Fingerprints of God (20 page)

I left Persinger’s laboratory near midnight, deflated. I had been secretly hoping for a spiritual experience, perhaps as confirmation that I had the right biological makeup, the right polymorphism in my DNA, to connect with a “Sentient Being.” I guess I’m not nearly as spiritual as I want to be. Besides that, I was now highly dubious that Persinger’s God helmet could just tickle the temporal lobe and evoke a counterfeit God. Sure, his ideas were plucked from the work of pioneering neurologists like Wilder Penfield and cited by many neurologists today. But his research had drawn derisive criticism from other researchers.
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So imagine my bafflement six months later when I finally transcribed the tape that we had recorded in the control room. The recording revealed that Persinger’s God helmet
had
in fact manipulated my temporal lobes and my experience.When Persinger began to stimulate my right temporal lobe, he predicted (into the tape recorder) that I would see slightly scary objects, such as faces, to my left. A couple of minutes later, my voice came through the speaker:
I see funny little goblins off to my left there, like we’re in Sherwood Forest.

Later Persinger predicted I would feel a sense of evil—once again, on my left, since he was stimulating the right side of my brain. About a minute later, my voice broke the silence:
I’m not sensing a presence per se, but there’s kind of a roiling darkness, like a battle of darkness, like waves breaking over each other, but it’s all dark, it’s off to my left.

Next Persinger narrated that he had changed the stimulation to a “burst firing pattern” to affect my amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers strong emotions, especially fear. As he was explaining this into the tape recorder, my voice interrupted:
I see little apparitions like little skulls.
A few seconds later:
I have these strange visual images, kind of over to my left.The face of a ghostly young woman, and then followed by a black goblin, with those eyes that you see in Japanese cartoon characters—spider-like eyes.

Shortly after this, the battery died and the recording ended.

As I transcribed my words, I realized that in my skepticism, my memory had filtered out some of my responses to Persinger’s electromagnetic waves. Manipulating my temporal lobes had evoked mental images—and, who knows, perhaps the memory of my prophecy for Sheila. I conceded that I could not easily dismiss Michael Persinger’s work, nor his discomfiting assertion that God is all in one’s head.

In 400 B.C., Hippocrates wrote one of the first texts on epilepsy, “On the Sacred Disease.” In his essay, the renowned physician of ancient Greece tackled the conventional wisdom of his day: namely, that epilepsy was a sacred disease bestowed by the gods. At the time, doctors believed it was a curse that threw its sufferer to the ground in paroxys mal fits; anyone who has seen a tonic-clonic (or grand mal) seizure knows it is a terrifying event to witness, and could look to a superstitious mind like demon possession. Alternatively, some ancient physicians believed epilepsy to be a divine blessing that conferred gifts of prophecy and spiritual visions. Not so Hippocrates. Hippocrates argued that epilepsy was brain dysfunction pure and simple, and that erratic brain activity, not the gods, sparked these fits.

Some 2,400 years later, the medical view of epilepsy has sided squarely with Hippocrates. It has vaulted from one extreme to the other—from superstition, where everything is attributed to divine whimsy, to reductionism, where everything is explained by brain chemicals and brain-wave activity. The vast majority of scientists now understand epilepsy to be a neurological disorder, a firestorm in the brain. Armed with evidence from brain scans and other technology, some modern neurologists are, like Michael Persinger, reframing religious history. The effect has been not to present the disease as sacred, but to present the sacred as a disease.

If scientific journals are to be believed, most of the world’s religious doctrine sprang from dysfunctional minds. The list of religious leaders who, neurologists say, might have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy is as long as it is impressive.
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The most intriguing and controversial figure is Saul of Tarsus. Before he became Saint Paul, who authored much of Christian doctrine, he was a fiery rabbi who had set out on the road to Damascus intent on persecuting the early Christians.We pick up the story in Acts, chapter 9.

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus. And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”
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Was this a conversation with the Son of God, or “visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness,” as the renowned psychiatrists Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard surmised?
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Was it a divine appointment, or, as neurologist William G. Lennox stated, the emotional reaction to “the voice of conscience possibly complicated by a migraine-like syndrome”?
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Paul is not the only religious leader to have been retrofitted with epilepsy. Neurologists have speculated that Muhammad’s visual and auditory “hallucinations” were complex partial seizures. The voice of the angel and the white light that inspired Joan of Arc, they say, did not come from heaven but from her daily ecstatic seizures. Joseph Smith’s pillar of light and two angels—a vision that birthed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism)—may have boiled down to a complex partial seizure. Ditto for the mystics Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, for Emanuel Swedenborg, who founded the New Jerusalem Church, and Ann Lee, who led the Shaker movement. Even Moses, who led the children of Israel through the wilderness and authored the Pentateuch, does not escape a troubling diagnosis. What, after all, are doctors to make of that encounter with the burning bush?

I called Orrin Devinsky, who directs the New York University epilepsy center, for his perspective. Part of the problem, he said, is that complex partial seizures, the most common form of adult epilepsy, were not medically understood until the mid-1800s. This particular parlor game involves people who lived scores or hundreds of years before that.

“So we’re left with little shards, little fragments of descriptions,” Devinsky said.“Moses at the burning bush.What was happening at the burning bush? He was looking at a bush that was burning but not consumed. Assuming a more rational scientific view, Moses was having a visual hallucination and then he heard ‘God’s’ voice. As a physician, can I say that was consistent with a temporal lobe seizure? Yes. Can I say Moses had a temporal lobe seizure at that time? All I can say is it’s a possibility. It also could have been a genuine religious experience. Or perhaps both.”

