8
Aldous Huxley,
The Doors of Perception
(New York: Perennial Classics, 2004; originally published 1954), p. 23.
10
E. C. Kast and V. J. Collins, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide as an Analgesic Agent,”
Anesthesia & Analgesia
43 (1964): 285-91.
11
See D. E. Nichols, “Commentary on: ‘Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance by Griffiths et al.,’ ”
Journal of Psychopharmacology
187 (2006): 284-86.
12
Stanislav Grof,
The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death
(Ben Lomond, Calif.: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2006). One patient was Jesse, an unmarried thirty-two-year-old man with tumorous masses on his face and neck. A strict Catholic, Jesse had been divorced for years and was terrified of dying; he felt certain he was headed for hell or for a void of nothingness. Grof administered 90 milligrams of DMT, and after a traumatic start to his trip, Jesse saw a gigantic ball of fire. “He experienced a Last Judgment scene where God [Jehovah] was weighing his good and evil deeds,” Grof reported later. “The positive aspects of his life were found to outweigh his sins and transgressions. Jesse felt as if a prison had opened up and he had been set free. At this point he heard sounds of celestial music and angelic singing, and he began to understand the meaning of his experience. A profound message came to him through some supernatural, nonverbal channels and permeated his whole being: ‘When you die, your body will be destroyed, but you will be saved; your soul will be with you all the time. You will come back to earth, you will be living again, but you do not know what you will be on the next earth.’ ” Grof reported that Jesse emerged from the experience believing in reincarnation; and with no “end” in sight, his anxiety and depression lifted. He died five days later. Grof wrote, “It almost seemed as if he were hurrying to get a new body on the ‘next earth.’ ”
Another patient, Ted, was a twenty-six-year-old African-American man with a wife and three children, who was suffering from inoperable colon cancer. Ted received 300 micrograms of LSD—a hefty dose—on three separate occasions. During the first, the Vietnam vet had visions of war scenes and children dying of epidemic diseases, followed by an ecstatic assurance that no one actually dies. His pain levels dropped so dramatically after the session that he soon took on a volunteer job. Grof reported that in the second session, Ted experienced his own death, “during which God appeared to him as a brilliant source of light. This was a very beautiful and comforting episode, as God told him there was nothing to fear and assured him that everything would be all right.” For me, the most arresting incident occurred later, when surgeons were making a last, desperate attempt to save Ted’s life. During an operation, Ted suffered two cardiac arrests resulting in clinical death. He was resuscitated both times. Later he told Grof that the transition to the afterlife was familiar territory for him, because he had traveled there before, during his LSD sessions. “Without the LSD sessions, I would have been scared by what was happening,” he told Grof. “But knowing these states, I was not afraid at all.”
13
Albert A. Kurland et al., “Psychedelic Drug Assisted Psychotherapy in Patients with Terminal Cancer,” in
Psychopharmacological Agents for the Terminally Ill and Bereaved
, I. K. Goldberg, S. Malitz, and A. H. Kutscher, eds. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973).
15
Her case is not unique. In a study of sixty cancer patients who were treated with LSD or a gentler psychedelic called DPT, 29 percent saw dramatic improvement, and 42 percent saw moderate improvement in their pain. Some cancer patients even returned to work after the experience. S. Grof et al., “LSD-Assisted Psychotherapy in Patients with Terminal Cancer,”
International Pharmacopsychiatry
8 (1973): 129-44.
16
Kurland et al., “Psychedelic Drug Assisted Psychotherapy,” 113.
CHAPTER 7. SEARCHING FOR THE GOD SPOT
1
For example, a group of scientists in Sweden tried to replicate his findings, going so far as hiring the engineer who built Persinger’s “God helmet” to make one for them. They then tested it on eighty-nine people, using a double-blind method. They concluded that some test subjects experienced a “sensed presence”—but it had nothing to do with the magnetic fields generated by the helmet. The relevant factor turned out to be personality. “Suggestible people”—those who were easily hypnotized, for example, or those who lived “a New Age lifestyle”—were far more likely to be transported by the helmet. See Pehr Granqvist et al., “Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields,”
Neuroscience Letters
379 (2005): 1-6. The Swedes concluded that since people most responsive to the helmet score high on suggestibility, “placing the helmet on their heads in a sensory deprivation context might have the anticipated effects, whether or not the cord is plugged in” (p. 5).
