The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [83]
In a related study reported in the 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and his colleague Eugene D’Aquili found that brain scans made when Buddhist monks meditated and Franciscan nuns prayed indicated strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region of the brain the authors have dubbed the orientation association area (OAA).28 The OAA’s job is to orient the body in physical space, and people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house, sometimes even bumping into objects. Even though they can see the obtrusive object, their brain does not process it as something separate from their body. When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who experience a sense of oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God, or with alien abductees floating out of their beds up to the mother ship.
This hypothesis was further supported in a 2010 discovery that damage to the posterior superior parietal lobe through tumorous lesions can cause patients to suddenly experience feelings of spiritual transcendence. Italian neuroscientist Cosimo Urgesi and his colleagues at the University of Udine in Italy measured the personalities of eighty-eight patients before and after brain surgery to remove tumors in both the left and right parietal cortex. They specifically noted the change in a relatively stable personality trait called “self-transcendence,” which tracks the tendency (or not) to become absorbed in an activity to the point of losing track of time and place, as well as the sense of having a strong spiritual connection with nature. “Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness,” Urgesi explained. “Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors.”29
Sometimes trauma can trigger such experiences. In a 2001 study published in the British medical journal Lancet, Dutch scientist Pim van Lommel and his colleagues reported that of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-death experiences. These included the full-on out-of-body experience, a light at the end of a tunnel, and so forth. Some of these near-death cardiac patients even described speaking to dead relatives.30
Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or “dead” and discovered that this was not at all the case. “What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal.” In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that’s the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: “By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn’t make you ‘clinically dead.’ It only means your heart isn’t beating and you may not be conscious.”31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain—quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist