Scanning Spiritual Experience

Over the weekend Summae from summaestudio.org sent me a link to an article on Salon by Steve Paulson titled Divining the brain, which discusses neurological research being done on people who are meditating and praying.

The viewpoint of many neuroscientists is embodied in the quote from Stephen Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience, when he says

I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd.

Other neuroscientists, such as Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania take a different view. Dr. Newberg has used imaging techniques to measure blood flow in the brain while people are meditating and praying. These scans show that people who are using verbal means of praying activate the verbal centers of the brain. People who are using visual focii of concentration during meditation activate the visual centers of the brain. Both groups show a deactivation of the parietal lobe, which “normally uses our sensory information to create a sense of our self and relates that self spatially to the rest of the world”. But, as Dr. Newberg says in the article,

What those scans don’t prove is whether or not that experience was real in some sort of objective sense — that God really was in the room, communicating with them. At this point in our technology, that is something we can’t answer. Whether we will ever be able to answer it, I don’t know.

We see here two different viewpoints. Dr. Heinemann has obviously made up his mind about the existence of the non-physical. Dr. Newberg is agnostic about the question, but is willing to research it.

Viewpoints such as Dr. Heinemann’s are fascinating. He assumes only the physical events exist. Put it in the context of observing the inside of a house when you have no mechanism for observing biological organisms. Occasionally you will see the television turn on, then after a while it will turn off. Noises will be heard from the stairway. A door will open, then close. The toilet may flush or the water in the bathtub run for a while. The telephone will ring, the receiver be lifted, then return to it’s cradle. The refrigerator will periodically open, food or drink come out, then the door close. Pots and pans will move of their own accord as a meal is prepared, then the dishes cleaned. From this perspective neuroscience is looking for the connections between the interactions in the house while ignoring the occupants. Dr. Newberg, meanwhile, is looking for the occupant of the house by studying the interactions within it.

We live in a physical world. There is an interplay between the physical and non-physical. There are physical channels for non-physical experiences. Studying the physical channels will show how the non-physical interacts with the physical, but it won’t provide evidence for the non-physical, nor will it convince people such as Dr. Heinemann of its existence. They are able to use the word ‘I’ while denying the existence of the ‘I’ and the consciousness that it implies.

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