For me, at least, a few things do not sit well with the saint-as-epileptic hypothesis. First, there is the imperious snobbery of scientific materialism, which implies that if a person’s brain acts a little bit differently from the “average” brain—slow brain-wave activity or the occasional electrical surge—then anything that person believes is probably distorted, illegitimate, just a little bit crazy. This troubled psychologist William James as well. We would never think of dismissing van Gogh’s art because in his madness he cut off his ear, James said, or throw Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
in the trash because its author suffered from epileptic seizures.

And yet,“medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic,” James observed in his famous Gifford Lectures in 1901.“It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.”
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My second reservation about reducing spiritual experience to a seizure is this: epilepsy is a horribly debilitating disease, punctuating one’s life with random fits of unconsciousness, short-term memory loss, and often eventual psychosis. It is hard to imagine epilepsy appearing frequently on the résumés of great religious leaders who traveled the Roman Empire with a new religion as did Paul, guided a nation in the wilderness for forty years as did Moses, or led troops into battle as did Muhammad.
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And yet, scientists have identified a connection between the temporal lobes and religiousness. Some say, only half joking, that the temporal lobe is a “God spot.” While this mass of tissue is not the sole trafficker in spiritual experience—many other parts of the brain light up during transcendent moments—it appears to be a major player, necessary but not sufficient.

The search for the spiritual brain center began almost by accident, with the pioneering work of Wilder Penfield. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Canadian neurosurgeon began to excavate the brains of his patients before surgery to determine what parts could be removed (to stop the seizures) and what parts could be left in (so that he would not unnecessarily remove, say, the patient’s ability to speak). Because the brain contains no pain receptors, Penfield could put his patients under local anesthesia and keep them conscious while he opened their skulls and poked around. He would stimulate various areas of the brain with an electrode and then ask the patient where he felt the prod in his body.
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In this way, Penfield mapped the part of the brain that corresponded to the right thumb, or the lips, or the left big toe.

Penfield made a different sort of discovery when mucking around in the temporal lobes: a few of his patients reported out-of-body experiences, hearing voices, and seeing apparitions.
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To be sure, these were nothing like the complex, hours-long visions of Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc. The sounds consisted of snatches of music or random words.The visuals included bizarre images or familiar scenes scooped up from their memory banks. Only two of Penfield’s more than 1,100 patients reported anything like an out-of-body experience. Nor were any of their experiences awe-inspiring visits to paradise. One patient cried, “Oh God! I am leaving my body!”
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And another patient said, “I have a queer sensation as if I am not here ... as though I were half [gone] and half here.”
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Still, Penfield’s electrodes bore testimony to a suspicion that many doctors had harbored for decades—namely, that there is something special about the temporal lobes.
Could they be the seat of spirituality?

Beginning in the 1960s, British psychiatrists Eliot Slater and A.W. Beard picked up the search.When they asked their psychiatric patients about their seizures, nearly four out of ten reported mystical delusions and hallucinations, including events like “seeing Christ come down from the sky,” “seeing Heaven open,” and hearing God speak.
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Anecdotal evidence accumulated about the “sacred disease.” For example, Dr. Beard and another colleague, Kenneth Dewhurst, theorized that people with temporal lobe epilepsy might be prone to have a religious conversion in the hours or days after a seizure. They described the cases of six people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. One woman heard “a church bell ring in her right ear; and the voice said, ‘Thy Father hath made thee whole, Go in Peace!’ ” Another patient had a “day-time visual hallucination in which he saw angels playing with harps.”
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Something about their seizures triggered spiritual experiences in their brains.
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Although the spirituality-as-epilepsy theory remains controversial, with time, many neurologists settled into the idea that increased activity in the temporal lobes is central to spiritual experience.
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If the evidence is thin, researchers speculate, that is because the clinical neurologists, the ones in the white coats who actually treat patients, generally do not ask about spirituality.
So, how is the Dilantin working for you? Okay. And your most recent seizure? Tuesday? And when was the last time you saw Christ descend from heaven?
For their part, patients hesitate to mention these types of visions; most already feel sufficiently self-conscious without adding the heavenly spheres into the mix.
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Yet when I asked patients about their spiritual auras, the stories surged out of them with an urgency and a clear-eyed certainty that left me stunned and impressed.

There is no doubt in Jordan Sinclair’s mind that he got religion from his temporal lobe.

“Of course I did,” he told me. “I’ve seen the brain scans.”

I met Jordan Sinclair (not his real name) through the Epilepsy Foundation, which let me post a note on its website. I wrote that I wanted to interview patients who had experienced ecstatic spiritual seizures or dramatic religious conversions as a result of their epilepsy. I received dozens of responses, but Jordan’s was the most remarkable.

Jordan was raised in a Conservative Jewish home. His parents were both Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe. Still, he never embraced religion.

“I always thought organized religion was a con game,” he told me the first time we talked, in November 2006.“It always got me mad that on High Holy Days you had to buy tickets to pray.”

Jordan constructed a life as a highly successful comedy writer in Los Angeles. In 2000, when he was forty-three, his doctor found and removed a benign tumor from his left temporal lobe. The surgery was a snap. But later Jordan began experiencing strange things. Sometimes when he was shaving, he said, his hands seemed unfamiliar, as if someone else’s fingers were wielding the razor. One day while he was shopping at the nearby mall, the stores suddenly appeared unreal.