This Is Your Brain on Sex (38 page)

Epileptic seizures are electrical in nature. They are bursts of overactivity in the brain that result in behaviors ranging from simple staring spells to violent convulsions. Ramachandran and his colleagues compared the brain activity of religious individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy, very religious individuals without the condition, and a nonreligious control group as they viewed words and images that were religious, violent, sexual, or neutral in nature. The measurement, a skin conductance response measure that indirectly indicates the strength of connections from the inferior temporal cortex to the amygdala, an area known to assign emotional meaning, might tell the researchers if the abnormal electrical activity in the epileptics’ brains was “kindling,” or strengthening neural pathways to add additional power to objects and words. That kindling effect might account for the fervor seen in these patients, as well as heightened brain response to certain types of words and pictures. If kindling was in effect,
everything,
from religious phenomena to athletic socks, would be more meaningful for these patients. Perhaps the epilepsy somehow upped that salience across the board.

Usually, in normal patients, the brain responds most to sexual stimuli. As Thomas James, the Indiana University professor running the appetitive decision-making study, told me, sexual pictures “get the brain going.” Across the board the strength of response in the brain to sexual stimuli is usually two to three times greater than the response to any other type. If you take nothing else away from this book, at least you’ll have learned that our brains are very, very interested in sex. In Ramachandran’s study the same thing held true in the nonepileptic participants, regardless of whether or not they were religious: the sexual images and
words jump-started their brains, or skin response, as it were.

In the epileptics, however, the pattern of activity was different. They showed heightened skin conductance response to religious words and icons, with diminished responses to the other kinds of stimuli—including items linked to sex. Ramachandran argued that the results demonstrated a localized area of the brain responsible for religious experience, most likely somewhere in the temporal lobe.
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(For the record, Ramachandran also acknowledges the possibility that there is a God that visits these people directly. It is just a scientifically untestable theory.)
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At the same time Ramachandran was testing epileptic patients, Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, independently noticed that a group of neurons in the temporal lobe, near the amygdala, lit up when individuals were contemplating God or spirituality. It just so happened that this was the same general area in the brain Ramachandran was looking at in his epileptic patients. When Persinger stimulated these areas using a low magnetic current mimicking neural activity, something quite interesting happened: those folks reported feeling an overarching “presence” nearby, along with a heightened sense of well-being. Persinger argued that he had induced a religious experience using only a motorcycle helmet and some solenoids (a solenoid is a thin, coiled loop of wire that produces a magnetic field if treated with an electric current).
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Both these studies hit the press with force—Michael Persinger’s so-called “God Helmet,” especially. Many critics thought scientists like Persinger were attempting to reduce religious feeling to a simple neurobiological artifact. But most researchers in the field of spiritual neuroscience hope only to better understand the effect of religious experience on the brain. They are not interested in debunking or judging it.

“For me, the information Michael Persinger provided was that the temporal lobes play an important role in different types of religious and spiritual experiences,” explained Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College and a leader in this field. “I don’t think the temporal lobes are the only mediators of those experiences. And I don’t think these results can tell us anything definitive
about what the true nature of those experiences might be.”

Although both Ramachandran’s and Persinger’s work suggests that connections from the temporal lobe to the amygdala are important in religious experience, neither methodology offers further details. Since the work was published, several neuroscientists have used various neuroimaging techniques to try to capture what is happening in the brain during an actual religious or spiritual experience. Mario Beauregard measured the brain activity of Carmelite nuns while they put themselves into a “state of union with God.” These nuns live a cloistered life, filling their days with service and contemplative prayer. Beauregard calls them the “Olympic athletes of prayer”; each nun who participated in the study had cataloged thousands upon thousands of hours on her knees talking to the man upstairs. If that is not some kind of love, it’s certainly an impressive commitment. For the neuroimaging study Beauregard and his colleagues isolated participants for approximately thirty minutes to allow them to relax into a mystical state, just as they might during a daily prayer session in the cloister, and then measured their brain activity.
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“These nuns believe that you cannot self-induce a deep, mystical state because it’s the product of God’s will. This is according to both their belief system and tradition,” said Beauregard. “But they can enter into a moderate state of union if they are physically isolated. Their daily prayer practice, that daily experience, and their subjective reports of their time in the fMRI allow us to feel confident they were able to reach a meaningful religious or mystical state.”

When the nuns were scanned while communing with their concept of God, several areas of their brain showed activation. Given that these experiences are complex and involve a variety of different types of imagery, it is not such a surprise. Like others in previous studies, Beauregard did see activation in the middle temporal area of the brain, which he and his collaborators argued might be related to the subjective experience of coming into contact with one’s spirituality. Neuroimaging studies of Tibetan monks and other religious practitioners have also uncovered activation in this temporal area of the brain.

“When people are engaged in religious or spiritual practices, it affects many, if not all, parts of our body and brain
,” Newberg said. “Parts of the brain helping us with our ability to focus attention, to regulate our emotional responses and integrate social stimuli change during such practices. Changes occur in the body too that may impact how our autonomic nervous system works. And these experiences probably affect our hormone systems too.”

