Nice summary of the news article, Moorad.
> The article, "Brain lobe linked to spirituality," was from the L.A. Times
> News Service. The research was done at the University of California at San
> Diego. They reported that the human brain may be hard-wired to hear the
> voice of heaven and was the first effort to directly address the neural
> basis of religious expression. The experiment was done with patients
> suffering from an unusual form of epilepsy. The researchers determined that
> the parts of the brian's temporal lobe--quickly dubbed the"God module"--may
> affect how intensely a person responds to religious beliefs. People
> suffering this type of seizure have long reported intense mystical and
> religious experiences as part of their attacks but also are usually
> preoccupied with mystical thoughts between seizures. This lead the
> researchers to investigate the relationship between the physical structure
> of the brain and spiritual experiences. The researchers determined that one
> effect of the patient's seizures was to strengthen their brain's involuntary
> response to religious words, leading the scientists to suggest a portion of
> the brain was naturally attuned to ideas about a supreme being. The
> scientists emphasized that their findings in no way suggest that religion is
> simply a matter of brain chemistry.
To quote the abstract: "If these preliminary results hold up, they may indicate
that the neural substrate for religion and belief in God may partioally involve
circuitry in the temporal lobes, which is enhanced in some patients. Of course,
far from invalidating religious experience this merely indicates what the
underlying neural substrate might be."
> p.s. The name of the researchers was not mentioned in the article.
It was VS Ramachandran's group. He has done a number of studies into the
physiology of higher cognitive and cortical functions, especially emotional
responses. He had an article in Sci American a few years ago on the "phantom
pain" phenomenon, as I recall.
It should also be pointed out that the research was presented at the Soc. for
Neuroscience meeting this week in New Orleans, and so is likely to be
preliminary, abstract type research that has not yet been published in final
paper form. Yup--here it is on p. 1316 of the abstracts..."Neural Basis of
Religious Experience".
What the newspapers didn't report was that this part of the temporal lobe is
very important to emotional experience, and is closely connected to parts of the
cortex involved in language processing--precisely the parts of the brain that
*should* respond to personal interactions with God (or anyone else with whom one
has an intimate relationship, for that matter). In fact, according to the
abstract, the area associated with "religious experience" in the epileptic group
tended to be associated more strongly with sexual experiences in both normal
"very religious" people and normal non-religious people. Make of that what you
will...I make of it that an area of the brain which responds to intensely
emotionally loaded experiences has been shown to also respond to religious
ideas.
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Scott Oakman Graduate Program in Neuroscience
University of Minnesota MD/PhD Program
oakma001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
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