Brain God, Sun Dog
by Ivy Xerxes Glossopharyngeal
June 11, 2011
Let there be light.
-God
Good Morning. If you’ve ever wondered what neurobiologists believe about God and our beliefs in a divine force that control the universe, then I guess you've come to the right place. As with most facets of life, you can bet on the conclusion. It’s all in your head.
Apparently in your brain there might be a ‘God spot.’ Not a spot where God resides like some bearded hobbit, but an area of your brain where you process feelings of a higher power. This conception of a higher power is different for different people. To illustrate this point, bear with me while I tell a story.
I grew up in a Catholic town – when I was in high school we had to go to religion class with the nuns on the other side of the parking lot by the church an hour every other day. Going to the convent disrupted the day. Our irreverent conversation and general apathy was put on full display and ostracized. It was like being at home after you accidentally let the f-bomb slip out. Only if your parents were both middle aged ladies that took an oath never to have sex in their entire lives. I am not saying anything against their choice. These are better people than I’ll ever be. I’m just saying that it really does teach tolerance to a 16 year old. One day in class, as everyone lazily looked out the window in boredom as one of the sisters tried to explain the concept of god, frustrated, she suddenly came to life with a fervent idea. You could see the idea growing in her head as she talked. She talked more and more rapidly. Finally, she believed she had struck a chord that wouldn’t put us straight to sleep. We were on the edge of our seats for the first time the entire semester. What could it be? Was she going to confess that her and the priest were getting it on? Was she going to say that she saw Jesus appear to her in her sleep? We weren’t so lucky.
‘Why doesn’t everyone draw what they think God looks like,’ She said enthusiastically.
We all groaned. She looked about nervously, realizing her plan had backfired. It backfired because it was obvious what her plan was. She aimed to trick us. We all knew that she wanted us to draw an old guy with a white beard so that she could pounce on this immaturity and explain that he could not be defined by the human senses. That much was evident. And none of us thought these types of underhanded tactics were becoming of a nun. So the moment of excitement passed, and mortified, we set about trying to draw God. As I looked at my notebook, I thought I’d be damned before I fell into that trap and drew the old guy with the white beard. I was not excited about the prospect of explaining what I eventually did draw to the nun, because it was absolutely horrendous. First of all, I can’t draw, secondly, I tried to draw ‘essence’ or some crap. But for me, I was lucky, because one of my classmates drew Charlie the SunKist Tuna Fish, and tried to act serious about what he did.
“What do you mean I’m not being serious? I think Charlie the Tuna Fish is God. What’s wrong with that?”
“Now Patrick,” she said, “I know you are trying to make a joke.”
“Don’t insult my religion Sister Mary Lou.”
“You’re Catholic, Patrick.”
“Yeah, I may be Catholic, but Charlie the SunKist Tuna Fish is sure as hell God.”
“Don’t say the H-word Patrick.”
And this discussion took up the rest of the hour.
Now I don’t know if Patrick was joking or not. If you don’t know who Charlie is, just google him and you’ll understand why Patrick was probably joking. Because it is one annoying cartoon. But if he wasn’t, and he sincerely believed that this cartoon tuna fish was God, if he was hooked up to the god helmet in Michael Persinger’s lab, he might see a slovenly blue cartoon tuna wearing thick glasses with a nondescript East coast accent after the electromagnetic field was charged around his brain.
How does having an intrinsic spot in our brain to perceive there is a higher power reconcile to the fact of atheism or celebrity worship today. Today it is true that we like to worship ‘reality.’ There is no room for religions concocted through stories that seem fictional. And everyone will say, which religion is right, catholism or Buddhism or judism or islam or etc. We want reality and we want to know what is true. However, we also know that there is a part of reality and truth that exists outside human comprehension. So many people become agnostic where they believe in a higher power but do not subscribe to any ordinary religion. Although, being an agnostic eliminates the human communal experience. And neuroscientists also tell us that we are social creatures.
