The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (31 page)

Another flaw in the reduction of mysticism to temporal-lobe epilepsy is the singularity of true mystical experience. An epileptic regularly experiences
attacks; in serious cases, the temporal lobe seizes several times per week or even per day.
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The hallucinations themselves are similarly repetitive, with the victim experiencing the same voice or the same intense feeling of knowing a hidden truth. Further, the hallucinations of epilepsy tend to be limited to a single modality—the victim sees a vision or hears a voice or feels a presence, but rarely all three. In contrast, “most mystics…experience only a handful of mystical encounters in a lifetime,” and these entail a “high degree of sensory complexity” and “tend to be rich, coherent, and deeply dimensioned sensory experiences.”
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Psychotic breakdowns are also distinct in that the mystic returns to reality, shares the experience, functions normally, and in fact
is
“often seen as among the most respected and effective members of some societies.”
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This presents a sharp contrast to the highly distressed lives, often in social isolation, experienced by the chronically psychotic mental patient.

The ensemble hypothesis assumes that the modern human brain provides all the parts necessary for spiritual experiences and inquiries. The brain is able to think symbolically, to envision the future, and to infer hidden causes. Whether it is a true mystical state, a psychotic state, or a temporal-lobe seizure that causes the unusual state of consciousness, it is not surprising that all three might be understood in symbolic terms and interpreted as religious experiences. The aberrant electrical storms of temporal-lobe epilepsy and the delusions and hallucinations suffered in psychosis could plausibly be understood as spiritual experiences because the normal human brain is equipped for such experiences even in the absence of disease. In fact, there are a variety of religious practices, such as prayer and meditation, that can also lead to mystical states with no disease present at all.

Using methods of prayer and meditation specific to their religious traditions, practitioners can experience a feeling of merging into a union with the transcendent, where the self dissolves into something infinite and immortal. Islamic Sufis, Zen Buddhists, Tantric Buddhists, Kabbalistic Jews, Christian mystics, Hindus, Taoists, and Native American shamans have all reported such mystical experiences. To illustrate: “The goal of the contemplative rituals practiced by some Catholic mystics, for example, is to attain the state of
Unio Mystica
, the mysterious union that the mystic experiences as a sense of union with the actual presence of God. In Buddhism, the aim of meditative rituals
is to encounter the ultimate oneness of everything by defeating the limiting sense of self generated by the ego.”
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Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili captured the activity in the brain that transpires during these peak religious experiences using neuroimaging. Of special interest to them was the parietal lobe. In the posterior superior region of the parietal lobe, sensory signals from the senses of touch, vision, and hearing converge to create a mental representation of the body and its orientation in space. The left hemisphere in this parietal region computes a spatial representation of the self, whereas its analogue in the right hemisphere computes the surrounding physical space in which the self's body can reside.
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Together, they allow the brain to maintain an understanding of where the self ends and the physical environment begins, and of how the body is spatially oriented from moment to moment.

In their studies, Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks meditated and signaled the researcher when they achieved a peak experience. At this moment, a long-lasting radioactive tracer was injected into their blood stream. This allowed the use of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) in scanning their brain activity several minutes later so as not to interfere with the religious experience as it occurred during prayer or meditation. Compared with baseline activity in the parietal lobe, the SPECT scans of both the nuns and monks showed a decrease in activity in the posterior superior parietal region during the peak religious experience.
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The region that would normally maintain a sense of how the self is oriented in space lowered its rate of neural firing during the peak religious experience. The neuroimaging findings correspond with the introspective reports of the mystical state of consciousness.

THE GENOME AND RELIGIOSITY

The present argument is that religion is a natural consequence of the design of the modern human brain. The advanced systems of working memory and social intelligence interact with mental time travel to enable spiritual inquiry and reasoning about theological questions, just as they enable moral reasoning. In fact, theological and moral questions are often intertwined. Of special importance is the role of the left-hemisphere interpreter that works with symbols and language, describing the abstractions of an unseen order.
Properties attributed to God—omniscience and omnipotence—can be understood and reasoned about perhaps only because of the words invented as labels for densely abstract concepts that are far from everyday percepts. They are like the mathematical concept of infinity; that is, difficult to really know in any way other than as a symbol. A primary function of the interpreter is to seek hidden causes for events perceived and thoughts held. It is thus essential in seeking answers to theological questions about the purpose and plan for the universe and humanity. From the current perspective, it is no surprise that human beings proceed both on faith as spiritual beings to understand theological problems and as scientific beings who can reason from empirical evidence. Both science and theology emerge from the ensemble of parts that constitute the brain of modern humans at least since the Upper Paleolithic.

Consistent with this view, a study with identical and fraternal twins has identified religious interests, attitudes, and values as being in part affected by genetic factors.
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This makes sense if spirituality naturally emerges from the design of the modern human brain and genome. Investigators compared twins who were raised apart from each other with those raised together to try to assess the relative weight of the environmental and genetic influences. They took a variety of standardized measures of religious beliefs, interests, and activities. Their conclusion: about 50 percent of the individual variation in human populations with respect to religious interests is genetically influenced.
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This finding runs strongly counter to the long-standing assumption that only cultural influence determines interest in religion. Yet it is one of very few studies that have examined religiosity in adults rather than in children, who are still under strong family influence.

