Religion and the Brain

One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The American neurologist, who was spending a year in England, saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings and some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then, Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. He saw things “as they really are,” he recalls. The sense of “I, me, mine” disappeared. “Time was not present,” he says. “I had a sense of eternity. My loathings, fear of death and selfhood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things.”

Call it a mystical experience, a spiritual moment, if you like – but Austin will not. Rather than interpret his instance of grace as a proof of a reality beyond comprehension of our senses, much less as proof of deity, Austin took it as “a proof of the existence of the brain.” As a neurologist, he accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is created by the brain. Austin’s moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have dissolved, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. When that happens, Austin wrote in a recent paper, “what we think of as our ‘higher’ functions of selfhood appear briefly to ‘drop out’, ‘dissolve’, or be ‘deleted from consciousness.’”

He spun out his theories in 1998, in the book “Zen and the Brain.” Since then, more and more scientists have flocked to “neurotheology,” the study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality.

What all the new research shares is a passion for discovering what happens in our brains when we sense that we “have encountered a reality different from the reality of everyday experience,” as psychologist David Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it. In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says Wulff, that it “suggests a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain.”

Are spiritual experiences within the reach of anyone? Neurologists are still clueless on this question. In numerous surveys since 1960s, 30 or 40 percent of respondents say they have, at least once or twice, felt “very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself.” Gallop polls found that 53% of American adults said they had had “a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight.” Psychologists believe that those people most open to mystical experience tend also to be open to new experiences generally. They are usually creative and innovative, with a breadth of interests and a tolerance for ambiguity. Since “we all have the brain circuits that mediate spiritual experiences, probably most people have the capacity for having such experience,” says Wulff. “But it’s possible to foreclose that possibility. If you are rational, self-controlled, not prone to fantasy, you will probably resist the experience.”

Brain-imaging studies have helped explain how nonspiritual people can be moved by religious ceremonies. Drumming, dancing, incantations – all rivet attention on a single, intense source of sensory stimulation, and at the same time evoke powerful emotional response. This combination sends the brain’s arousal system into hyperdrive, much as intense fear does, causing one of the brain structures responsible for maintaining equilibrium to put on the brakes. It inhibits the flow of signals between neurons, like a traffic cop preventing any more cars from entering a tied-up highway. The result is that certain regions of the brain – including the one that goes quiet during meditation and prayer – are deprived of neuronal input.

Neurotheology may wind up having its biggest impact on our thinking about consciousness, the biggest mystery of neuroscience. “In mystical experiences, the content of the mind fades, sensory awareness drops out, so you are left only with pure consciousness,” says Robert Forman, a comparative-religion scholar at Hunter College in New York. “This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and it is a mere byproduct of sensory action.” The question of whether our brain wiring creates God or whether God created our brain wiring will most likely remain purely a matter of faith.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)