Unaware of Persinger’s concerns, but keenly aware of my own, I suddenly recalled a scene from ten years earlier, a previous time when I had felt spiritual performance anxiety. I had been invited to the house of an acquaintance for a “Bible study.” I arrived to find six others there surrounding Nancy, the guest of honor. Nancy, I was informed, was a modern-day Christian prophet: she was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she heard directly from God. She visited Washington from Texas every few weeks to hold a Bible study and tell other women what God was saying about their lives. I quickly noticed that most of Nancy’s “prophecies” involved money—people becoming rich, owning large mansions, giving away millions of dollars for evangelism projects. Most of the Bible verses she quoted in her “study” promised abundance.
After about an hour of Nancy’s preaching, she slapped her hands on her thighs and said, “Now let’s hear from the Lord!” in the way someone might say,“Let’s have some ice cream!” Everyone murmured assent, except for me, who felt a little bit queasy.
We huddled together and Nancy prayed for God to speak through each one of us. Then she announced, “Okay, I want each person to prophesy over another person. I will begin.”
She began to prophesy about me. She “saw” me on a “jet plane with a man with a turban on—he owns the plane. Oh! He’s very wealthy. And I see you getting off the plane in a very hot dusty country. Oh! And you are being greeted by hundreds of children, little brown children, little brown babies.You must be in Africa,” she added. And that was it.
One by one, the others prophesied. My hands grew clammy; I surreptitiously glanced at the door, plotting my escape. Finally, everyone had spoken. It was my turn to inform Sheila about God’s will for her life. Silence fell on the room as I struggled for something to say. The seconds stretched to the breaking point, the silence yawned wider and wider, and I saw . . . nothing. I didn’t have a word for Sheila. Not one stupid word. I thought, Oh, man, I’m drowning here.
“I see water,” I heard myself intone, in a flash of inspiration.
The others murmured, “Yes, Lord.”
Warming to my tale, I said,“It is a pool, and you are standing on the high dive.”
“Yes, Lord, thank you, Jesus,” several exclaimed, and I heard someone softly speaking in tongues.
“You’re afraid to dive, Sheila,” I continued, “but the Lord does not want you to be afraid. The Lord says, ‘I will catch you, my child, just trust me.’ ”
“Thank you, Lord!” This came from Sheila, in heartfelt gratitude for this, my first prophecy.
Six years later, I was at a reception at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. A woman walked up to me.
“Barb?” she said, moving closer to examine my face. “Do you remember me? I’m Sheila.We met at Julia’s house, when you prophesied over me.”
“Of course, Sheila, how are you?” I said, scrambling to remember what, exactly, I had said.
“Great! Do you remember how you prophesied that the Lord wanted me to jump off the high dive?”
“Oh.Yeah.”
“Well, the next day I quit my job!”
I wondered briefly if one could be sued for faking a prophecy. I was intensely relieved when she told me she had started her own animation and graphics company, which had prospered from the first day.
Back in Michael Persinger’s chamber, I found myself once again expected to manufacture a spiritual experience. I willed myself to stop thinking and simply relax. As the minutes ticked by, a few images penetrated the darkness—a flash of a park near my house, the brief glimpse of a face. The most profound moment came as I tottered on the edge of sleep.
“I am utterly relaxed,” I said in a thick, gravelly voice.“I feel as if I’m dissolving into the chair. It’s not that I don’t have boundaries, but the boundaries include the chair.” Pause. “I’m communing with a chair.” Pause. “Great.”
For the remainder of the session, I felt blackness cresting over itself like roiling waves. I briefly saw a woman’s face, but even in that suggestible moment, I knew these were creations of an imagination trying too hard, and certainly not the presence of a Sentient Being. Mercifully, the session ended a few moments later.
My answers on Persinger’s follow-up questionnaire reflected my desultory performance. On only one question—“I felt relaxed”—did I give an enthusiastic response. I had also (erroneously, I came to believe) checked the item:“I felt I left my body,” thinking about the union with the chair.
Dr. Persinger seized on that answer. I tried to explain that it was more relaxation, not an out-of-body experience, but he persisted.
“But you did feel something like this,” he insisted, and in that instant I realized how he came by his remarkable results.
“Yes,” I said, “but no Sensed Presence.”
“Well, according to your EEGs, you were right on the verge of feeling a Sensed Presence,” he assured me. The machine was showing very fast spiking behavior in my brain waves about three minutes before the session ended.
“If we had continued, it would have hit you”—he flicked his fingers in front of his face, as if releasing a ball of energy—“it would have hit you powerfully.”
“Say it had hit me powerfully,” I suggested.“Would that mean spiritual experience—God or Allah or whatever you want to call it—can be reduced to brain activity?”
“Well, certainly from the point of view of neuroscience, all experience is generated by brain function,” Persinger said.“That means when you have an experience of a memory, that’s a brain pattern being activated. When you have an experience of God, or Allah, or Buddha, or whatever the cosmic whole is that inspires you, that is brain activity. Does that mean that everything is programmed by brain structure or electromagnetic activity or chemistry? Of course it is.”