Another study indicated that spiritual beliefs are already held in young children, suggesting they are in part a consequence of our genome and key brain networks. If family and culture indoctrinates children into believing in an afterlife, then one would expect that expressions of such a belief would grow with age. Kindergartners, late elementary school children, and adults were asked questions about what kinds of biological and mental states occur after death.
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For example, does the brain still function, is there a need to eat, is it possible to love, and is it possible to want something or to know something? Compared with older children and adults, the younger children were
more likely to attribute all of these abilities to a mind even after death. As the researcher noted, “This is precisely the opposite pattern that one would expect to find if the origins of such believes could be traced exclusively to cultural indoctrination. In fact, ‘religious answers’—such as Heaven, God or spirits—among the youngest children were extremely rare.”
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Their intuitions about an afterlife were driven by nature, not nurture.

If it is correct that the ensemble of parts making up the modern human mind is responsible for the inevitable emergence of spiritual inquiry and religious belief, then it ought to be possible to find a link between these beliefs and the relevant brain networks mediating the parts. Research addressing such questions is just now beginning, but a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in fact found such evidence.
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Religious beliefs were analyzed with the goal of understanding their underlying semantic relationships. Three dimensions were discovered that accounted for how people differ in their religious beliefs: God's perceived level of involvement in the world, God's perceived emotion, and a dimension that captured religious knowledge along a continuum of doctrinal versus experiential aspects. Doctrinal beliefs were expected to be associated with abstract semantics “whereas experiential knowledge engages networks involved in memory retrieval and imagery.”
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The fMRI results showed that the networks mediating theory of mind, abstract semantics, and the memory retrieval and visual imagery of mental time travel were critically involved. Such findings support the contention that it is our advanced social intelligence, mental time travel, and the capacity for abstract thoughts captured in symbols and language that underlie the human capacity for religion. Although social cognition, language, and logical reasoning have other important functions, as argued by the ensemble hypothesis, religious thought “likely emerged as a unique combination of these several evolutionarily important cognitive processes.”
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A final argument favoring the notion that religion is endogenous to the structure of the human brain is its resiliency over time. Despite large changes in cultural climates, religion has stayed with us, and arguably always will, because it emanates from the ensemble of the modern brain. Beginning during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intellectuals have predicted the end of
belief in God and have done their best to bring it about. In their book
God Is Back
, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write that

Europe gave birth to succession of sages who explained, in compelling detail, why God was doomed. Karl Marx denounced religion as “the opiate of the masses.” Émile Durkheim and Max Weber argued that the iron law of history was leading to “secularization.”…Sigmund Freud dismissed religion as a neurosis that was designed to divert attention from man's real interest, sex…. It is hardly surprising that Marxist dictators such as Lenin and Mao tried to impose atheism by force.”
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Even so, religion shows no signs of going away. If anything, the trends are in the direction of growth. For instance, “one estimate suggests that the proportion of people attached to the world's four largest religions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism—rose from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2005 and may reach 80 percent by 2050.”
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Even in Communist China, despite Mao's efforts, the “government's own figures show the number of Christians rising from fourteen million in 1997 to twenty-one million in 2006, with an estimated fifty-five thousand official Protestant churches and forty-six hundred Catholic churches.” Including both house churches and the underground Catholic Church, “there are at least sixty-five million Protestants in China and twelve million Catholics—more believers than there are members of the Communist Party.”
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Perhaps the strongest cultural headwind against the religious impulse of the human mind has come not from governments but from science. The conflict between science and religion is legendary and large. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the many battles that have unfolded since the time of Galileo, through Darwin, to the present. But the conflict was not and is not inevitable. Did God create the universe and human life or did evolution? This either/or choice misses the third possibility, that both statements are true. Perhaps evolution was the means by which God created the universe. Indeed, the noted Harvard botanist, Asa Gray, interpreted Darwin's
Origin of Species
in this manner in 1860.
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Today, Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health in the United States and a leading scientist in the human genome project, sees in the discovery of DNA all the more reason to believe
in God: “Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less.”
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His view, however, is not shared by most members of the National Academy of Sciences, with only 10 percent professing a belief in God, with even fewer biologists (5 percent).
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If the ensemble of the modern human mind underlies both scientific and spiritual inquiry, then neither one is ever expected to triumph over the other. The eminent scientist Stephen Jay Gould offered a framework for understanding how this duality of human intellect can peacefully coexist in his book
Rock of Ages
. Science and religion constitute two separate teaching authorities or magisteria that address nonoverlapping sets of questions.
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For example, what is our relationship, as human beings, with other living creatures? Darwin's theory of evolution is a teaching of science. It addresses whether living organisms are related in some manner through their genealogical links across geological time. For example, are apes similar to us in appearance and in some behaviors because we share a common ancestor with them? Does the greater degree of similarity between human DNA and chimpanzee DNA have some rational interpretation compared with the lesser degree of similarity between gorilla DNA or old world monkey DNA and human DNA? What does the DNA not coding genes and proteins do? Is it really just junk DNA? These kinds of questions, Gould concludes, fall within the magisterium of science, the “teaching authority dedicated to using the mental methods and observational techniques validated by success and experience as particularly suited for describing, and attempting to explain, the factual construction of nature.”
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