Religious Exaltations and Brain Anomalies

Do you feel that He is with you and watching over you every day of your life?

Do you walk through life feeling His divine presence?

Does He speak to you; Or through you to communicate His message?

If you are one of the [potentially] millions who would answer Yes to these questions, hold onto your jockies – it’s not Him; It’s You.

This article in Scientific American [thanks Mom] discusses potential correlations between temporal lobe anomalies (or abnormal brain activity) and claimed experiences of spiritual epiphanies. In sum: there is evidence to suggest that “experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain” and that spiritual sensations – feelings that you are not alone, that there is a divine presence that surrounds you, and other spiritual wonders – can in fact be manipulated and/or artificially induced to create or enhance a “religious experience”.

God, is nothing more mystical than the sum of psychological conditioning of the most common religious rituals paired with abnormal electrical impulses traversing the pathways of the human brain.

Hmm. OK.

For life, love or limb - Whether you are a life-long believer or newly transformed.. any emotionally charged moment will produce abnormal brain activity, including the need to believe in something greater than yourself. Sadness, grief, loneliness, love and happiness (and the fear of losing them both) are all fixtures of electrical impulses that talk to the brain. And so naturally Science can prove where and how feelings of the mystical can materialize in the human body – just as mathematical theorems can prove that you actually can hold a 5-ton elephant over the edge of a 5-story building with nothing but a paper clip and an inch of thread (or was it a daisy??).

But we know better.

The point is - it's an interesting perspective and I love to dissect it's possibilities but in the end, Science is not proof.

As an agnostic I can neither accept nor deny the notion that abnormal brain activity is at the heart of every individual's spiritual or religious experience. I need more data. But there's an obvious correlation no doubt and in most circumstances this explanation is perhaps the most likely. After all, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. A Divine experience or are you just really, really happy and creating your own sensations of the divine...

Either way, the idea does bring up interesting thoughts about my own personal experiences. There have been more than a few fragile moments in my life - moments filled with sadness or trepidation or uncertainty - and in those moments I’ve found myself looking up in the hopes that there exists something in the mystical, something greater than myself, that has the power to guide the directions of my fate. *Oh pretty please* And in many of those moments, I’ve felt it. That sense of absolute truth. That sense that in this moment there can be no doubt. And in all honesty, those moments have always given me the greatest comfort and peace.

Flash forward to the here and now and well, maybe it wasn’t Him; maybe it was Me. Did I feel the divine or did my own heightened sense of need create in my mind, the feeling of the Divine? When people go to Church and they reach that sense of connected peace - is it because they truly feel the presence of God and the mystical or is it because being surrounded by thoughts of love and happiness in fact changes our brain patterns and the electrical impulses going to and from the brain, thereby inducing the feeling of a "religious experience"..?

Seeing is believing? Or is believing, seeing?

I don't know but as I've said before it makes for interesting conversation. Probably the more relevant question is, if you feel happier and more fulfilled in your life, does it really matter? You decide.