Slashdot Mirror
Where God Lives In Your Brain
TheSync writes: "NewScientist has a story about research into the 'religious brain,' the part of the brain responsible for a deep, calming, spiritual feeling. Brains of Tibetan Buddhists meditating and Franciscan Nuns deep in prayer were imaged using Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT). It was found that during these spiritual experiences, an area of the parietal lobe in the brain became much less active." The article is interesting as well for the other areas of brain research it touches on. Where can I get a God helmet?
Apparently the brain "refreshes" consciousness every 10 milliseconds by sweeping a pulse of electricity over the brain. When you tinker with this, your consciousness seems to slow down, then collapse!
So is this overclocking or underclocking? And could it be done elsehow?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
OK, he was looking for the neural correlate of religious experience, he found something, and he announced success.
He should be the first person to exercise skepticism toward his own findings. Why not run the experiment on people practicing TM, or absorbed in a programming problem, or getting laid, or any other non-religious activity that brings about extreme focus in the brain, and see whether you get the same effect?
It's way too easy to find some general phenomenon and think you've found the specific phenomenon you've been looking for. That's the danger of focussing your career on a search for something that you "know" must exist.
Maybe he's right, but I'll hold out for a second opinion.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The mere fact that different parts of the brain are active during meditaion is not so significant. Certainly, the motor regions should be nearly quiecent during prolonged meditation. We have different brain patterns when sleeping as well.
The fact that he can alter brain wave patterns to cause people to "feel the presence of God" is another thing entirely, and is rather significant. It puts the experience of the mystical on the same footing as other internal or externally triggered "altered states of conciousness" such as drug trips, frenzys, and clinical depression, excersise highs, and heightened awarness during crises.
<rant>
This is the difference between real science and nonsense. A lot of supposedly scientific work is entirely based on observeed correlations, especially in psycology and other "social sciences" as well as nutrition. While sometimes the results of these observations can be interesting and occasionally useful, they are hardly conclusive. Real science is about twiddling knobs and seeing what happens. Unless the researcher can control the independant variable, no statements of causality can be determined.
In particular, "People who eat 3 servings of meat a day are 30% more likely to suffer from heart disease" (totally made up statistic) does NOT imply "eating meat causes heart disease." The *only* useful content of a statement like that is for assesing risk -- ie. for an insurance company. It provides no information on how to reduce that risk.
</rant>
Of course, looking at Buddhism does certainly help make sense of these findings. Since meditation is essentially the suppression of conscious thought, finding that the brain becomes less active in the frontal lobe would bolster the claim that much of conscious thought is centered in the frontal lobe. But I think this has already been shown.
The really interesting thing is that similar activity was seen in the brains of praying nuns. This would suggest that their prayer was similar to Buddhist meditation, and therefore may hold some of the same appeal. Considering that the appeal of Buddhist meditation is the loss of personal identity ...
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under-paid karma whore
The experimental info is thin. Basically, they're seeing data about at the level you'd observe if you looked at the innards of a laptop computer with a thermal imager. If the computer has active power management, so that different parts are being powered up and down (remember Crusoe doing this in a big way), you can observe which sections power up for different kinds of operations. This is a very low-resolution data source.
In fact, their experimental technique is even weaker than that. They inject their subjects with a low-level tracer that binds to active elements in the brain, then look at the tracer with a suitable scanning device. They get one data set per injection. So they're very low-rez in the time dimension, too.
Upon this very narrow experimental base, the authors build a sizable philosophical superstructure. This is a problem with the book. Future experimental work may lead to more solid publications. But it's a good first step.
BTW, this is from memory, and I can't find any references, so please check my facts if they don't look right. For more information on the eye, try The American Optometric Association's website, it has some good introductory information about vision problems.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Jaynes speaks of consciousness as a development of only the past 3 millenia. Before that, the lobes of the brains comunicated in a way such that one half acted as the "God" brain. To say that is a huge generalization of the book, so I suggest you go read it.
If you want, you can buy it at Amazon
Well the article leaves a lot to be desired. It seem quite full of rhetoric, and very little hard scientific fact.
As we've often seen in early cognitive research, especially with the notion of humans as embeded, embodied, pattern-completeting, neural network-based organisms, we see that research of this kind is more inconclusive than ever. So what if part of the brain calms down when we meditate. Parts of it get excited when we procreate, and parts of it likewise calm down when we pass out afterwards.
The modular synthesis of the brain, something which Jerry Fodor, a major proponent of the syntactic properties of the mind, has been slowly dropped by many people, as we find a flexibility in the brain that surpases anything else we've ever encountered. Did this "scientist" find God in the brain. It's dubious and since there are some other good comments above, concerning this ideal, I'll leave my rant right here.
yoink
Persinger is one of the more interesting researchers and has a _LOT_ of books and papers published to support his theories. Worth checking out...
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
I fear that somewhere in the future, they'll be using this kind of information to do stuff similar to Philip K Dick's "Do androids dream of electric sheep?", specifically the part about using mood-enhancers (or however they were called).
So flip a few switches, set the unit on "Mystical Meditation", and voilá, you're on your way to deep artificial enlightment.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
It is valuable any time we can attribute functions to areas of the brain. This allows, for example, surgeons removing a tumor or treating a severe head injury to plan their work so as to minimize damage to important areas of the brain.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
The mere fact that we can see what areas of the brain are active or inactive under certain conditions is far significant than people seem to think. Sure, we can't exactly read whats running through the mind at the moment, but, all will come together in time. We've been able to detect this kind of activity for a wihle, and while not directly pertaining to how certain portions of the brain shut down under extreme calm such as this implies, the fact that we have gotten this far means that perhaps 15 years from now (very optimistic there ;)) we'll be commanding computers with thought, perhaps in virtual-realms or sorts.
Oh well, we can always dream ;)
As for decreasing activity under meditation etc, well that just makes sense. You are closed off from outside influences - your senses numb.
Perhaps all these things which we subconsciously run through our brains take more, ahem, 'processing power' than once thought.
I think its possibly as simple as that...
> Life is short, don't waste time on religion. Instead of
> sitting in church on sunday, spend a couple hours thinking
> about being alive and what that means to you.
That's what sitting in church is for a lot of people, soldier. Geez, I'm and atheist, and I know this. Open your mind a little.
Virg
So they found that the brain stops functioning when a person is "talking to God". Huge surprise!
Dancin Santa