The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [47]
Agenticity and the Demon-Haunted Brain
Five centuries ago demons haunted our world, with incubi and succubi tormenting their victims as they lay asleep in their beds. Two centuries ago spirits haunted our world, with ghosts and ghouls harassing their sufferers all hours of the night. For the past century aliens have haunted our world, with grays or greens molesting people in their sleep, delivering messages to them as they lay awake, or abducting them out of their beds and whisking them away to the mother ship for prodding and probing. Today people are undergoing out-of-body experiences (OBEs), floating above their beds, out of their bedrooms, and even off the planet into space.
What is going on here? Are these elusive creatures and mysterious phenomena in our world or in our minds? By now you know that I will argue that they are entirely in our heads, even while they are modified and tweaked by the culture into which we happened to be born. The evidence that brain and mind are one is now overwhelming. Consider the research by the Laurentian University neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who in his laboratory in Sudbury, Ontario, induces all of these events in volunteers by subjecting their temporal lobes to patterns of magnetic fields. Persinger uses electromagnets inside a modified motorcycle helmet (sometimes called the God Helmet) to produce temporal lobe transients—increases and instabilities in the neuronal firing patterns in the temporal lobe region just above the ears—in the brains of subjects. Persinger believes that the magnetic fields stimulate “microseizures” in the temporal lobes, often producing what can best be described as “spiritual” or “supernatural” episodes: the sense of a presence in the room, an out-of-body experience, bizarre distortion of body parts, and even profound religious feelings of being in contact with God, gods, saints, and angels. Whatever we call them, the process itself is an example of agenticity.
Why does this happen? Because, said Persinger, our “sense of self” is maintained by the left hemisphere temporal lobe. Under normal brain functioning this is matched by the corresponding systems in the right hemisphere’s temporal lobe. When these two systems are out of sync, the left hemisphere interprets the uncoordinated activity as “another self” or a “sensed presence,” because there can only be one self. Two “selves” are reconfigured as one self and one something else, which may be labeled as an angel, demon, alien, ghost, or even God. When the amygdala is involved in the transient events, said Persinger, emotional factors significantly enhance the experience, which, when connected to spiritual themes, can be a powerful force for intense religious feelings.8
Having read about Persinger’s research I was naturally curious to know if his helmet would work its magic on a skeptic’s brain. I had recently tried hypnosis for the first time in nearly two decades for a television series I cohosted for the Fox Family Channel called Exploring the Unknown.9 In my far-less-skeptical early twenties, while training for the three-thousand-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America, I engaged the talents of a former fellow graduate student to teach me self-hypnosis so that I could learn to deal with pain and sleep deprivation. I was easily hypnotized, as evidenced in an ABC Wide World of Sports “Up Close and Personal” segment on me in which I was so deeply entranced that my hypnotist colleague had a hard time bringing me out (dramatically revealed on television). But during my Exploring the Unknown experience, I was much too anxious about what was going on in my brain during the hypnotic process and thereby negated its effects, leaving me in what was little more than a role-playing mode (which critics of hypnosis think is all that it is anyway). Would the same thing happen in Persinger’s lab when they strapped me into the God Helmet, I wondered?
Articulate, smart, and media savvy, Persinger is an interesting character, famous for wearing 1970s-era three-piece