in the brain’s reward and motivation system and has some relevance for the treatment of drug addiction.) Although both groups made more mistakes under the influence of L-dopa, skeptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing. This finding suggests that paranormal thoughts and beliefs may be associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. The significant effect is that L-dopa makes skeptics less skeptical. By contrast, and surprisingly, L-dopa did not seem to increase the tendency of believers to see coincidences or relationships between the words and images. Brugger concluded that this could mean that there is a plateau effect for believers, with more