To seal the case for the temporal lobe’s involvement, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario sought to artificially re-create religious feelings by electrically stimulating that large subdivision of the brain. So Persinger created the “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface.In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence—a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is—or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.
Persinger thus argues that religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain.
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Mmm, I loves me some selective quoting. There’s a hell of a lot more to that article than what you pulled from it.
Aaaaand, the article ends with the usual “no, no, we’re not challenging your delusions!” paragraph.
Sure; I quoted the bit I found interesting. Isn’t that the best way to lead people to read the whole thing?
That’s awesome! I’ve learned about similar stuff before, but they were based on studies post experience rather than inducing the experience itself. One involved studying EEGs of people who claimed to have religious experiences vs those who hadn’t; they found the people who had those experiences tended to have a generally more active temporal lobe.
It makes perfect sense that people will interpret their perceptions based on their environmental upbringing.
“Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe.”