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Oct 10
Cherche le Dieu
IMG_1020photocopy, originally uploaded by Mitchkitter.
Scientific American reports of a very interesting research. It seems that some scientists are so fed up with the elusive nature of God that they decided to solve this mystery once and for all.
The beginning of the story resembles a stunning masterpiece of pure decadent horror adorned with film noir suspense.
The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.
Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t take place in Guantanamo. It’s Montreal, Canada where neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the local university decided to pull God’s pants and finally expose the Great Unexposed. The trick is as follows - you cage the nun, then you try to trace her brain activity with all available scientific methods as she dives in deep prayer to unify herself with Her creator. There is even a special scientific branch for such research, the article reports. It’s called neurotheology. But enough popular science.
The study is actually not focused on literary finding God inside the brain but on explaining religious experience “in utero”. And the research completed so far, suggests such divine experiences can be linked to epilepsy. Another neuroscientist, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario, openly claims that religious experience and belief in God are results of electrical anomalies in the brain.
However Persinger’s experiments couldn’t be confirmed with certainty due to the diverse nature of the religious experience among different cultures. It seems he was a little bit preoccupied with people from the West. Other scientists decided to try their luck with a group of Buddhists and the conclusions were a bit different. During meditation, the participants were injected with a radioactive isotope that was carried by the blood to particular brain areas and the scientists had the ability to observe the distribution with a technique called single-photon-emission computed tomography. At the peak of their meditation, when the participants reportedly lost their sense of self and became one with the universe, so to say, the scientists detected increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with thought and almost no activity in the parietal lobe - the part of the brain that is responsible for navigation and spatial orientation. Later, similar results were shown in experiment involving some Franciscan nuns.
The current experiment, which I mentioned in the beginning, aims at widening the research by studying other parts of the brain more precisely to get a more complete picture of the case. And it seems to meet some expectations:
The researchers found six regions that were invigorated only during the nuns’ recall of communion with God. The spiritual memory was accompanied by, for example, increased activity in the caudate nucleus, a small central brain region to which scientists have ascribed a role in learning, memory and, recently, falling in love; the neuroscientists surmise that its involvement may reflect the nuns’ reported feeling of unconditional love. Another hot spot was the insula, a prune-size chunk of tissue tucked within the brain’s outermost layers that monitors body sensations and governs social emotions. Neural sparks there could be related to the visceral pleasurable feelings associated with connections to the divine.
Pinpointing God is a little bit wacky idea however. Because in the end it may so happen that the goals defeat the purpose. “If you know how to electrically or neurochemically change functions in the brain,” Beauregard says, “then you [might] in principle be able to help normal people, not mystics, achieve spiritual states using a device that stimulates the brain electromagnetically or using lights and sounds.” This is some bold statement, at least. And it may look quite funny coming from a scientist who specializes in an area that resembles alchemy in its state of development. Because there is always the danger of delusion - but not among nuns or atheists. It may be a delusion that would force some people to disassemble a TV set to search for pictures in it.
