The God of Mind : Exploring the Implications of Neurotheological Research
by Rs Mani on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 6:46am
The God of Mind : Exploring the Implications of Neurotheological Research
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN PARARAJASINGHAM OCTOBER 26, 2011 11:54 PM 3 COMMENTS
Editor’s
Note: This is the fourth part of “Mind’s Matter”, a series by Dr.
Jonathan Pararajasingham exploring the Neurobiological basis of
behaviour.
Neuroscientists have discovered curious
truths about religious experience and their potential enhancement
through drugs, disease or even practice. In this article I explore the
implications of the apparent malleability and non-universality of
religiosity.
A relatively new area in neuroscience
gaining momentum rapidly is neurotheology – a field which investigates
the notion that within the brain are neural structures which give rise
to the potential for religious experience. More studies are beginning to
show not only that neural correlates exist, but that they have
susceptibility to pharmacological and pathological modification and
potentiation, much as the same as we have found for many of the complex
emergent properties of the brain.
The
neuroscientist VS Ramachandran has extensively investigated a curious
condition known as temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Studies have shown that
after TLE patients undergo an epileptic seizure, they uniquely describe
having a profound “spiritual” experience. They claim to understand
their place in the cosmos, and how everything suddenly becomes saturated
with significance and meaning. Such experiences occur independently of
prior beliefs held by the patient. Ramachandran has explained that the
phenomenon is not evidence for “God module” as the media initially
popularised. Rather that there are perhaps a variety of structures which
work together to give rise to such spiritual experiences, which is the
case with other specific systems of the brain. The visual system for
example has many quite distinct components (colour, movement, object
recognition, facial recognition) working together to produce vision,
rather than a “vision module” located in a single area. TLE patients
also show a reduced response to normally provocative images (such as
sexual images), but a heightened response to religiously-loaded words or
imagery.
The serotonin (5-HT)
system has long been of interest in biological models of human
personality. Psychopharmacological research has investigated the effect
of psychedelic drugs in relation to religious experience. The drugs
which have been studied include adrenaline derivatives (e.g. mescaline)
and serotonin derivatives (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, DMT). It has been found
that these drugs cause transcendental or spiritual experiences as well
as intense visual hallucinations. The remarkable finding is that all of
these drugs act on one specific type of neuroreceptor called serotonin
2A (or 5-HT2A) receptors, which are found all over the cortical surface
of the brain. 5-HT2A receptors are stimulatory, which means when these
drugs acts on them they increase production of serotonin in the brain,
and this gross overstimulation of the 5-HT2A receptors leads to what are
interpreted as religious experiences.
A second
line of evidence regarding the serotonin system was published in the
American Journal of Psychiatry in 2003 on the effect of 5-HT1A
receptors, which are inhibitory. They showed that the binding potential
of 5-HT1A receptors correlated inversely with scores for
“self-transcendence”. Self-transcendence is a personality trait covering
religious behaviour and attitudes originally described by Washington
University psychiatrist Robert Cloninger. He found that spiritual people
tend to share a set of characteristics, such as feeling connected to
the world and a willingness to accept things that cannot be objectively
demonstrated. This result implies that there is a dysfunction in the
5-HT1A receptors in spiritual people resulting in less inhibition of the
effects of serotonin, which in turn would lead to increased
susceptibility to spiritual experiences. This was further evidence that
the serotonin system may serve as a biological basis for spiritual
experiences.
In “Why God Won’t Go Away”,
radiologist Andrew Newberg describes his studies on the religious
experiences of Tibetan Buddhists in meditation and Franciscan nuns in
prayer. Using PET scanning, Newberg revealed a number of mental traits
which all seem to play a part in an overall religious experience in the
brain. The most interesting of these processes is the feeling of cosmic
unity. The parietal lobe contains an area called the “orientation
association area” (OAA), which processes information about space and
time, as well as the orientation of the body in space. It determines
where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. The left OAA
creates the sensation of a physically delimited body. The right OAA
creates the sense of the physical space in which the body exists. An
injury here destroys your ability to navigate around in physical space.
Sensory
input is essential for the OAA to function, which is blocked during
intense meditation or prayer. The left OAA cannot find any boundary
between self and non-self, resulting in a sense of oneness. Without
sensory input, the right OAA defaults to a feeling of infinite space,
where meditators feel that they have touched infinity.
The
obvious interpretation of such findings is that there is neural
architecture in the brain which includes the temporal lobes that are
specialized for what we understand as spirituality, which may be
selectively and transiently enhanced by pathological (epileptic storm)
and artificial (5-HT2A agonists) factors. However, it is quite specific
in these studies that what is described is an overwhelming feeling of
meaning or significance. I would speculate that such religious
experiences feed into our mind’s innate teleological sense, eventually
culminating in a deep religious belief which is used to elucidate the
experienced emotions. The focus therefore is in meaning – an idea which
ties in elegantly with native teleology, explaining the obsession with
meaning and purpose explanations among intellectual theists.
The
most significant question that arises from these discoveries is the
implications on the theistic account of free will in choosing faith. In
other words, the typical monotheistic description of a God who gives us
the ability (free will) to choose to worship him becomes problematic,
since we find that the capacity for religious experience seems to be as
varied among the population as any other personality trait, individual
characteristic or innate ability. Some people are simply born with a
brain that has a greater chance of finding God, as they are “wired up”
that way. We are restricted in our choice, much the same as we are
restricted in our choice to prefer chocolate or vanilla, Bach or Mozart,
men or women. Neuroscientific studies have consistently shown that all
the choices we make in life are far more greatly influenced by genetic
makeup, rather than our environmental influences. In this regard, we are
certainly not equal in finding pathways to God.
The
potential of religiosity to be enhanced through drugs, disease or even
practice, reminds one of similar effects on other abilities such as
music or art. Certain brain conditions such as autism or schizophrenia
lead patients to express heightened artistic or musical abilities.
Perhaps we should think of deeply religous individuals as having a keen
“religious ability”, much like we do with other types of artistic
temperament.
But like art, such religious
abilities may be rationalised now as being secondary to natural rather
than divine processes, though I concede that those with strong religious
abilities would be unlikely change their view that their stunning
experiences have no supernatural component. Having said that, I would
still hope for an intellectual purification of such feelings, perhaps
first by discarding words such as spiritual, transcendent or religious
in their description, as these have all been tarnished by the brush of
supernaturalism. Instead, I would propose we begin to use phrases such
as “numinous ability”. We can learn to appreciate this creative numinous
ability as something intrinsically rather than mystically stunning,
much the same as we appreciate music or art without linking their
intrinsic beauty with supernaturalism.
