3
B. Zinnbauer and K. Pargament, “Spiritual Conversion: A Study of Religious Change Among College Students,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
37 (1998): 161-80. Since the 1800s, studies have shown that conversion is a radical change following a period of stress (often crisis). Some have found that 80 percent of converts reported serious distress, including feelings of despair, doubts about self-worth, fear of rejection, estrangement. Others found that converts had problematic relationships with their fathers, and that they were actively seeking a conversion experience to resolve life difficulties.
Zinnbauer and Pargament studied 130 college students at a Christian college, ages eighteen to twenty-eight. They found that religious converts—those who convert to a sacred, transcendent force such as Jesus, God, or Allah, and feel connected to that force—have undergone more stress in the six months before their conversion. They did not actually have more stressful lives than the nonconverts, but they thought they did. They also had a greater sense of personal inadequacy and limitation. One problem with this study, of course, is that students attending a Christian school do not greatly differ from one another, so you have the sense that the researchers are straining at gnats.
4
P. McNamara, ed.,
Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion
, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Perspectives, 2006).
5
Raymond F. Paloutzian, Erica L. Swenson, and Patrick McNamara, “Religious Conversion, Spiritual Transformation, and the Neurocognition of Meaning Making,” in McNamara,
Where God and Science Meet
, vol. 2:
The Neurology of Religious Experience
, pp. 151-69.
CHAPTER 5. HUNTING FOR THE GOD GENE
1
W. Miller,
Quantum Change
(New York: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 94.
2
The Gospel of Thomas is one of the Gnostic gospels, not included in the Bible. Don Eaton closely paraphrased verse 77, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
3
C. R. Cloninger, D. M. Svrakic, and T. R. Przybeck, “A Psychobiological Model for Temperament and Character,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
50 (1993): 975-90. Cloninger’s self-transcendence trait is determined by three criteria. One is called “spiritual acceptance versus rational materialism” and involves phenomena such as mystical experience or a belief in miracles, the supernatural, and a force greater than oneself directing one’s life. Another is “transpersonal identification,” that is, a connectedness to the universe and everything in it, including nature and people. Finally, there is “self-forgetfulness,” or absorption with beauty, music, and the task at hand, to the point of forgetting oneself, time, and space. One’s spirituality is measured by how one responds, “True” or “False,” to a series of statements such as “I believe in miracles” or “Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time or space.”
4
Researchers make a distinction between spirituality, which involves personal experience, and religiosity, which pertains to doctrinal beliefs and external religious practices. One way to distinguish the two is to consider intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness. Spirituality is often equated with intrinsic religiousness—that is, an inward-looking faith that is not necessarily tethered to a particular religion; it involves private prayer, meditation, and a strong sense of God’s presence; one’s whole approach to life is based on religion. Extrinsic religion is outward-looking: I go to my church or synagogue to spend time with my friends; I pray because I’ve been taught to pray; I don’t let religion affect my daily life. Saroglou found that people who are intrinsically religious (more spiritual than traditional) score high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Those who are more extrinsically religious (traditional) are conscientious and agreeable, but are not open to new experience. They also show high levels of neuroticism. V. Saroglou, “Religion and the Five Factors of Personality: A Meta-analytic Review,”
Personality and Individual Differences
32 (2001): 15-25.
5
On the heritability of spirituality, see the following:
K. Kirk, L. Eaves, and M. Martin, “Self-Transcendence as a Measure of Spirituality in a Sample of Older Australian Twins,”
Twin Research
2 (1999): 81-87. In a sample of more than 3,000 twins (identical and fraternal), genes appeared to explain 41 percent of the variation of spirituality in women, and 37 percent in men.
L. Eaves, B. D’Onofrio, and R. Russell, “Transmission of Religion and Attitudes,”
Twin Research
2 (1999): 59-61. The researchers found that variation in personality is partly genetic, but there are large effects from the family environment.
T. Bouchard et al., “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religiousness: Genetic and Environmental Influences and Personality Correlates,”
Twin Research
2 (1999): 88-98. This study of thirty-five identical and thirty-seven fraternal twin pairs raised apart found that intrinsic religiousness is 43 percent heritable; extrinsic religion is 39 percent heritable. The rest is attributed to nonshared environment.
6
Dean Hamer,
The God Gene
(New York: Doubleday, 2004).
7
Hamer’s idea of a “gay gene,” as proposed in his 1995 book
The Science of Desire
(coauthored with Peter Copeland), stirred controversy, and large sales; the book was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. Hamer’s findings never appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and scientists were unable to replicate them. By the time other scientists were commenting that they could not find a gene that inclines one toward homosexuality, Hamer had moved on to his next project: the God gene.
8
Francis Collins,
The Language of God
(New York: Free Press, 2006).
9
This has put Collins in hot water with evangelicals, who take the Bible literally. For example, he believes in evolution, and when he said so in
The Language of God
, major evangelical figures refused to endorse his book.
10
D. Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene and the Spiritual Transcendence Scale of the Character Temperament Index,”
Psychiatric Genetics
10 (2000): 185-89. (Note that neither the serotonin study nor the dopamine study has been replicated.)
11
As in many studies, the researchers tried to compare similar subjects, and thus did not compare across gender. In addition, most of this spirituality research is done on a shoestring, and researchers often recruit their subjects from already existing treatment programs or trials; therefore, researchers do not have much of a choice of subjects.