Celebrity worship is essentially modern polytheism. The people we are so interested in are not the people themselves in our mind. They are concepts linking together a story of intrigue and relationships like the Gods in Greek Mythology. Brad Pitt even played Achilles. But we know these people exist, so somehow it is not as ridiculous. Even though our minds are placing attributes to them that the ancient Greeks would to their Gods. Relatively. I’m not saying that we think Bruce Willis can create horses out of sea form, but like the realm of Athena, Dionysus and Eros, love and lust and pleasure are the realm of a brain, a human experience and personal. Science can explain many things but no matter what they say about that – we know it’s fun and we don’t want to hear it.
Outside of our brain, we worship scientific discovery. Also, because we believe there is some reality to it, because occasionally we see some results. Which means we are also worshiping ourselves. Stories aren’t interesting anymore unless there is some reality to back them up. How our brains believe our brains believe in God is part of this interlocking story of modern faith.
Any neuroscientific discussion about God always starts with Michael Persinger. Persinger dodged the draft in the late 60s and now sits up in his lab in Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada trying to understand why people believe in a higher power. There is some justice in the top God researcher in the world being a draft dodger who refused to believe in the benevolence of the USA back in the late 60s. Persinger believes, among other things, that UFO citings are more frequent around fault lines because the electromagnetic releases from the earth’s crust cause us to see visions. He thinks belief in a higher power is a mass delusion and that some people are more susceptible than most. He also believes that the center in the human brain that corresponds to belief is in the right temporal cortex. The right temporal cortex has long been associated with abstract thought and emotion. Scans of the brains of epileptic people who experienced divine visions after seizures lit up in the right temporal cortex. Some people would have seizures in times of emotional distress or during a religious experience. Scientists think tales of people speaking in tongues in the bible were people experiencing seizures at religious ceremonies.
Persinger developed a ‘God Helmet’ to tap into the god spot. It is a converted motorcyle helmet with electrocal input placed inside. After placing the helmet on and covering the eyes of the person serving as guinea pig, Persinger manipulates the electromagnetic pulses to the brain based on how he reads the brain activity. People wearing the God Helmet have experienced a wide variety of celestial or paranormal happenings. Some people will respond like a bad acid trip or the devil is in their face. Others will start crying because of the overwhelming joy the experience because of the divine power and oneness with the universe. Others will feel a looming powerful presence behind them. Some experience nothing or just a mild feeling. Persinger reasons that some people are more susceptible than others. He finds females to be more susceptible than males.
John Kitt, a writer for Wired Magazine described wearing the God Helmet in 2001. He said he felt like he was back in high school on the day he lost his virginity. He was transported back to thoughts of his first girlfriend. Which for him was a mystical experience. According to Persinger and Kitt, there does seem to be some truth in the argument that our perception of some otherworldly higher power is an innate brain experience.
The other major neuroethologist is Andrew Newburg at the University of Pennsylvania (depcited in Bill Maher's Religulous). Him and colleague Eugene D’Aquili used a different approach than Persinger. They completed SPECT scans of nuns and Buddhist monks when they were deep in prayer. What they found was that the left parietal cortex activity slowed while there was increased activity in the frontal lobes. They did not see a change in the temporal lobe. This contradiction between the two studies illuminates that we are unsure where the area is.
In Ancient Greece prayers to Zeus to be less liberal when reaching in the evil jar would be said regularly in hoping for good fate for oneself. You might pray to Jesus today. Or say a mantra to Ganesha. Or light one up for Halie Salie. Or pray to L. Ron Hubbard or whatever Scientologists do. Or you might get drunk. But you will do something. Which begs to question, when times are tough, who does a neuroscientist turn to?
If a neuroscientist had a conversation with god it would go something like this –
“Hello right temporal cortex or frontal lobe with repressed activity in the left parietal cortex, how about world peace and so that work goes well tomorrow and for my kids so they don’t go down the wrong path….”