Simply because the brain is firing during these experiences does not mean the brain causes them, Persinger quickly added. But in the next breath he gave up the game, blithely stating what I suspect many scientists believe but do not say, at least not to religion reporters like me: Neuroscience will soon relegate “God” to the ash heap of history.
“If we look at the trend in the history of science, first we thought we were the center of the universe, and Copernicus modified that,” he said. “Then Darwin removed the illusion that we were a special creation. Freud ripped apart the concept that we were logical animals and showed that that was only a veneer, that actually we were still a primitive animal.
“So the next big question is: What is the last illusion that we must overcome as a species?” he asked rhetorically.“That illusion is that ‘God’ is an absolute that exists independent of the human brain. That somehow we are in His or Her care. We have to realize that ultimately that may not be true, but what we may learn from it may take us much further than we ever imagined.”
I left Persinger’s laboratory near midnight, deflated. I had been secretly hoping for a spiritual experience, perhaps as confirmation that I had the right biological makeup, the right polymorphism in my DNA, to connect with a “Sentient Being.” I guess I’m not nearly as spiritual as I want to be. Besides that, I was now highly dubious that Persinger’s God helmet could just tickle the temporal lobe and evoke a counterfeit God. Sure, his ideas were plucked from the work of pioneering neurologists like Wilder Penfield and cited by many neurologists today. But his research had drawn derisive criticism from other researchers.1
So imagine my bafflement six months later when I finally transcribed the tape that we had recorded in the control room. The recording revealed that Persinger’s God helmet had in fact manipulated my temporal lobes and my experience.When Persinger began to stimulate my right temporal lobe, he predicted (into the tape recorder) that I would see slightly scary objects, such as faces, to my left. A couple of minutes later, my voice came through the speaker: I see funny little goblins off to my left there, like we’re in Sherwood Forest.
Later Persinger predicted I would feel a sense of evil—once aga
in, on my left, since he was stimulating the right side of my brain. About a minute later, my voice broke the silence: I’m not sensing a presence per se, but there’s kind of a roiling darkness, like a battle of darkness, like waves breaking over each other, but it’s all dark, it’s off to my left.
Next Persinger narrated that he had changed the stimulation to a “burst firing pattern” to affect my amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers strong emotions, especially fear. As he was explaining this into the tape recorder, my voice interrupted: I see little apparitions like little skulls. A few seconds later: I have these strange visual images, kind of over to my left.The face of a ghostly young woman, and then followed by a black goblin, with those eyes that you see in Japanese cartoon characters—spider-like eyes.
Shortly after this, the battery died and the recording ended.
As I transcribed my words, I realized that in my skepticism, my memory had filtered out some of my responses to Persinger’s electromagnetic waves. Manipulating my temporal lobes had evoked mental images—and, who knows, perhaps the memory of my prophecy for Sheila. I conceded that I could not easily dismiss Michael Persinger’s work, nor his discomfiting assertion that God is all in one’s head.
The Sacred Disease
In 400 B.C., Hippocrates wrote one of the first texts on epilepsy, “On the Sacred Disease.” In his essay, the renowned physician of ancient Greece tackled the conventional wisdom of his day: namely, that epilepsy was a sacred disease bestowed by the gods. At the time, doctors believed it was a curse that threw its sufferer to the ground in paroxys mal fits; anyone who has seen a tonic-clonic (or grand mal) seizure knows it is a terrifying event to witness, and could look to a superstitious mind like demon possession. Alternatively, some ancient physicians believed epilepsy to be a divine blessing that conferred gifts of prophecy and spiritual visions. Not so Hippocrates. Hippocrates argued that epilepsy was brain dysfunction pure and simple, and that erratic brain activity, not the gods, sparked these fits.
Some 2,400 years later, the medical view of epilepsy has sided squarely with Hippocrates. It has vaulted from one extreme to the other—from superstition, where everything is attributed to divine whimsy, to reductionism, where everything is explained by brain chemicals and brain-wave activity. The vast majority of scientists now understand epilepsy to be a neurological disorder, a firestorm in the brain. Armed with evidence from brain scans and other technology, some modern neurologists are, like Michael Persinger, reframing religious history. The effect has been not to present the disease as sacred, but to present the sacred as a disease.
If scientific journals are to be believed, most of the world’s religious doctrine sprang from dysfunctional minds. The list of religious leaders who, neurologists say, might have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy is as long as it is impressive.2 The most intriguing and controversial figure is Saul of Tarsus. Before he became Saint Paul, who authored much of Christian doctrine, he was a fiery rabbi who had set out on the road to Damascus intent on persecuting the early Christians.We pick up the story in Acts, chapter 9.
