by Ceri Payne - Thursday, 13 March 2008, 12:46 AM
Right now this is a bit of a sporadic topic but i spent last night at an arts & philosophy discussion night and a very intelligent chap by the name of Sam Bennetts began this discussion. So i am attributing the concept to him, but i would love to hear what everybody, including Julian! thinks
Love & God - Two pretty huge staples in today's culture,
but research into Neurology discovered that the feelings of 'love' and the feeling of the presence of a 'God' were simple chemical reactions and could be triggered and studied.
Dr. Michael A. Persinger is a American researcher and university professor in the field of Neuroscience and Neurotheology.
Neurotheology is a hard specialism to describe accurately but it supposes and theorizes that base spiritualism - or the feelings that arise from it are based in chemical and neurological changes in the brain.
Dr Persinger brought forward the concept that it 'spirituality' can be induced very simply with a device he calls a 'God Helmet' - and it does what it says on the tin - it induces the feeling of heightened spirituality in a person by stimulating specific regions of their brains with electromagnetic pulses. Persinger uses a modified snowmobile helmet or a head-circlet device nicknamed the Octopus that contain solenoid which create a weak but complex magnetic field over the brain's right-hemisphere parietal and temporal lobes.
For many tested it was said to be effective, in at least whilst wearing the helmet they feel 'enlightened' like in the presence of a god or a deceased loved one
Here comes a little bit of science which i am ashamed to say comes straight from the lovely Wikipedia and less shameful Discover Magazine:
An example of this is an increase of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland, explains the neurological basis for many experiences & behaviours associated with religion, such as:
* The perception that time, fear or Self-consciousness have dissolved.
* Spiritual awe.
* oneness with the universe.
* Ecstatic trance.
* Sudden enlightenment.
* Altered states of consciousness.
This Helmet therefore suggests a future where we could buy/sell spirituality & go and plug ourselves in and experience meditative bliss ever experienced only by buddists or mystics who have been faithful and prayed for years. And if we can do that - then we can effectively steal heaven!
But of course there are issues with this idea - especially dealing with such a subjective subject as spirituality
"Even when the neural basis of religion has been identified, it remains a plausible interpretation of any conceivable neuropsychological facts that there is a genuine experience of God," *
So yes - If the feeling of God is nothing more that an stimulation in a gland in a brain - then what stimulates this need in the first place? is it human nature's desire to find order in the universe? or is there more?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not posing a theological debate here, being a vicar's daughter i have had enough to last me a lifetime! but i am interested in neurotheology and it's role in society, if you research into this, and the surrounding areas, you find that love and free will work in a similar way in the human mind and the fallout from that is possibly even more controversial, the idea that love and free will mean nothing more than a few electrical signals and glands swelling..
I'm not sure exactly where i'm going with this but please give me your feedback!
* Fraser Watts is a psychologist, theologian & Anglican vicar.
Also much information derived from clever people round a table!
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Picture of Julian Bryant
Re: Stealing Heaven!
by Julian Bryant - Monday, 17 March 2008, 08:22 PM
I promised I'd comment on this one. A defining text that covers similar material is Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. In it he describes dropping mescalin, an early psychotropic and forerunner of LSD. He describes changes in the perceptive field, and more importantly relates it to works of art (particularly Van Gogh and Goya) and religious experience. Feelings of religious elation can be induced also through self-mortification, experience of battle, and through other means which induce adrenalin such as theme park rides - and maybe the fear of performance! (Apparently it's connected with the breakdown of adrenalin to noradrenalin, related to other hormone experience). Also, ritual, chanting, rhythmic action and hypnotic moments of ll kinds.
Now, in the 60's and 70's people again were trying to short-cut the path to 'enlightenment'. But as your favourite poet Eliot says in Four Quartets , "We had the experience but missed the meaning". Students of Zen spend years preparing for the experience, in order to be able to make proper use of it. We live in a society that is obsessed by self-gratification - the commodification of experience. Properly understood, religious experience is about losing self in the knowledge of a greater wisdom - exactly the opposite to what both the acid-heads and, by the sound of it, neurotheologists are after.
We should also remind ourselves of the religious origins of performance (see Richard Schechner on this one). Bright lights, intensity of the moment, loud rhythmic action, chanting: we might be in the business of helping people "find God", whatever that means. Peter Brook talks about 'Holy Theatre'; and I'm vey aware of the sanctity of the stage space, and hwat is and isn't allowed by our own instincts. Sweeping or mopping becomes ritual purification; who may walk on it. Artaud talks about the madness of the artist, but it is a holy madness - being touched by God.
I had this discussion with a drama colleague from a missionary college. I can accept God as metaphor - her point was that she and her students understood Him as lived experience. What impressed me was that for them it was an experience which motivated them to work with AIDS victims in Africa, or among poor lepers in India. A million miles from a purely experiential conception of the deity.
