Got Spirituality on the Brain?

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, awoke on the morning of December 10, 1996 with a sharp pain behind one eye, which proved to be the start of a severe stroke. A blood vessel in the left hemisphere of her brain had haemorrhaged, and soon Taylor found such faculties as language, analysis and judgement – for which that part of the brain was responsible – quickly slipping away. Truly a scientist and observer by nature, in the middle of this dire emergency she decided to take note of all that was happening to her.

She now can recall thinking to herself, “Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” But, as she told her audience at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference (better known as TED) in February 2008, in the next instant, the following thought flashed through her mind: “This is so cool!”

Her subsequent experiences closely resemble what practitioners of Eastern meditative traditions typically call satori .

Taylor, like all her colleagues in neuroscience, describes the brain in terms of two halves, each fulfilling separate functions and, as a result, maintaining perspectives on the world very different from each other. The right hemisphere, she says, is “all about the present”, observing what the given moment looks like through the seemingly infinite sensory information it receives. The left, in contrast, is “all about the past and the future”, thinking linearly and placing all of the data it continually receives in context and categories. Echoing Descarte’s cogito ergo sum, Taylor says the left side of the brain gives the self its definition separate and apart from the rest of the universe. “It is the little voice that says to me, ‘I am.’”

Normally, the two hemispheres constantly communicate through a complex structure known as the corpus callosum, resulting in the worldview we normally hold. However, as Taylor explains on the Amazon.com display for her 2008 bestseller My Stroke of Insight, “When the cells in my left brain became nonfunctional because they were swimming in a pool of blood... I shifted into the consciousness of the present moment. I was in the right here, right now awareness, with no memories of my past and no perception of the future. The beauty of La-la land (my right hemisphere experience of the present moment) was that everything was an explosion of magnificent stimulation and I dwelled in a space of euphoria.”

As defined by her then still functioning right hemisphere, she was “an energy being connected to the energy all around me”. Although it took her eight years to recover fully from her stroke, Taylor says she now can slip in and out of this heightened state of awareness at will.

It is easy to imagine how, even just 20 years ago, Taylor’s experiences might have been dismissed as an illusion created by a “brain state”. What I find remarkable about the Spirit Age, however, is how so many are willing to consider at least the possibility that Taylor’s stroke gave her insight to a Truth – with a capital “T” – normally beyond our daily experiences.

Taylor is cited briefly in How God Changes Your Brain, the recently published book by Andrew Newberg, the director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mark Waldman, a therapist and associate fellow at the Center. As the title implies, their book explores much the same realm covered by Taylor. While Taylor’s account is unique and personal, however, Newberg and Waldman review numerous different clinical experiments examining how the brain develops over time in relation to its conceptualizations and contemplation of God and spirituality.

Newberg in particular has been known since the 1990s for his studies of the brain as it relates to mystical and religious experiences. For the past 10 years, he has been most noted in the popular press for his work using imaging technology to scan the brains of Buddhist monks during meditation, Franciscan nuns during prayer and Pentecostal believers while they were speaking in tongue.

He has observed that, in both meditating monks and praying nuns, activity decreases in the parietal lobe, the area of their brain that orients the self in relation to space. This state of decreased activity seems to cause, at least in part, the sense of timelessness brought about by meditation or intense prayer, as well as the “oneness” with God or the universe often described by spiritualists. Furthermore, in subjects who have practised meditation for 10 years or longer, Newberg observed unusual asymmetrical activity in the thalamus, the part of the brain which functions to identify what is and is not real. This, he says, may explain the realness God takes on in the practitioners’ mind. However, asymmetrical thalamic activity is also often associated with epilepsy and schizophrenia.

Although, unlike Taylor, he does not suggest that these irregularities are directly related to the brain encountering a greater Truth, neither does he dismiss the practitioners’ experiences simply as illusions resulting from an abnormal brain state. To his credit, he clearly understands his limitations: “Our research indicates that our only way of comprehending God, asking questions about God, and experiencing God is through the brain,” he explains on his Web site. “But whether or not God exists ‘out there’ is something that neuroscience cannot answer.” A true scientist, he only will state what he observes in the brain as test subjects undergo their spiritual experiences. He will neither confirm nor deny whether these experiences are based in reality.

Again, however, it is easy to imagine how sceptics might simply reduce all spiritual experiences to material brain activity given Newberg’s findings – especially since some of his findings are usually associated with illness and abnormality. That this is no longer the overwhelming reaction from today’s public, I feel, is the result of various factors coming into play. The first is how the definition of spirituality has now broadened far beyond traditional religions and concepts of God as a separate, omnipotent being. In its presently nebulous state, spirituality can commonly accommodate science and vice versa. Secondly, wider acceptance and familiarity with both Eastern schools of thought such as Daoism, as well as branches of Western philosophy such as Deconstruction, have made many of us more comfortable with the idea of multiple, relative truths.

Perhaps most importantly, as advancements in technology enable us to discover matters and materials of which we were previously unaware – in physics, biology and medicine among other disciplines – we now realize the limitations of our own consciousness. Physicists, for example, will tell you an infinite number of neutrinos are passing through our bodies at every moment, yet we are completely unaware of this fact. Furthermore, countless experiments in psychology have shown that our conscious mind can skewer reality often in extreme ways. The memories you hold of your childhood may not be as accurate as you think. Your conviction that your co-workers do not like you may not have any basis in reality.

As Newberg and Waldman state in How God Changes Your Brain, “We believe that consciousness represents a limited and somewhat fragmented view of reality that is discrepant from the holistic view generated by nonconscious processes in the brain.”

Eastern schools of thought have always downplayed the reliance of so-called reality created by our conscious mind. Japanese Buddhists call it ukiyo, an illusionary, floating world. There is also the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, a version of which appears in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant – its trunk, its legs, its side – and imagines in varying ways the shape of the animal none of them have actually seen. The limitation of consciousness is also expressed in the often quoted Daoist phrase from the Dao De Jing: “The way called the way is not the eternal way”. The moment we conceptualize Truth with our conscious mind, as soon as we give it a name and categorize it in the left hemisphere of our brain, it is lost.

Accepting our limitations, especially one with such enormous implications, is never easy. However, it is precisely our recognition of the conscious mind’s limits that enables us to see the possibilities revealed by Taylor’s stroke. Such possibilities may encourage scientists to continue their research with renewed vigour. Or they may inspire us to take up meditation or prayer or some other contemplative exercise. When we accept that the door in front of us is closed, it becomes easier for us to see that countless other doors are still open. Such is the remarkable thing about the Spirit Age in which we live.

Image by Salvatore Vuono at Freedigitalphotos.net.