Re: A "God" Part of the Brain?

From: EckertWAIII@aol.com
Date: Thu Aug 14 2003 - 17:08:35 EDT

  • Next message: Jay Willingham: "Re: A "God" Part of the Brain?"

    Granted that it is difficult enough to define "God" not to mention a "God
    experience", and granted that people are not always honest and so-called lie
    detector tests have many caveats; nonetheless, we can directly ask people whether
    they are experiencing "God", "Nirvana", deep relaxation, etc at a given point
    in time and correlate these subjective experiences with brain activity. In
    fact, we can determine how well they correlate. We can ask if there are times
    when people claim to experience something in particular that correlates with
    different patterns of brain activity than when the subjective experience seems
    indentical to a previous subjective experience. When the two repeatedly
    correlate very well, we can then be reasonably sure that they are associated although
    we can not be absolutely sure which is the cause and which is the effect.
    However, this is far more information than we can obtain with animals, except to
    correlate brain or neuronal activity with behaviors or physiological states.
    The value in obtaining information from human beings about their subjective
    experiences from asking them should not be underestimated.

    -Bill

    --
    William A. Eckert III, Ph.D.
    Senior Research Scientist
    Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
    Durham, NC
    

    In a message dated 8/14/2003 2:57:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jaywillingham@cfl.rr.com writes:

    > I would like to see the same for man's experience of God.



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