Intruding into the realms of faith

Posted November 7th, 2006 by Prometheus 6

...A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent...

The scans also showed a dip in the activity of a region called the left caudate. “The findings from the frontal lobes are very clear, and make sense, but the caudate is usually active when you have positive affect, pleasure, positive emotions,” said Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “So it’s not so clear what that finding says” about speaking in tongues.

A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues
By BENEDICT CAREY

The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers....

Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent.

The new findings contrasted sharply with images taken of other spiritually inspired mental states like meditation, which is often a highly focused mental exercise, activating the frontal lobes.

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What is it that triggers the

On November 7th, 2006 cnulan says:

What is it that triggers the brain to produce a religious experience?

â€œWhat researchers are finding is that there seem to be common brain pathways underlying all transcendental experiences,â€? she says. â€œItâ€™s the cultural interpretations that vary. But whatâ€™s really challenging is that the research evidence is very strong that what we think of normal everyday reality is actually a construction of the brain.

â€œHowever, it is quite clear that the brain is also able to construct a version of reality that is quite unlike the survival-orientated â€˜normalâ€™, one. Now why on earth should it have evolved to do that and why is our culture so dead set against exploring it?â€?

How the Brain Creates the

On November 7th, 2006 cnulan says:

How the Brain Creates the Experience of God: An easy to read explanation of a controversial hypothesis. The God effect.

if one comes face-to-face with God, one is actually being confronted with one's self.

And the self is now a matter of brain science. It has fallen to the neuroscientists for two reasons. There's a neurological disorder that sometimes leaves people seeing god, or at least claiming to. And there's a neurological picture of the self emerging.

Within neuroscience, both the self, and the disorder that seems to make visions of God concern the limbic system, the middle and lower portions of the temporal lobes, parts of the brain that are activated very easily. More easily, in fact, than any other parts of the brain.

There are two pieces of evidence behind this. One is that psychological 'disorders of the self' usually involve differences in the limbic system. A schizophrenic hippocampus is different from normal one. A depressed person's amygdala (there's two - one on each side) works differently from a normal one.

The other important evidence is a thing called "The Forty Hertz Component." It's a component of a typical EEG readout. It appears from the temporal lobes, and its there when a a person is awake, there when the person is in REM sleep, but it's absent when a person is in dreamless sleep.

We cannot remember dreamless sleep, but we can recall dreams, and what happens in ordinary, waking consciousness. And those are the times when the 40hz is present. A conclusion follows. One that a lot of people don't like too much. The 'self' is what we experience when a specific pattern of brain activity is happening. It might BE that activity, or it might only require it. In either case, "we" aren't completely made of any sort of spiritual or divine energy. Some of what we are, at least, can be measured, recorded, 'logged in as data', and all that.

Prometheus 6