From: Jay Willingham (jaywillingham@cfl.rr.com)
Date: Thu Aug 14 2003 - 17:46:25 EDT
Truly, the power of the spoken word cannot be overstated.
That is what makes the vet or the infant pediatrician's diagnostic job so much more difficult.
Are you familiar with any research seeking to correlate brain activity with the demon possession concept?
----- Original Message -----
From: EckertWAIII@aol.com
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 5:08 PM
Subject: 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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