“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus. And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”3
Was this a conversation with the Son of God, or “visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness,” as the renowned psychiatrists Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard surmised?4 Was it a divine appointment, or, as neurologist William G. Lennox stated, the emotional reaction to “the voice of conscience possibly complicated by a migraine-like syndrome”?5
Paul is not the only religious leader to have been retrofitted with epilepsy. Neurologists have speculated that Muhammad’s visual and auditory “hallucinations” were complex partial seizures. The voice of the angel and the white light that inspired Joan of Arc, they say, did not come from heaven but from her daily ecstatic seizures. Joseph Smith’s pillar of light and two angels—a vision that birthed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism)—may have boiled down to a complex partial seizure. Ditto for the mystics Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, for Emanuel Swedenborg, who founded the New Jerusalem Church, and Ann Lee, who led the Shaker movement. Even Moses, who led the children of Israel through the wilderness and authored the Pentateuch, does not escape a troubling diagnosis. What, after all, are doctors to make of that encounter with the burning bush?
I called Orrin Devinsky, who directs the New York University epilepsy center, for his perspective. Part of the problem, he said, is that complex partial seizures, the most common form of adult epilepsy, were not medically understood until the mid-1800s. This particular parlor game involves people who lived scores or hundreds of years before that.
“So we’re left with little shards, little fragments of descriptions,” Devinsky said.“Moses at the burning bush.What was happening at the burning bush? He was looking at a bush that was burning but not consumed. Assuming a more rational scientific view, Moses was having a visual hallucination and then he heard ‘God’s’ voice. As a physician, can I say that was consistent with a temporal lobe seizure? Yes. Can I say Moses had a temporal lobe seizure at that time? All I can say is it’s a possibility. It also could have been a genuine religious experience. Or perhaps both.”
For me, at least, a few things do not sit well with the saint-as-epileptic hypothesis. First, there is the imperious snobbery of scientific materialism, which implies that if a person’s brain acts a little bit differently from the “average” brain—slow brain-wave activity or the occasional electrical surge—then anything that person believes is probably distorted, illegitimate, just a little bit crazy. This troubled psychologist William James as well. We would never think of dismissing van Gogh’s art because in his madness he cut off his ear, James said, or throw Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in the trash because its author suffered from epileptic seizures.
And yet,“medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic,” James observed in his famous Gifford Lectures in 1901.“It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.”6
My second reservation about reducing spiritual experience to a seizure is this: epilepsy is a horribly debilitating disease, punctuating one’s life with random fits of unconsciousness, short-term memory loss, and often eventual psychosis. It is hard to imagine epilepsy appearing frequently on the résumés of great religious leaders who traveled the Roman Empire with a new religion as did Paul, guided a nation in the wilderness for forty years as did Moses, or led troops into battle as did Muhammad.7
And yet, scientists have identified a connection between the temporal lobes and religiousness. Some say, only half joking, that the temporal lobe is a “God spot.” While this mass of tissue is not the sole trafficker in spiritual experience—many other parts of the brain light up during transcendent moments—it appears to be a major player, necessary but not sufficient.
The God Spot
The search for the spiritual brain center began almost by accident, with the pioneering work of Wilder Penfield. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Canadian neurosurgeon began to excavate the brains of his patients before surgery to determine what parts could be removed (to stop the seizures) and what parts could be left in (so that he would not unnecessarily remove, say, the patient’s ability to speak). Because the brain contains no pain receptors, Penfield could put his patients under local anesthesia and keep them conscious while he opened their skulls and poked around. He wo
uld stimulate various areas of the brain with an electrode and then ask the patient where he felt the prod in his body.8 In this way, Penfield mapped the part of the brain that corresponded to the right thumb, or the lips, or the left big toe.
Penfield made a different sort of discovery when mucking around in the temporal lobes: a few of his patients reported out-of-body experiences, hearing voices, and seeing apparitions.9 To be sure, these were nothing like the complex, hours-long visions of Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc. The sounds consisted of snatches of music or random words.The visuals included bizarre images or familiar scenes scooped up from their memory banks. Only two of Penfield’s more than 1,100 patients reported anything like an out-of-body experience. Nor were any of their experiences awe-inspiring visits to paradise. One patient cried, “Oh God! I am leaving my body!”10 And another patient said, “I have a queer sensation as if I am not here ... as though I were half [gone] and half here.”11
Still, Penfield’s electrodes bore testimony to a suspicion that many doctors had harbored for decades—namely, that there is something special about the temporal lobes. Could they be the seat of spirituality?
Beginning in the 1960s, British psychiatrists Eliot Slater and A.W. Beard picked up the search.When they asked their psychiatric patients about their seizures, nearly four out of ten reported mystical delusions and hallucinations, including events like “seeing Christ come down from the sky,” “seeing Heaven open,” and hearing God speak.12 Anecdotal evidence accumulated about the “sacred disease.” For example, Dr. Beard and another colleague, Kenneth Dewhurst, theorized that people with temporal lobe epilepsy might be prone to have a religious conversion in the hours or days after a seizure. They described the cases of six people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. One woman heard “a church bell ring in her right ear; and the voice said, ‘Thy Father hath made thee whole, Go in Peace!’ ” Another patient had a “day-time visual hallucination in which he saw angels playing with harps.”13 Something about their seizures triggered spiritual experiences in their brains.14
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