Is God just the electromagnetic functions in your brain?

[JuliaB]

This Is Your Brain on God

Michael Persinger has a vision - the Almighty isn't dead, he's an energy field. And your mind is an electromagnetic map to your soul.
By Jack Hitt
Over a scratchy speaker, a researcher announces, "Jack, one of your electrodes is loose, we're coming in." The 500-pound steel door of the experimental chamber opens with a heavy whoosh; two technicians wearing white lab coats march in. They remove the Ping-Pong-ball halves taped over my eyes and carefully lift a yellow motorcycle helmet that's been retrofitted with electromagnetic field-emitting solenoids on the sides, aimed directly at my temples. Above the left hemisphere of my 42-year-old male brain, they locate the dangling electrode, needed to measure and track my brain waves. The researchers slather more conducting cream into the graying wisps of my red hair and press the securing tape hard into my scalp.
After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God.
I'm taking part in a vanguard experiment on the physical sources of spiritual consciousness, the current work-in-progress of Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a "sensed presence."
Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations - describing the presence as one's grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story.
It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism, pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal - aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it.


To those of us who prefer a little mystery in our lives, it all sounds like a letdown. And as I settle in for my mind trip, I'm starting to get apprehensive. I'm a lapsed Episcopalian clinging to only a hazy sense of the divine, but I don't especially like the idea that whatever vestigial faith I have in the Almighty's existence might get clinically lobotomized by Persinger's demo. Do I really want God to be rendered as explicable and predictable as an endorphin rush after a 3-mile run?




read the rest of the article at

Wired 7.11: This Is Your Brain on God (https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/persinger.html)

[Aphelion1182]

Read about DMT, a substance in all living things, even the human brain. God is a human invention.

Dimethyltryptamine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine)

[zeetroll]

When an understanding of evolution began to dawn, many religious people (obviously to this day) felt their faith in a higher power was threatened by the realization that biological life was not created as it is by a simple command. But now, many people with deep faith in the mystery of the universe have no problem with evolution, they see it as a deeper understanding of the ways of God, if you will. That human experience is mediated by the brain is not surprising, nor that there are electrophysiological correlates to mystical experiences. There are several models of understanding this data that don't undermine the substance of mystical insight. First of all, we know how the eyes work to some degree. We don't think that the universe we see is not really there because the process of this perception involves prosaic biological elements. But we believe (unless we are severely solipsistic, as I am at times) that there is a reality we are receiving through this evolved biological apparatus. Similarly, the brain may be induced to reproduce mystical experiences but that doesn't mean that what the brain is perceiving doesn't exist. It is just functioning in a way that it can perceive or receive it. When I was a medical student studying neural science I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about peak experiences and the brain and what it said or didn't say about reality outside the skull. I realized that, whether the brain is entirely an organ with input from the senses as we know them, whether it can receive other kinds of input directly, or not- this was not determined by the neurobiology of that time. I think it still isn't clearly determined from the data in these experiments. I don't think mystics or religious people should fear in any way this data. We should go further and really explore what it says about our relationship to a greater reality, divine or whatever, outside or even inside us. There is a hubris as well as a disappointment in stating "Human beings have created God" After all, who created the brain that is creating these experiences, and is it not a critical part of our humanity, our destiny, our potential, that we can do this? Does this negate the possiblility of divinity, whether within or outside human beings?