There were a few other areas of interest that lit up in the brains of the Carmelite nuns in Beauregard’s study, in particular the caudate nucleus, insula, and anterior cingulate. These are all brain regions that have been implicated in neuroimaging studies of romantic and maternal love.

Unconditional Love

When Beauregard talked to the Carmelite nuns after their time in the magnet, they all mentioned that they experienced a feeling of unconditional love while they prayed. Might that feeling, as they spiritually connected with their God, account for the brain activation? It made Beauregard wonder. Could there be a way to test the concept of unconditional love in individuals who had not devoted their life to God? As in other studies of love, the first challenge was to operationally define it. “Not everyone in the field believes in the concept of unconditional love, in this possibility,” Beauregard said. Certainly when I queried friends about the concept, they were not so sure either.

Perhaps my friend Alyson summed it up best when she told me, “I believe in a lot of things about love. But unconditional love . . . I probably only believe in it when it’s a parent’s love for a child.” Not being particularly religious but being head over heels in love with my kid, I tend to agree with her. But there are others who believe strongly in the concept of unconditional love outside the parental sphere. Sociologists and theologians who have studied the phenomenon find it to be paramount to the future of humanity. Stephen G. Post, president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, postulates that, at its very essence, to experience unconditional love is “to emotionally affirm as well as to unselfishly delight in the well-being of others, and to volitionally engage in acts of care and service on their behalf without expecting anything in return.” Those who are able to feel unconditional love do so freely and without expectation by definition, but they also admit to
feeling very rewarded by acts done in its name.

One charity that attracts people who are able to love unconditionally is L’Arche. L’Arche creates homes of faith and friendship for disabled individuals and volunteer caregivers, called assistants, who commit to a year or more of sharing a home and life with an intellectually disabled charge. This organization not only believes in unconditional love but also makes the ability to feel and express such love one of the prerequisites for volunteering as an assistant. Beauregard recruited seventeen assistants from two local L’Arche communities near Montreal to participate in an fMRI study to identify the underlying neural correlates of unconditional love.

Each assistant was scanned as he or she looked at photos of disabled people. In one condition, participants were asked to just passively view the photos; in another, they were asked to generate a feeling of unconditional love toward the person depicted in the picture. Because of the rewarding aspects of unconditional love, Beauregard expected to see patterns of cerebral blood flow similar to those observed in earlier studies of romantic and maternal love.
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“There is probably a common substrate in these various forms of love, especially with regard to the reward aspects of these different manifestations,” he said. “But there are also some neural distinctions between them. It makes sense, considering there are differences experientially, the way people feel and experience these different types of love.”

It should come as no surprise that this is precisely what Beauregard and his colleagues found. As in those early neuroimaging studies of love, the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus, both significant parts of the brain’s reward machinery, lit up like a Christmas tree. Maternal love’s globus pallidus, another reward area, and the periaqueductal gray matter of the midbrain, a region with a large number of oxytocin receptors, were also active. Beauregard also saw significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area implicated in a variety of forms of love and attachment. Unconditional love, at least from a neural perspective, does seem deserving of the name. As we can see from the brain activity in these studies, there’s quite a bit of overlap.

Beauregard also hypothesized that the dopamine system is involved. “Some of the areas we saw activated are involved with
the production of dopamine,” he told me. “It still needs to be tested, but I would make the argument that there probably is an involvement of the dopamine neurotransmitter in this form of love, especially when you consider how rewarding the people tell us it feels.”

Unconditional love also boasted some unique brain activation in comparison to other forms of love. Though the insula has been implicated in previous studies, Beauregard’s work noted that a different part of it was active when participants generated unconditional love. He believes the activation was associated with reactions to viewing the photos. Previous studies suggest this part of the insula is necessary to integrate sensory and emotional representations as well as feel empathy. Several other areas mediating attention, visual processing, and a distinction between self and other were also activated.

“It’s not well understood why this form of love is rewarding. It does not have the same characteristics as other kinds of love,” said Beauregard. “But those who can feel it—and not everyone can—report it is a very rich, very rewarding experience and one that is a big part of their spiritual tradition.”

Recall that Helen Fisher talked about love as a kaleidoscope—a different range of patterns in brain activation for sex, romantic love, and attachment. Perhaps unconditional love within a strong spiritual ritual or tradition provides a fourth system, with a familiar yet unique pattern. It is certainly possible—at least for those who can experience unconditional love. Yet what it is about a person’s brain that offers this ability is unknown. As with most cases we’ve seen so far, further study is required.

Conclusion

A Brave New World of Love

In January 2009 Larry Young, the Emory University neuroscientist
who studies pair-bond formation in prairie voles (and is arguably one of the most prolific researchers in this realm), published an essay entitled “Love: Neuroscience Reveals All” in the renowned journal
Nature
. In it he wrote: