I would definitely recommend watching the whole thing, but those pressed for time can find the segment on Dr. Ramachandran at about 18:30 into the video. The experiment was like the one we saw in the video during class. He measured subjects's galvanic skin responses to words flashing on a screen. He performed this experiment on people with temporal lobe epilepsy and people without. The words were a mix of neutral, religious and sexual. He found that epileptic patients had more intense responses to religious words, and the normal subjects had more intense responses to sexual words (which is normal).
Also, at around 22 minutes in, there's a really interesting segment on a Canadian scientist who is experimenting with artificial magnetic fields that go across the temporal lobe and allegedly creates the same religious sensation that an epileptic person would have. Again, I would definitely recommend watching the whole thing, but if not that's fine. I would love to hear your thoughts on these experiments and anything related to the topic.
-Taylor Quinn
5 comments:
I have seen the segment about the magnetic induction of “religious experiences” through the wired helmet before, but from a different show called Through the Wormhole. I find it somewhat interesting that certain parts of the brain become more or less active when in the state of having some sort of experience, whether that be religious or simply paranormal, however, I am personally not comfortable with the idea that religion and paranormal experiences are nothing more than our brains firing a little funny. I usually get weird looks when I tell this story, but I once had a paranormal experience many years ago—I saw the ghost of my aunt’s dog who had passed away. It was only for a split second, but it scared me half to death. Since I don’t have any known damage to my brain, I really don’t think this experience can just be dismissed as a figment of my imagination. Damage to the temporal lobes could certainly have a profound effect on such “experiences,” but if it is hard wired into our brains, I don’t think that it was all just a mistake of evolution.
It is astounding to think about the activity in the temporal lobe is linked to the way we react to religious and spiritual belief. I mean we can now pinpoint an area of the brain that processes this information, that’s amazing. I don’t think this displaces any otherworldly or religious experience, but instead explains why and how we process these experiences in the brain. I wonder if meditation or trance-like states are also processed or activated in the temporal lobe. Experiments to figure out whether meditative states and religious experiences have similar brain responses would be fascinating. I think I might start meditating more if I knew I could activate a euphoric experience in my brain.
This video makes me very suspicious. I'm not a religious or spiritual person at all, so I'm probably biased, but I feel like the experiments described (mostly in the 22:00 section) don't really prove any religious connection. They talk about how the subjects felt that they were "not alone" and had a 'sensed presence," but that doesn't necessarily hint to a religious presence. I feel like there could have been a million other explanations for that, perhaps something more concrete and medical like hallucinations. Our brains seem to have multiple ways of tricking us, but most of them seem to be proven as just that, a trick. There always seems to be an explanation behind them. It reminds me of our talks about the optical illusions and how we are seeing things that really aren't there.
This really calls all of religion into question. Most origin of religion stories are of some prophet having visions and proclaiming a message from God. If all those people had temporal lobe seizures, what does that mean for religion? I’m curious to know what kind of experiences people with this disease would have if there was no known idea of religion. I wonder if people consider these feelings religious experiences because we’ve all been ingrained with the idea of these unexplainable supernatural beings that live beyond us and control the world we live in. Is it possible to have an episode similar to the one’s they speak of in the documentary once? I wonder if the same issue could attributed to those seeing miracles.
I’m also curious if our brains in someway determine the atheists from the believers. If all religious experiences are attributed to a brain function, is it possible that atheists has low brain activity when it comes to the temporal lobes? This is a super interesting aspect of psychology, and I bet will bring up a lot of controversy in the coming years.
Definitely a highly controversial and probably a not so talked about study in psychology. I think it should be discussed more though. As far as the testing goes, it makes sense that with stimulation of areas in our brain we can kind of distinguish who is more prone to religious experience and who is not (they didn't fully test in this way but I think they should). It seems that if our brains make up is in control of our religious abilities than it is not our fault, to an extent, if we do or do not believe in spiritual beings. There is so much philosophically and theologically that can or cannot help in this discussion. Unfortunately this topic in general stirrs up people more than any other and causes tension. I would say, unnecessary amounts of tension.
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