Which, when you think about it is probably not a bad thing that you are praying to your brain for some accountability. However, your brain isn’t the only brain. And therefore a lot of factors go into whether world peace will be achieved. So it behooves us to pray to a higher power if it exists to help out all these brains working together. But where do all these brains come from? That is not something neurobiologiest can’t help you with.
For instance, about 10 years ago I was driving through southern Vermont, and I came to a nice picturesque town. I was looking for a place to get some maple walnut pancakes with maple syrup. This to me seemed like the thing to do in Vermont when I was 23. Right on the corner near the main square was a guy dressed in a full cream suit in a lawn chair by the sidewalk. He looked pretty wealthy. But he was holding up a sign that he had painted on himself. It looked like something you would see at a college football game. Only it said, ‘Eternal Torture is Ridiculous.’
Okay. I’m sure it is ridiculous. But so is sitting on a sidewalk in a nice cream colored suit holding a sign that says Eternal Torture is Ridiculous. But maybe that was his point. But how does he know it is ridiculous? He believes it is ridiculous. Which at the base of it is the same as someone who believes that a fiery caldron of boiling hellfire and lava run by a red beast with hooves and a pitchfork is where you’ll go if you lie kill cheat steal.
If it is true that the feeling of God is innate in our brains, and most neuroscientists do believe this to be true, then why is it there? As usual in these types of ethical discussions, if you want to simplify it, you can take one of two sides, the creationists or the evolutionists. The creationists point of view would essentially be that God put it there to make us aware of Him, or to screw with us. The evolutionist perspective would be that we developed this area over time or worship the flying spaghetti monster. The people that mutated this area in the brain were more likely to survive and pass along their genes. As usual the evolutionary idea opens up all kinds of possibilities that are fun to discuss where the creationist idea is so rigid that it is almost certainly not true. Or is it? We don’t know.
One of the evolutionary ideas would be that we developed an area for this through evolution to keep us in check as a society, meaning that people with this trigger in their brain were able to pass along their genes because they stayed in line under the king/despot etc and weren’t beheaded. Another line of thought is a little more interesting. And that is that this conceptual notion of a higher power helps us deal with life as having meaning. People that didn’t have this ability, just killed themselves because they felt nothing had any purpose. The other idea would be that primitive cultures smoked a little too much weed and this stimulation was so desired that the people that could experience it with the greater effect were more desired through their genes that they procreated the most and passed along their unique drug altering brains. The evidence for this would be the copious amounts of weed buried with shamans in ancient cultures.
But a more satisfactory explanation would be that this ability to believe in a higher power evolved in people in concert with the idea of morality, or ‘doing good’ because it helped the species advance instead of us fighting with each other. Because we want to be kind and be morally upright with our fellow human beings. And as society has advanced, so have we had a better chance to grow in population, by having babies that also wanted to ‘do good.’ The evidence for this could be the advent of karma. In Western society, we have taken a Hindu concept and marginalized it to the simple idea that if you inflict harm on fellow people, harm will come back and get you. This has popped up as people have slowly embraced science and turned their backs on religion.
For instance, a few guys I’ve dated weren’t incredibly religious but I know they had intrinsic spiritual parts of their brain. I know this because if I was upset with someone or I did something that could be perceived as cruel, no matter how the person wronged me, they would tell me that I shouldn’t react because of karma. It’s bad karma, they would say. I’m beginning to feel like dealing with karma might be eternal torture.
But no matter how you explain why we believe in the ephemeral in our brain, it still isn’t satisfactory to explain why we are all walking around on this pale blue dot.
As we thirst for reality in our worship, science is also becoming the higher power that we consider with our brain ‘god spot’ instead of established religion. But the problem with this shift is that, like religion, science is also concepts created by people. But science is apparently based on numbers, so it has an element of perceived truth in it.
