Is This Your Brain On God? | Hacker News Reader

Is This Your Brain On God?

npr.org

43 pointsonreact-com18 comments

Article sounds interesting, but I want an actual page of text, not a flash layout. Here's links to each of the articles for those like me:

The God Chemical http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042407...

The God Spot http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042915...

Spiritual Virtuosos http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043104...

The Biology of Belief http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043517...

Near-Death Experiences http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043970...

Indeed; It took me a good minute to figure out where the content was.

It's worthwhile information, but does anyone else feel like this story get pulled back into the light once every two years or so?

Telegraphically: "Overactive temporal lobe causes epileptic visions. NDEs. Meditation increases theta waves and drops parietal lobe activity. Is god real?"

I'd love to learn what actual progress has been made in understanding why or how these things work, rather than just the bare correlations. I need to find a good peer-reviewed journal of, how did they put it, neurotheology?

Roughly a year ago, over a period of a few months, I had a serious of "spiritual experiences" that utterly, utterly changed my life.

Only one problem: I don't believe in the supernatural, so the "I found God" explanation obviously doesn't cut it for me. That left me with a deep need to learn what the hell happened in my brain.

It appears that we have only recently begun to consider such questions as topics of legitimate scientific inquiry. The field still seems to attract whack job "scientists" who think people's brains can be connected by quantum entanglement (see part 4 of the article). There is a long way to go before I can have my answers. That's ok, I can wait :-)

Can you elaborate your "spiritual experiences". I would love to read about them. It's not often that you hear an atheist having an experience like that.

Who cares about the experiences, let us just hope it isn't some dangerous physical disease.

If you want to see your god, use the classical way -- eat too little, suggestion ("prayer") and get some infected wounds from self flagellation. :-)

Edit: I don't think atheists generally puts an experience like that in a religious context, but assumes it has something to do with brain functions (or that some strange mushroom got into lunch). Point is, you won't hear about these becaues atheists don't think they are religious.

Edit 2: To the downvoters, if you RTFA it mentions a classical problem that gives religious experiences: epilepsy.

I had a serious of "spiritual experiences" that utterly, utterly changed my life ... I don't believe in the supernatural

I'm curious, why were the experiences–while life-changing–not able to change your stance on the supernatural? Did they at least cause you to question that belief?

Presumably the poster's faith in naturalism was too strong to be questioned by a few brain-hiccups.

some antidepressants can be very powerful, life changing, spiritual experiences. And they are not supernatural at all...

This is interesting research, but it's poorly described and honestly I doubt the NYT reporter even really understands it. A few errors also, for example:

"the active ingredient in psilocybin"

Should be the active ingredient in psilocybes (i.e. psilocybe mushrooms). Psilocybin is a chemical itself, so it doesn't even make sense to describe it as having active ingredients. (It gets broken down into psilocin by the body, which is what actually causes the effect.)

If you want to see something on this that is actually kind of interesting, check out these YouTube videos that were made to promote The Spirit Molecule, a documentary about DMT:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+spirit+molec...

I've often struggled with these notions, as they are brought up in the media in cycles. Our normal faculties are faulty and tenuous, so I don't see why other, less-used faculties should be discounted because they seem faulty or tenuous. Seems like an unfair double standard.

One can suppose that there /must/ be an evolutionary advantage to have developed such senses, but maybe they are a by product of some other feature of the brain. I mean, early humans didn't need iPhones to figure out how to trap a boar, but it turns out that we use the same set of faculties to build both the trap and the iPhone.

I made a short film about this stuff a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWHd5cWjKC8

( With more robots and Gene Simmons than the npr link )

Putting aside the question of whether God exists, why would it be surprising that an animal with a brain sophisticated enough to contemplate its own death would evolve protective mechanisms against that eventuality?

Perhaps, but religion is largely something that we came up with through thinking. When you need to control a bunch of slaves, it's nice to be able to say, "your life sucks now, but if you work really hard, there will be PRESENTS waiting for you when you die! YAY!! It's not me, your hated master, saying this; it's God! The creator of the whole Universe loves you if you work yourself to death. So get out there and do it." Very convincing story, and it mostly worked. (Religion plays on a number of human desires; wanting something more, wanting to fit in with everyone else, etc.)

It still works today.

There's something dubious about my point: does excessive worry about death result in people having fewer children?

Maybe the evolutionary pressure comes from telling people that God wants them to have children. And so those with biology favorable to belief in God would have more children.

Having no spiritual beliefs/religion (aka atheism) satisfies human desires.

Ex. Evolution has several flaws and can never be proven. Even scientifically it cannot be proven. It is purely the fruit of an individual's imagination, conviction and desire. Nothing more than this.

"Scientifically" nothing can be proven. Theories are simple suppositions (hypotheses) supported by evidence. When we have found an overwhelming body of evidence in support of a particular theory we consider that theory "proven." By this standard, we can consider evolution "proven."

In essence, it would take a significantly large corpus of data to refute the theory of evolution.

With empirical observations it takes mountains of evidence to prove your case and just one piece of evidence to disprove it.

That's rather an oversimplification in practice. "Just one piece of evidence" can almost always be explained in many, many different ways. Overturning an apparently well-established theory generally takes a substantial accumulation of contrary evidence, and preferably the appearance of a new and better theory.

So, suppose someone found a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian. J B S Haldane notwithstanding, biologists would not abandon evolution, nor should they. They'd start looking at possibilities like fraud; previously unknown ways for things to get fossilized very rapidly; some screwup in their dating of the relevant bits of rock; and so forth. It would take a whole lot of fossil rabbits, and preferably some other evidence too, to make "evolution is all wrong" a better theory than those. That doesn't mean evolution is unfalsifiable; it means it's got a whole lot of evidence and arguments behind it, and overturning it would take a correspondingly large weight of evidence.

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