Where God Lives In Your Brain 28
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?
Re:Junk science crap..sorry wrong button (Score:1)
What's a spiritual feeling?
Exactly that. A spiritual feeling. Remember, when Spock told Mccoy, that he couldn't explain the feeling of death to him since he would have had to have been dead to understand it? Well, whether I agree with that or not, I do believe a spritiual feeling is a feeling that cannot be described otherwise.
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Overclocking your brain (Score:2)
So is this overclocking or underclocking? And could it be done elsehow?
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Re:Value of this research (Score:1)
Re:Do nuns dream of electric sheep? (Score:1)
Rural priests sometimes dream of sheep, but not electric ones.
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Re:Helmet slows down the perception of "time" too! (Score:1)
Heh heh. In the last episode of Futurama they dug up an old VW "bus" and started using it. When DrZ first got in, he asked "Where's the device that speeds up and slows down time?" Fry replied that it was under the seat, and fetched it out. They only gave a brief glimpse, but I believe it was a water pipe.
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Bad science, or at best weak science. (Score:4)
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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Re:This article hmmm (Score:3)
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>
Re:God and Buddhists (Score:3)
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 ...
Re:Helmet slows down the perception of "time" too! (Score:1)
"Why God Won't Go Away" (Score:2)
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.
Mathew Alper's book (Score:1)
"The God Part of the Brain"
(right on topic!)
He gives a good scenario for why people perceive
a god. Also interesting is that this "part"
of the brain can be stimulated by certain
drugs to create religous-like experiences.
cheers,
metric
Re:Bad science, or at best weak science. (Score:2)
Actually, you made me think...perhaps we could look into the brains of cynics - see if skepticism has its own part of the brain. We could alternate some stimuli between pictures of the pope, and pictures of James Randi, and watch the person explode!
Crossing the bridge, talking to the troll. :) (Score:1)
Hold your breath for three minutes, and when you wake up, tell us if your vision "tunneled" before you fell over.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Physiology of "light at the end of the tunnel". (Score:3)
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, [aoanet.org] 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."
"God" brain (Score:4)
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
Re:Bad science, or at best weak science. (Score:1)
Keep in mind that this was simply an article and not a detailed lab report or research paper. He may have had a control group (including people doing nothing, or doing "less spiritual" tasks) which simply wasn't mentioned.
Not that I would object to continued research. I believe that injecting people with radioactive fluid is a worthwhile cause in and of itself
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Re:Value of this research (Score:1)
I recall seeing a TV special on the Discovery channel or somewhere which covered the experience that pilots were having during training. Specifically, when they were in the part of training that spins them really fast and subjects them to really high G forces, they would pass out as the blood rushed out of their heads. They reported having the experience of seeing "a light at the end of the tunnel" while they were passing out. I can't remember exactly what the show attrbuted the phenomenon to, but I think it had something to do with the visual system shutting down, which started with the loss of peripheral vision. Hence, the tunnel effect.
I couldn't come up with a link that backs this up, though. Sorry
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Re:God and Buddhists (Score:1)
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This article hmmm (Score:3)
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
Helmet slows down the perception of "time" too! (Score:3)
Persinger is one of the more interesting researchers and has a _LOT_ of books and papers published to support his theories. Worth checking out...
Do nuns dream of electric sheep? (Score:3)
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
Re:Value of this research (Score:3)
it makes sense... (Score:2)
Right Button, Wrong Button (Score:2)
> 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
Better be careful (Score:1)
Re:Value of this research (Score:1)
Dancin Santa
Value of this research (Score:5)
Dancin Santa
Re: Bad science, or at best weak science (Score:1)