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Right now this is a bit of a sporadic topic but i spent last night at an arts & philosophy discussion night and a very intelligent chap by the name of Sam Bennetts began this discussion. So i am attributing the concept to him, but i would love to hear what everybody, including Julian! thinks
Love & God - Two pretty huge staples in today's culture,
but research into Neurology discovered that the feelings of 'love' and the feeling of the presence of a 'God' were simple chemical reactions and could be triggered and studied.
Dr. Michael A. Persinger is a American researcher and university professor in the field of Neuroscience and Neurotheology.
Neurotheology is a hard specialism to describe accurately but it supposes and theorizes that base spiritualism - or the feelings that arise from it are based in chemical and neurological changes in the brain.
Dr Persinger brought forward the concept that it 'spirituality' can be induced very simply with a device he calls a 'God Helmet' - and it does what it says on the tin - it induces the feeling of heightened spirituality in a person by stimulating specific regions of their brains with electromagnetic pulses. Persinger uses a modified snowmobile helmet or a head-circlet device nicknamed the Octopus that contain solenoid which create a weak but complex magnetic field over the brain's right-hemisphere parietal and temporal lobes.
For many tested it was said to be effective, in at least whilst wearing the helmet they feel 'enlightened' like in the presence of a god or a deceased loved one
Here comes a little bit of science which i am ashamed to say comes straight from the lovely Wikipedia and less shameful Discover Magazine:
An example of this is an increase of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland, explains the neurological basis for many experiences & behaviours associated with religion, such as:
* The perception that time, fear or Self-consciousness have dissolved.
* Spiritual awe.
* oneness with the universe.
* Ecstatic trance.
* Sudden enlightenment.
* Altered states of consciousness.
This Helmet therefore suggests a future where we could buy/sell spirituality & go and plug ourselves in and experience meditative bliss ever experienced only by buddists or mystics who have been faithful and prayed for years. And if we can do that - then we can effectively steal heaven!
But of course there are issues with this idea - especially dealing with such a subjective subject as spirituality
"Even when the neural basis of religion has been identified, it remains a plausible interpretation of any conceivable neuropsychological facts that there is a genuine experience of God," *
So yes - If the feeling of God is nothing more that an stimulation in a gland in a brain - then what stimulates this need in the first place? is it human nature's desire to find order in the universe? or is there more?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not posing a theological debate here, being a vicar's daughter i have had enough to last me a lifetime! but i am interested in neurotheology and it's role in society, if you research into this, and the surrounding areas, you find that love and free will work in a similar way in the human mind and the fallout from that is possibly even more controversial, the idea that love and free will mean nothing more than a few electrical signals and glands swelling..
I'm not sure exactly where i'm going with this but please give me your feedback!
* Fraser Watts is a psychologist, theologian & Anglican vicar.
Also much information derived from clever people round a table!
Edit | Delete | Reply
Picture of Julian Bryant
Re: Stealing Heaven!
by Julian Bryant - Monday, 17 March 2008, 08:22 PM
I promised I'd comment on this one. A defining text that covers similar material is Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. In it he describes dropping mescalin, an early psychotropic and forerunner of LSD. He describes changes in the perceptive field, and more importantly relates it to works of art (particularly Van Gogh and Goya) and religious experience. Feelings of religious elation can be induced also through self-mortification, experience of battle, and through other means which induce adrenalin such as theme park rides - and maybe the fear of performance! (Apparently it's connected with the breakdown of adrenalin to noradrenalin, related to other hormone experience). Also, ritual, chanting, rhythmic action and hypnotic moments of ll kinds.
Now, in the 60's and 70's people again were trying to short-cut the path to 'enlightenment'. But as your favourite poet Eliot says in Four Quartets , "We had the experience but missed the meaning". Students of Zen spend years preparing for the experience, in order to be able to make proper use of it. We live in a society that is obsessed by self-gratification - the commodification of experience. Properly understood, religious experience is about losing self in the knowledge of a greater wisdom - exactly the opposite to what both the acid-heads and, by the sound of it, neurotheologists are after.
We should also remind ourselves of the religious origins of performance (see Richard Schechner on this one). Bright lights, intensity of the moment, loud rhythmic action, chanting: we might be in the business of helping people "find God", whatever that means. Peter Brook talks about 'Holy Theatre'; and I'm vey aware of the sanctity of the stage space, and hwat is and isn't allowed by our own instincts. Sweeping or mopping becomes ritual purification; who may walk on it. Artaud talks about the madness of the artist, but it is a holy madness - being touched by God.
I had this discussion with a drama colleague from a missionary college. I can accept God as metaphor - her point was that she and her students understood Him as lived experience. What impressed me was that for them it was an experience which motivated them to work with AIDS victims in Africa, or among poor lepers in India. A million miles from a purely experiential conception of the deity.
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Last modified: Thursday, 7 June 2012, 2:15 PM