In response, Persinger reanalyzed data from 407 subjects and reiterated his claim that the magnetic configurations, not the subjects’ exotic beliefs or suggestibility, were responsible for sensing a presence. But, he conceded, the subjects’ histories of sensed presences experienced before the experiment were “moderately” correlated with exotic beliefs and temporal lobe sensitivity. See M. A. Persinger and S. A. Koren, “A Response to Granqvist et al.: ‘Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak magnetic fields,’ ”
Neuroscience Letters
380 (2005): 346-47.
2
For an excellent synopsis, see J. Saver and J. Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,”
Journal of Neuropsychiatry
9 (1997): 498-510.
Among the religious figures who supposedly had epilepsy are: Moses, Ezekiel (Jewish prophet), Saint Paul, Muhammad, Joan of Arc, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Catherine de’ Ricci, Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, Emanuel Swedenborg (founder of the New Jerusalem Church), Ann Lee (leader of the Shaker movement), Joseph Smith (founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism), Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Ellen G. White (founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church), and Hieronymus Jaegen (German mystic).
3
Acts 9:3-5 (King James Version).
4
K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, “Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
117 (1970): 497-507.
5
W. G. Lennox, in
Epilepsy and Related Disorders,
vol. 2 (London: Churchill, 1960).
6
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
:
A Study in Human Nature
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; originally published 1902), pp. 14-15.
7
This bothered John Hughes as well. Hughes has directed the Epilepsy Center at the University of Illinois Medical Center for thirty years. He is a Christian as well as a neurologist, a bit like being a zebra in a herd of horses: you
sort of
look like the others, but not really. Hughes researched forty-three alleged cases of epilepsy, from Pythagoras (born 582 B.C.) to Richard Burton (born A.D. 1925), searching for evidence of epilepsy.
“How many of those people actually had epilepsy?” I asked him. “Zero,” he said. “I looked up the literature and very carefully reviewed the history of those people and found that none of them had epilepsy.” Some were diagnosed for silly reasons: one person had a “fit of spleen,” which meant he was irritable, not epileptic. Martin Luther was taken into custody by the Catholic Church, and the phrase “Martin Luther’s seizure” became his ticket to the annals of brain disorder. For others, Hughes said, the diagnosis did not match the symptoms. For example, Joan of Arc’s visions stretched on for hours. Seizures last a couple of minutes.
Of course, Hughes’s analysis has no more empirical heft than does that of neurologists who attribute religious fervor to complex partial seizures. His theory cannot be tested, either, since Moses and Paul are no longer available for a brain scan. But Hughes sees chicanery in the scientific community, which might have a hard time accommodating Saint Paul’s experience within a materialist worldview. “I think it was some epileptologist who wanted to diminish Christianity by making Saint Paul’s experience into a seizure,” Hughes said. “Maybe it’s the only thing scientists can do to try to put it in the context of the twenty-first century. But I’m very willing to see them as what I believe they were—truly deeply religious experiences.”
8
W. Penfield and P. Perot, “The Brain’s Record of Auditory and Visual Experience: A Final Discussion and Summary,”
Brain
86 (1963): 595-696.
9
Pierre Gloor and his colleagues found that surgical stimulation or spontaneous discharge in the hippocampus and amygdala—two areas deep in the temporal lobes—evoked memory fragments, dreamy states, and visual or auditory hallucinations. People reported that these events brought intense personal meaning, emotion, vibrations, fear, sudden insight, and mystical-like experiences. P. Gloor et al., “The Role of the Limbic System in Experimental Phenomena of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,”
Annals of Neurology
12 (1982): 129-44.