12
In both the serotonin and dopamine studies, it was the subset “spiritual acceptance versus material rationalism” that accounted for most of the difference in spirituality. This makes intuitive sense to me. It seems logical that believing in miracles or that one’s life is directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being, or feeling in contact with a divine being, describes a more classic spirituality. Transpersonal identification (feeling connected to others and being willing to sacrifice for the good of other people, animals, nature, and the world) seems more a qualification for the Humane Society than evidence of a spiritual worldview. Self-forgetfulness (losing oneself in thought, time, and space) appears to me a measure of one’s ability to focus—a trait surely found as readily in the atheist biologist or agnostic violinist as in the pastor or mystic.
13
D. E. Comings et al., “A Multivariate Analysis of 59 Candidate Genes in Personality Traits: The Temperament and Character Inventory,”
Clinical Genetics
58 (2000): 376.
14
Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene,” p. 188.
15
J. Borg et al., “The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
160 (2003): 1965-69.
16
What they found was an inverse relationship: the higher the subjects’ spirituality score, the fewer the number of serotonin receptors that lit up. A couple of theories were offered to explain what that might mean. One was that spiritual people have less of that neurotransmitter. The researchers reasoned that the serotonin system regulates a person’s perception and the various sights, sounds, and other stimuli that reach his awareness; therefore, if there is a weak “sensory filter,” they wrote, that would allow for “increased perception and decreased inhibition.” In other words, the filter is more loosely woven, so that more spiritual experiences get through. Think about a soccer team playing without a goalie: it’s much easier for “God” to kick spiritual feelings and ideas into one’s psyche if a key player in the defensive line is missing.
The researchers considered another theory. Maybe the serotonin neurons were firing a lot, and so when the radioactive tracer drug came along looking for a place to dock, the receptors were otherwise occupied. Imagine you are throwing your six-year-old a birthday party in your backyard. His friends begin to arrive, and you launch the festivities with a game of musical chairs. More and more six-year-olds arrive, and you run out of chairs. Soon, too soon, you have two dozen six-year-olds cavorting around the yard, kicking up the grass and trampling the daffodils. Such euphoria, such joy and awe! That is a transcendent moment in the serotonin system.
17
Borg et al., “The Serotonin System,” 1965.
CHAPTER 6. ISN ’T GOD A TRIP?
1
J. H. Halpern et al., “Psychological and Cognitive Effects of Long-Term Peyote Use Among Native Americans,”
Biological Psychiatry
58 (2005): 624-31.
2
R. R. Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,”
Journal of Psychopharmacology
187 (2006): 268-83.
3
For the follow-up study, see R. R. Griffiths et al., “Mystical-Type Experiences Occasioned by Psilocybin Mediate the Attribution of Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance 14 Months Later,”
Journal of Psychopharmacology
, published online July 2008.
The Johns Hopkins study was modeled after the “Good Friday experiment” of 1962, the most famous study to attempt to plumb spiritual experience through psychedelics. On Good Friday, 1962, twenty divinity students gathered in the basement of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Half of them received a capsule (30 mg) of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. The other half received a placebo. After eight hours of exploring alternative states of consciousness, the psilocybin group returned to consensus reality. Four of the ten men who had received the psilocybin had encountered a full-blown mystical experience, including transcendence of time and space, and unity with all things, a sense of sacredness. Four others experienced most of the characteristics of mystical experience. None of the control group enjoyed much of anything except profound boredom. See W. Pahnke, “Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness” (Ph.D. dissertation in Religion and Society, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1963).
Griffiths used some of the same measures of mystical experience that Walter Pahnke employed in his “mystical consciousness” experiments. M. W. Johnson, W. A. Richards, and R. R. Griffiths, “Human Hallucinogen Research: Guidelines for Safety,”
Journal of Psychopharmacology,
published online July 2008.
4
That serotonin receptor gene made an appearance in the previous chapter. Swedish researchers found that serotonin HT1A—which acts as a docking station to allow the chemical to enter—seemed to affect whether their subjects scored high in spirituality, or “self-transcendence.”
5
Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania has found the opposite behavior in the parietal lobes. A study of Buddhist monks deep in meditation and Franciscan nuns deep in prayer showed that the parietal lobes grew quiescent, essentially eliminating the boundaries between the subjects’ perception of themselves and the rest of the universe. This is discussed in detail in chapter 8. The research is still in its infancy: the cartographers of the brain are just beginning their work. It will take many more scouting trips, many more studies, to plot the neural landscape successfully, especially as it’s not only a physical landscape but a spiritual one as well.
6
David Nichols subscribes to another theory about chemical heaven or hell. A pharmacologist at Purdue University who has studied the chemistry of mystical experiences, he speculates that when you take enough drugs, the front part of your brain that tries to make sense of the world is working overtime. But it doesn’t have much real stuff—real sights or sounds—to work with. That could be because the thalamus, the gateway that lets in sensory information, shuts down. Or it could be because you are closing your eyes and withdrawing into your own little world. “What the brain is actually processing,” Nichols posits, “is not sensory information, but is related to subconscious things: your dreams, desires, fears, anxieties, memories. You’re still conscious, and your brain has to process something, so it processes all your intuitions and feelings and imagination and fantasies. Now you’re into this realm where I would say the mystical experience occurs.” In other words, the brain is creating its own reality—its own heaven and hell—because it does not have external sensory information to work from.
7
Other researchers, who have different theories about the chemical process of spiritual experience, point out that the dosage used in Vollenweider’s subjects was only enough to disrupt the senses, not plunge a person into a full-blown hallucinogenic experience. The dosages of psilocybin in the Good Friday experiment and in Roland Griffiths’s study at Johns Hopkins were much higher.