Why is it that we don’t hold cooking in as high esteem as science? We need food to live and cooks creatively conceive the most delicious ways to eat that food. There is something aesthetically and spiritually beautiful in that. In science doctors are the priests. In cooking it would be the cooks. And you would have ravenous sects that believed in overindulgence. And sects that believed in self-denial. And prayers for the priests to conceive a greater dish. Because like science, the ingredients in cooking are infinite. And scientists are like cooks. Most drugs are herbs that have been specially prepared to alter our minds. Cooking doesn’t have to conform to the numbers though. It’s too subjective to be a religion for modern society.
The definitivenss of numbers has always intrigued people because of the inherent aspect of truth in their underlying concept. If you have 1 apple and I give you another apple, you have two apples. 1 +1 = 2. No matter what. But as we step further away from math and into the scientific realm of neurobiology, it is not as mathematically definitive as it may seem. Simple math has a rigid aspect to it and we like that in our reality thirst, but biology is not all based on straight math. It is based on statistics of observable activity. So it may not be much more true in the end than a religion. Although since it is achieved through painstaking observation and data gathering and results, most people will hedge their bets on science rather than say, scientology. But science is a nice story as well. And the higher power is not something outside this world. Science is the belief in human powers. A belief in the human mind. As discovery is good and interesting, then it may not seem so wrong to worship the ideas of the human mind – except that it is just a tad bit conceited.
I answered an internet poll recently that asked ‘do you believe in god?’ 2/3s of the people that answered said no. I answered yes. I suppose I answered yes because I knew I had to. I’m a neurobiologist, so I know our brain perceives god so I was obligated to say yes. But I suppose I actually do think a divine force is behind some aspects of the universe. Why not? Or maybe I just think I should think this because I know there is a part of my brain that likely processes this information. Kind of like why I believe in pandas. I’ve never seen a panda. Not even at the zoo, mainly because I don’t usually go to zoos because they creep me out. Especially the wolves.
But there are pictures of pandas that tell me these animals exist. I should be skeptical, but I believe in the technology of photography as a reliable source, so all right, I’ll believe in pandas. Before photography, you would have to be a pretty good drawer to draw it and tell me that it existed. I suppose I’d believe you.
Science works similarly this way, as does brain science. Pictures that show how our brain is functioning based on imaging technology tell us that something is true. But you can’t see it for sure, you can’t know for sure. Similarly to me with the panda. I’ve seen the photograph, and I believe it exists. But I’ve also seen a supposed video of Bigfoot. But I do not believe Bigfoot exists. I think that was a guy in a warped gorilla suit.
This brings us to the ‘God Helmet’. Are the experiments true or not? They seem to work and be true, but there are many opposing theories to why this would seem true. Maybe the simple meditation of sitting a chair with your eyes covered gives you a mystical experience. Or maybe the expectation of having a mystical experience gives you a mystical experience. Like when you watch a TV show that you want to be great, and then you make it great. Even though in reality it wasn’t.
Since these experiments contradict many central tenets of established religion, and they can show us data and pictures to back it up instead of just tell us stories, we put our faith in science. But now we can manipulate data and pictures like never before so a picture becomes as heresay as a story and only as reliable as the story teller. Therefore it only becomes as reliable as the scientist. This scientist has a lot to gain because if his story is believed he is awarded lucrative government grants. More lucrative than what the Bigfoot video hoax guys made.
We like to believe in these stories and higher powers. The arrogance is that the brain believes it can understand these things.
One of the inherent problems in brain science is the fact that the brain is trying to study itself. As we’ve seen throughout history and probably among your friends, people tend to have a skewed view of the reality of themselves. How does a brain that develops concepts so far from reality going to really know what is going on with itself.
Our generally concept of our own self-importance tends to cause obstacles in the understanding of the organ in our body that possesses the key to this self importance.
Our ideas of how the brain works are based on the work of normal men who are ruled by a brain that is so conceited it thinks itself as the most vital organ in the body. For the fact we take this so far to believe that we are even the most brilliant minded species on the planet betrays our blatant egotism. As Ben Franklin once said, we think everyone is in the fog but ourselves, We look at the man in the front of us and he is draped in fog, the man to our right is obscured by a blanket of fog, and the man walking to our left is covered in fog. But everything around ourselves is clear.