10
W. Penfield, “The Role of the Temporal Cortex in Certain Psychical Phenomena,”
Journal of Mental Science
101 (1955): 458.
11
W. Penfield and T. Rasmussen,
The Cerebral Cortex of Man: A Clinical Study of Localization of Function
(New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 174.
12
E. Slater and A. W. Beard, “The Schizophrenia-like Psychoses of Epilepsy: Psychiatric Aspects,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
109 (1963): 5-112; also “Discussion and Conclusions,” ibid., 143-50.
13
K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, “Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
117 (1970): 497-507.
14
Not even people in psychiatric hospitals experience many spiritual seizures. Researchers in Japan studied 137 people with temporal lobe epilepsy and found that only three of them (2.2 percent) suffered seizures that were remotely religious in nature. Another study looked at 606 patients and found that only six had religious seizures. Akira Ogata and Taihei Miyakawa, “Religious Experiences in Epileptic Patients with a Focus on Ictus-Related Episodes,”
Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
52 (1998): 321-25.
15
Norwegian researchers Bjørn Asheim Hansen and Eylert Brodtkorb studied eleven patients who experienced ecstatic seizures. Of those, five reported spiritual or religious experiential phenomena. Two felt contact with “an undescribable phenomenon” or a “divine power.” One interpreted her ictal hallucinations to represent “the voice of God.” Three subjects described the sensation of receiving deep messages during the seizures. Two felt that these experiences influenced their day-to-day lives between seizures; one interpreted the seizure experience as a prophecy with an objective of giving her life another dimension. B. A. Hansen and E. Brodtkorb, “Partial Epilepsy with ‘Ecstatic’ Seizures,”
Epilepsy & Behavior
4 (2003): 667-73.
16
The day of discovering the God spot, I suspect, will arrive far sooner than the Day of Judgment. Recently I watched Susan Bowyer, a medical physicist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, create an image of a young woman’s brain using MEG, or magnetoencephalography. MEG is brain scanning on steroids. Other types of brain-scanning technology, like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), can record a static map of those areas of the brain that light up during a particular task. That would be like showing the route that O. J. Simpson took in his white Bronco when he fled the police. With the MEG, you can watch the brain work second by second, as if viewing the police chase live from a television news helicopter. Dr. Bowyer pointed to a computer that was recording the woman’s brain as she performed a word task.
“I can tell you what your brain is doing from the minute you see the stimulus to the time you push a button and make a decision,” she explained. “I can see it go from your visual cortex, to Wernicke’s area for language, to the frontal for memory, going back to Broca’s area before you say something, going on to the areas where you make the decision. So with MEG you can look at all the different areas and see which comes before which.”
“Would the MEG, theoretically, be able to map a person’s brain while she’s having religious thoughts?” I asked.
“Probably,” Dr. Bowyer said. “If you wanted to look at the religious areas [of the brain], you’d want to show a person maybe thirty religious icons, average them together, and see where they showed some activity.”
“So would you be able to locate a God spot in the brain?”
Dr. Bowyer pondered the question. “You could show religious people the religious images and see where that evoked a response. And then take people who are atheists or nonreligious and show them the same images and see if they evoked any kind of emotional response. And maybe you could see if there is a God spot in the brain. Yeah,” she said, nodding, “you could put together a study that might do that.”
17
Saver and Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,” 499. See also D. Hay, “The Biology of God: What Is the Current Status of Hardy’s Hypothesis?”
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
4 (1994): 1-23.
18
J. Wuerfel et al., “Religiosity Is Associated with Hippocampal but Not Amygdala Volumes in Patients with Refractory Epilepsy,”
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry
75 (2004): 640-42. See also L. Tebartz van Elst et al., “Psychopathological Profile in Patients with Severe Bilateral Hippocampal Atrophy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Evidence in Support of the Geschwind Syndrome?”
Epilepsy & Behavior
4 (2003): 291-97.