By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Push theories argue that activation of a single ‘God Spot’ causes mystical beliefs, suggesting that injuries to these spots would reduce mysticism. In contrast, pull theories argue that the suppression of our inhibitory functions opens up the brain to mystical experiences,” – Joseph Bulbulia
Spiritual experiences, be they called awakenings, mystical experiences, or enlightenments, involve a shift in how the individual perceives reality. This could be viewed as a spiritual revelation. But it could also be viewed as a change in the neural systems integrating and interpreting experiences. So, are spiritual awakenings revelations of a reality beyond physical reality or are they simply hallucinatory experience evoked by changes in the nervous system?
One way of investigating this question is to study the brain-spirituality connection. Modern neuroscience research employing sophisticated neuroimaging techniques has investigate this relationship and has revealed that there is a clear association between spirituality and the brain. Neuroimaging techniques that allow the measurement of the nervous system in an intact human have demonstrated that spirituality is associated with changes in the size, activity, and connectivity of the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain. So spirituality and changes in neural systems co-occur. But, this does not demonstrate a causal connection, whether spirituality alters the brain or brain alteration causes spirituality, or some third factor is responsible for both.
A better way to demonstrate if brain activity causes spiritual experiences is to investigate what happens to spirituality when the brain changes. One place to look at this is with accidental brain injuries incurred by humans. This affords an opportunity to glimpses associations between brain change and spirituality. In general people who have incurred damage to the right inferior parietal area show an increase in spirituality. So, brain alteration affects spirituality. But, increased spiritual beliefs and spiritual seeking are not the same thing as spiritual experiences. So, we cannot conclude that these changes in the brain are responsible for awakening experiences.
In today’s Research News article “Neural correlates of mystical experience”
Cristofori and colleagues study the effects of brain injury incurred by soldiers in the Vietnam war and mystical experiences with a matched group of uninjured Vietnam veterans. The neuroimaging technique of Computerized Axial Tomography (CT Scans) were used to map the areas of the brain damaged in the veterans. They found that one particular area, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) was associated with higher levels of mystical experiences. Veterans with damage to that area had significantly higher scores on the Mysticism Scale (M-Scale) than either intact veterans or veterans with damage to other brain areas. These results suggest that damage to the brain causes increased mystical experiences.
The prefrontal cortex in general, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) have been shown to be involved in executive function. Executive function regulates cognitive processes, including attention, working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving as well as planning and execution. The results from the study suggest that damage to areas underlying these executive function increases mystical experiences. This in turn suggests that reducing higher level thinking induces more mystical experiences. Indeed, Cristofori and colleagues found that the in the brain injured veterans the greater the deficit in executive function, the higher the mysticism score.
These results support a theoretical model of mystical experiences proposed by de Castro in which executive function inhibits unprocessed sensory information from reaching consciousness. The model postulates that these raw sensory experiences are the basis of mystical experiences. So, brain damage which disrupts executive function would tend to increase the ability of these unprocessed experiences to reach consciousness.
Regardless of the explanation, it is clear that frontal cortex damage increases mystical experiences.
“it will first be necessary for science to accept that its ability to understand subjective phenomena is radically limited by its current world-view and that this world-view or paradigm is long overdue for a radical transformation. What will aid enormously in this transformation is for scientists to begin the process of inner research or exploration of their own consciousness so that the states of mind being studied, such as mystical perception, become a part of their own experience. When the consciousness of the researchers starts to undergo a profound transformation, the old world-view or paradigm will correspondingly undergo a similar shift.” – Michael Persinger
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
Study Summary
Irene Cristofori, Joseph Bulbulia, John H. Shaver, Marc Wilson, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Neural correlates of mystical experience. Neuropsychologia, Volume 80, 8 January 2016, Pages 212-220
Highlights
- We investigated the causal role of brain region in mystical experience.
- VLSM showed increased mystical experience associated to ip temporal cortexanddlPFC.
- Patients with selective lesions to dlPFC reported increased mystical experience.
- Executive functioningcontributes to the down-regulationof mystical experiences.
Abstract
Mystical experiences, or subjectively believed encounters with a supernatural world, are widely reported across cultures and throughout human history. Previous theories speculate that executive brain functions underpin mystical experiences. To evaluate causal hypotheses, structural studies of brain lesion are required. Previous studies suffer from small samples or do not have valid measures of cognitive functioning prior to injury. We investigated mystical experience among participants from the Vietnam Head Injury Study and compared those who suffered penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI; n=116) with matched healthy controls (HC; n=32). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping analysis showed that lesions to frontal and temporal brain regions were linked with greater mystical experiences. Such regions included the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(dlPFC) and middle/superior temporal cortex (TC). In a confirmatory analysis, we grouped pTBI patients by lesion location and compared mysticism experiences with the HC group. The dlPFC group presented markedly increased mysticism. Notably, longitudinal analysis of pre-injury data (correlating with general intelligence and executive performance) excludes explanations from individual differences. Our findings support previous speculation linking executive brain functions to mystical experiences, and reveal that executive functioning (dlPFC) causally contributes to the down-regulation of mystical experiences.
The connection that has been made between spirituality and science requires more evidence. This evidence is everywhere in my country in Africa. I have spoken to spirits through human hosts on many occasions, both good and bad spirits, marine, & ancestral spirits who can foretell the future and who can actually cause events in the physical world to happen or not to. It would be very revealing for science and spirituality to collect data through scientific technology of human brain and other activity whilst a spirit speaks or acts through a host.
My experience through talking to spirits is that there exists another realm with rules & regulations as exist in the physical realm. My view is that the brain works to separate these realms and when the brain allows content of the spiritual realm to filter through whether caused by injury or deliberate manipulation e.g. through a certain type of fasting or concoction of herbal medicines the result is what you are calling spirituality.
Good and bad spirits possess people and give instruction to their hosts who may or may not know this and the host’s responsibility is to select the preferred course of action – the biblically given gift of choice.
Action in the physical realm affect the spiritual realm and vice versa and with further focused manipulation of the dlPFC I believe increased access to the spiritual realm can be achieved.
A lot of mental “disorders” derive from spiritual possession and science borrow from spirituality to solve these cases. Some disorders are the human individual mental living in the spiritual realm and bring unable to separate physical and spiritual realities.
I know of a lot of instances where spirits causing “insanity” have been cast out by gifted people and the individual gaining immediate sanity. The gifted people themselves also being possessed by spirits enabling them to cast out others. This area in science, if correctly pursued can materially change the world as we know it. In the same breath maybe the mind was created to filter out the spiritual realm for a good cause.