example, when we call up “the recollection of a friend, a landscape, or a statue” but these images, without practice, are “indistinct and obscure” and “still inferior to the original.” With practice, however, the representation becomes much more realistic (as tested in a series of experiments with artists’ models, who appeared for a fixed duration, followed by the artists’ rendition from memory). Such mental representations can be produced in extended meditation, so a hallucination must be the product of something resembling the normal process of mental representation and not a state of disease—physiology, not pathology: “I believe I am justified in concluding that the phenomena—apparently so dissimilar—of sensorial perception or sensation; of voluntary and normal mental representation (memory imagination, conception), and of involuntary and abnormal mental representation (illusions, hallucinations )—result from the operation of one and the same psycho-organic faculty, acting under different conditions, and with apparent degrees of intensity.” If intense enough, the hallucination seems “exterior and at some distance from the ego,” and thus “the person sees and believes.” Especially intense hallucinations, as produced through reverie and meditation, and with religious overtones, are particularly effective, where “everything concurred to favour the production of hallucinations—religion, the love of the marvellous, ignorance, anarchy, and the still lingering fear that the end of the world was at hand.” When Martin Luther wrote: “It happened on one occasion that I woke up suddenly, and Satan commenced disputing with me,” this was no literary trope. He was hallucinating, says Brierre de Boismont. The “ideas of Luther, exalted by perpetual controversy, by the dangers of his situation, by the fulminations of the church, and by continually dwelling on religious subjects, would naturally fall under the influence of the demon, which he saw everywhere, and to whom he attributed all the obstacles he encountered, and whom—like his contemporaries—he conceived interfered in all the affairs of life.” For Brierre de Boismont, Satan is a socially constructed hallucination, the product of a mind trapped in a demon-haunted world.
Brierre de Boismont’s early theories, constructed long before even a crude understanding of brain physiology was realized, have held up remarkably well. And if Ramachandran’s and Persinger’s research is corroborated, we might inquire further about the origin of temporal lobe-stimulated religiosity. Persinger proffers an evolutionary explanation: “The God Experience has had survival value. It has allowed the human species to live through famine, pestilence, and untold horrors. When temporal lobe transients occurred, men and women who might have sunk into a schizophrenic stupor continued to build, plan, and hope.” Maybe, but Ramachandran is more cautious: “Whether the findings imply the existence of a religion or a ‘God module’ in the temporal lobes remains to be seen.”
In fact, according to neuroscientist David Noelle, “the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying religion form a distinct brain module was not really tested by these experiments. Reports of evidence for a ‘God module’ in the brain are, at best, premature.” When you consider the fact that most studies show that more than 90 percent of the population believes in God, it would take a big stretch of the temporal lobe imagination to suggest that billions of people of all faiths the world over have experienced or are experiencing temporal lobe seizures or transients. A more reasonable hypothesis is that the handful of fanatic religious leaders throughout history, who report hearing the voice and seeing the face of, and even communicating with God, the devil, angels, aliens, and other supernatural beings, can perhaps be accounted for by temporal lobe abnormalities and anomalies. Their followers need a different explanation.
GOD AS MEME
In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed a cultural replicator to explain the transmission