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they found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly someone responds to a mystical experience. As evidence of how brain cells and synapses might process spiritual stirrings, the experiment suggests a physical basis for a religious state of mind.” Hotz followed up six months later in the Los Angeles Times with a deeper analysis of “the biology of spirituality,” in which he explored just how far science might go with this line of research. “The issues are huge,” explained Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and Natural Science in Berkeley. USC neuroscientist Michael Arbib agreed: “We cannot approach theology without some sense of the intricacy of the human brain. A lot of what people hold as articles of faith are eroded by neuroscience.” And Nancey Murphy, from the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, rationalized the problem to Hotz this way: “If we recognize the brain does all the things that we [traditionally] attributed to the soul, then God must have some way of interacting with human brains.”

Specifically, what Ramachandran said was that an individual’s religiosity may depend on how enhanced a part of the brain’s electrical circuitry becomes: “If these preliminary results hold up, they may indicate that the neural substrate for religion and belief in God may partially involve circuitry in the temporal lobes, which is enhanced in some patients.” Using electrical monitors on subjects’ skin (a skin conductance response commonly used to measure emotional arousal) Ramachandran and his colleagues tested three types of “emotional stimuli”: religious, violent, and sexual, in three populations: (1) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients who had religious preoccupations, (2) normal “very religious” people, and (3) normal nonreligious people. In groups 2 and 3 Ramachandran found skin conductance response to be highest to sexual stimuli, whereas in the first group the response was strongest to religious words and icons, significantly above the religious control group.

Ramachandran considered three possible (but not mutually exclusive) hypotheses to explain his findings: (a) that the mystical reveries led the patient to religious beliefs; (b) that the facilitation of connections between emotion centers of the brain, like the amygdala, caused the patient to see deep cosmic significance in everything around him or her that is similar to religious experiences; (c) that there may be neural wiring in the temporal lobes focused on something akin to religion. Research other than Ramachandran’s tends not to support the first hypothesis, which leaves band c the likeliest explanations of the findings. Psychiatric and neurological patients experiencing hallucinations, for example, do not necessarily exhibit religious propensities, but TLE patients, when shown religious words, as well as words with sexual or violent connotations, showed much higher emotional response to the religious words. Cautious not to offend, Ramachandran concluded with this disclaimer: “Of course, far from invalidating religious experience this merely indicates what the underlying neural substrate might be.”

Related to Ramachandran’s research, with implications for both supernatural and paranormal beliefs, is the work of Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. Persinger places a motorcycle helmet specially modified with electromagnets on the subject’s head, who lies in a comfortable recumbent position in a soundproof room with eyes covered. The electrical activity generated by the electromagnets produces a magnetic field pattern that stimulates “microseizures” in the temporal lobes of the brain which, in turn, produces a number of what can best be described as “spiritual” and “supernatural” experiences—the sense of a presence in the room, an out-of-body experience, bizarre distortion of body parts, and even religious feelings. Persinger calls these experiences “temporal lobe transients,” or increases and instabilities in neuronal firing patterns in the temporal lobe. These “transients” are