So where does that leave brain science? One of the most peculiar soul killing and denigrating concepts in philosophy is the idea that nothing can ever be known to be true. This is called the Munchhausen Trilemma proposed by Hans Albert in Treatise on Critical Reason and goes back to the ancient Greeks. It basically says that there’s three ways to seek the truth and that all of them suck. The first way is to give evidence for the truth, but then you have to give evidence for the evidence etc etc until infinity. And philosophers know that we have the inability to understand infinity. Secondly, the evidence that we give for the truth is based on the truth we are providing the evidence for. Lastly, you can just say, I’m the boss and that’s the way it is, or just say, hey, it’s right in front of you. Or you can just speak the obvious. But you aren’t telling anything to anyone that they didn’t already know.
However, most people are not going to just roll over and knife themselves in the throat because there’s nothing that can be true. And scientific discovery has led to Tylenol and MRI scans, which are not anything that anyone can just say suck. But when it comes to understanding the brain. The Munchhausen Trilemma is in full effect. Albert named it after Baron Munchhausen – a guy known for telling tall tales. Like that he could ride cannonballs. Or that he pulled himself out of a lake by his own hair.
The circular argument is the most problematic in neuroscience. Because trying to understand the brain with a brain is already tainting the evidence. Any conclusions we make about how the brain works is tainted by how the brain works.
We can only know one thing for sure, we can imagine and create and fantasize what is not there.
When it comes down to it, our brains are just huge piles of goo. When you fire a gun through them they spatter like child’s bowl of jello. When you take one out of a pig. – believe me, I know – it feels like you reached into a jar of congealed honey. Whatever, it actually feels like what it is, that you’ve reached inside a goddamn pig. Inside this goo holds the concepts and weight of the entire planet. From a cheetah’s notion to run down an antelope to the human concept of time. But how this goo and the rest of us for that matter is formed is something we may never fully understand. We evolved from single cell organisms that haphazardly formed in the oceans. Okay. But why is the ocean there in the first place. How did the earth get here? What is the moon doing there? Why does gravity exist? Go on all day about the attraction of molecules, that’s fine, but why? Why are these rules in place? Maybe our human obsession with rules and their The big bang theory is interesting but what came before and how did it bang and why did it bang, etc. etc.??????? So our pile of conceited goo has conjured a concept for a higher power having created all this.
Interestingly, if we believe there is a ‘god spot’ in our brain, then it is true that we become convinced that there is a divine being because we think it. But there might also actually be a divine being. However, the fact that our brain is partly responsible may be the key to the obstruction of the scientific understanding of the brain.
If we are convinced by the reality of something because it was thought how are we ever going to sift through the reality of how our brain thinks these thoughts? This is unique to brain science and not other science or facets of biology. The objectively of looking at the liver will weed out those tempted to create scientific falsehoods based on what they believe. And therefore we will have no trouble understanding the liver. Whereas in the morass of studies on the brain it is less likely for the truth to be revealed due to the nature that the science is about the organ that originally did the thinking. This circular complex is a sincere obstacle. Because if we think the data adds up, then our thoughts to initiate the data accumulation for the reality of the truth becomes convoluted. Because our brains are imaginative and creative. And not easily pinned down by data. Data is finite and science is limited to our senses. Our brain processes from our senses. And our senses are incapable of comprehending the infinite.
The only way to grasp beyond our senses is to create. And all things creative should be looked at with awe, not just scientific data. We know laughter helps people, we know entertainment helps people, food, drink, drugs. We need to hope that what is outside our senses is worth living for. And if it is only accessible through our imagination, then shouldn’t we revere our imagination?
All of this gives me a brain cramp.
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God and the Brain BBC 2001
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McNamara P Where God and Science Meet, Vol 1, Evolution Genes and the Religious Brain, 2006 Praeger Westport CT
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