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The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a
plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown
habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam
cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine.
Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head
in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.
The Carmelite nun and 14 of her Catholic sisters have left their
cloistered lives temporarily for this claustrophobic blue tube that
bears little resemblance to the wooden prayer stall or sparse room
where such mystical experiences usually occur. Each of these nuns
answered a call for volunteers “who have had an experience of intense
union with God” and agreed to participate in an experiment devised by
neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal. Using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to
pinpoint the brain areas that are active while the nuns recall the most
powerful religious epiphany of their lives, a time they experienced a
profound connection with the divine. The question: Is there a God spot
in the brain?
The spiritual quest may be as old as humankind itself, but now there is
a new place to look: inside our heads. Using fMRI and other tools of
modern neuroscience, researchers are attempting to pin down what
happens in the brain when people experience mystical awakenings during
prayer and meditation or during spontaneous utterances inspired by
religious fervor.
Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine—a new
discipline with the warring titles “neurotheology” and “spiritual
neuroscience”—not only might reconcile religion and science but also
might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings
in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will.
Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have
them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them
artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier,
healthier and better able to concentrate. Ultimately, however,
neuroscientists study this question because they want to better
understand the neural basis of a phenomenon that plays a central role
in the lives of so many. “These experiences have existed since the dawn
of humanity. They have been reported across all cultures,” Beauregard
says. “It is as important to study the neural basis of [religious]
experience as it is to investigate the neural basis of emotion, memory
or language.”
Mystical Misfirings
Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can
be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental
illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy.
Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the
Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a
form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings
within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over
the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report
intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as
neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate
that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might
sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues.
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