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Michael Persinger, a professor of psychology at Laurentian University in
Canada, published Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs in 1987. In it, he
argued that a specific neurological condition known as temporal lobe epilepsy
produces psychological states that are similar to the religious experiences
of people like Joan of Arc and St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Temporal
lobe epilepsy is different from other forms of epilepsy in that temporal lobe
epilepsy seizures do not involve convulsions, immobility, or loss of consciousness.
Instead, a person having a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure notices
a change in sensory perception, often involving changes in smells, sounds,
tastes, and phantom sensations in the skin. Some people also experience
cognitive changes such as déjà vu or jamais vu during a temporal lobe epileptic
seizure, and a significant fraction of these people also experience a
heightened sense of “religiosity,” including the sensation of an unseen,
supernatural presence.
Persinger developed a machine, often dubbed the “God helmet,” which
generates a weak magnetic field in and around the right temporal lobe of
the brain of a person wearing it. Approximately 80 percent of people tested
with the “God helmet” sense the presence of an unseen figure nearby,
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which they usually interpret as a supernatural entity, such as a God-like figure
or the spirit of an absent or dead person. Persinger attributed this
response to the neurological “wiring” of the temporal lobes, which he suggested
is “wired” in many people to produce the sensations that most people
associate with religious experiences.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has also linked temporal lobe epilepsy and
other neurological effects to religious experiences. Ramachandran based his
work on the previous research of Norman Geschwind, a clinical psychiatrist.
Geschwind described a clinical syndrome (called Geschwind syndrome)
characterized by hypergraphia (the tendency to write long, detailed
arguments and descriptions, often on religious subjects), hyper-religiosity,
fainting spells, mutism (the inability to speak in certain social situations),
and pedantism (the tendency to discourse at length on obscure subjects,
especially the definitions of words and the fine points of grammar).
Geschwind hypothesized that this syndrome is a manifestation of one form
of mild temporal lobe epilepsy and suggested that it might explain the
behavior of some hyper-religious historical figures.
Ramachandran tested Geschwind’s hypothesis using a lie-detector-like
device that measures the electrical conductivity of the skin as an indirect
indication of emotional arousal. Ramachandran found that people with mild
temporal lobe epilepsy reacted differently to religious words than people
who did not have temporal lobe epilepsy. Specifically, Ramachandran found
that people with temporal lobe epilepsy responded more strongly than nonepileptic
subjects to religious words, less strongly than non-epileptic subjects
to sexual words, and about the same as non-epileptic subjects to neutral
words.
Jeffrey Saver and John Rabin also studied the relationship between temporal
lobe epilepsy and extended their findings to neurological states generated
by the limbic system of the brain and to the neurochemical states generated
by the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. They pointed out that
close to a majority of Americans have reported having religious experiences,
characterized by sensations that included the belief that a specific
event was “supposed to happen,” that they were aware of “the presence
of God,” that “God had answered their prayers,” that they were being protected
(or at least watched) by an unseen presence (often characterized as
the spirit of an absent or dead person), that they felt the presence of a
“sacred spirit in Nature” or an “evil presence” or a profound sensation of
“unity with the cosmos.”
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