The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [84]
In addition to localized neural networks, hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to trigger such preternatural experiences, such as the sense of floating and flying stimulated by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids. These can be found in mandrake and jimsonweed and were used by European witches and American Indian shamans, probably for this very purpose.32 Dissociative anesthetics such as the ketamines are also known to induce out-of-body experiences. Ingestion of methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) may bring back long-forgotten memories and produce the feeling of age regression, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT)—also known as “the spirit molecule”—causes the dissociation of the mind from the body and is the hallucinogenic substance in ayahuasca, a drug taken by South American shamans. People who have taken DMT report “I no longer have a body,” and “I am falling,” “flying,” or “lifting up.”33 Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of “contact,” of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system’s emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict.34
These studies, and countless others, continue to rain blows down upon the dualist head that brain and mind are separate. They are not. They are one and the same.35 The brain, and the brain alone, is the source of our beliefs, and thus the template for our understanding of reality. The neural correlates of consciousness and subconsciousness elude us personally and can be gleaned only through careful scientific research using sophisticated tools such as brain scans and electrical stimulation of brain regions. As science marches onward it is inevitable that the paranormal and the supernatural either will be subsumed into the normal and the natural, or will simply disappear as a problem to be solved.
An Afterlife Interlude on Larry King Live
On Thursday, December 17, 2009, I filmed an episode of Larry King Live, which did not feature Larry King and was not live. No matter, it was a rockin’ good time with a room full of guests, which Larry’s show is wont to be.36 Featured guests on this day included CNN’s medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta (author of Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles That Are Saving Lives Against All Odds), the New Age alt-med quantum guru Dr. Deepak Chopra (author of Life After Death: The Burden of Proof), the social commentator cum Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza (who was touring for his new book Life After Death: The Evidence), a football referee named Bob Schriever who “died” on the playing field and saw the light, a reincarnation researcher who claims that birthmarks and bizarre dream images represent reincarnated dead people, and a young boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot (accompanied by his parents there to promote their book, Soul Survivor). The guest host who artfully juggled all these guests was Jeff Probst, star of the television series Survivor (a title I thought ironically appropriate for the topic of the show). All the guests except me were in the New York CNN studio. I sat alone in the Hollywood CNN studio set staring into a camera with a video feed streaming in about three seconds ahead of the audio feed in my earpiece, which made me feel like I was being channeled from some other plane of existence. This was fitting because the subject of the show was life after death.37
Sanjay Gupta started us