Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Although the spirituality-as-epilepsy theory remains controversial, with time, many neurologists settled into the idea that increased activity in the temporal lobes is central to spiritual experience.15 If the evidence is thin, researchers speculate, that is because the clinical neurologists, the ones in the white coats who actually treat patients, generally do not ask about spirituality. So, how is the Dilantin working for you? Okay. And your most recent seizure? Tuesday? And when was the last time you saw Christ descend from heaven? For their part, patients hesitate to mention these types of visions; most already feel sufficiently self-conscious without adding the heavenly spheres into the mix.16 Yet when I asked patients about their spiritual auras, the stories surged out of them with an urgency and a clear-eyed certainty that left me stunned and impressed.

  Jordan Sinclair’s Scar

  There is no doubt in Jordan Sinclair’s mind that he got religion from his temporal lobe.

  “Of course I did,” he told me. “I’ve seen the brain scans.”

  I met Jordan Sinclair (not his real name) through the Epilepsy Foundation, which let me post a note on its website. I wrote that I wanted to interview patients who had experienced ecstatic spiritual seizures or dramatic religious conversions as a result of their epilepsy. I received dozens of responses, but Jordan’s was the most remarkable.

  Jordan was raised in a Conservative Jewish home. His parents were both Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe. Still, he never embraced religion.

  “I always thought organized religion was a con game,” he told me the first time we talked, in November 2006.“It always got me mad that on High Holy Days you had to buy tickets to pray.”

  Jordan constructed a life as a highly successful comedy writer in Los Angeles. In 2000, when he was forty-three, his doctor found and removed a benign tumor from his left temporal lobe. The surgery was a snap. But later Jordan began experiencing strange things. Sometimes when he was shaving, he said, his hands seemed unfamiliar, as if someone else’s fingers were wielding the razor. One day while he was shopping at the nearby mall, the stores suddenly appeared unreal.

  “The storefronts all looked like façades, like sets on a movie location. The lighting was wrong. The people—they looked real, but they kind of looked a little bit animated, a little bit of a Pixar quality to them. And I was so afraid for a moment there—it just looked like at any moment someone was going to come out and yell,‘Cut, we got it!’ and tear away the entire mall, and there were going to be a million people working there, you know, cleaning up, and all the people were extras. That’s how fake it seemed.”

  What Jordan did not know was that jamais vu—in which the familiar seems brand-new: the opposite of déjà vu—commonly plagues people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Shortly after the shopping-mall episode, Jordan visited his neurologist. His MRI films revealed that, as a result of his surgery, his left temporal lobe had retreated from his skull. It was a different shape and size, and new scarring was causing electrical storms in his head. Jordan had developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But the organic change in his brain was nothing compared with the one in his heart.

  Jordan could pinpoint the moment of his spiritual epiphany. He and his eleven-year-old daughter were reading about world religions. They worked through the chapters on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism without event.

  “When we got to the chapter on Buddhism, as soon as I started to read it, the light went on in my head, and it was almost as if I had found the definition that fit the things I was feeling and thinking.”

  He laughed, a little embarrassed. “I probably know less about Buddhism than you do. But it seems to me, Buddhism is the truth. I feel it. I mean, right now I’m looking at my fireplace mantel, where I have ...” He inhaled deeply. “Let’s see—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven statues of Buddha looking at me. I’m wearing a mala bracelet, which is like a rosary. I’ve been wearing one every day—don’t know what it means, don’t know its significance, but I feel that if I’m not wearing it, I forget ...”

  His voice trailed off.

  “I do know I’ve never believed more in spirituality, never believed more that it has answers to the most basic questions.”

  Neurologists might classify Jordan as having Geschwind syndrome, in which his small seizures rewrote his mental script, his values, and his thoughts, not only during the seizures, but all the moments in between. I told Jordan that scientists would probably relegate his spiritual conversion—the top-to-bottom overhaul in his values, his new Buddhist view that compassion trumps success—to a brain disorder.

  “I know,” he sighed. “It’s kind of sad in a way to think that your religious beliefs, or your feelings of spirituality, or your peace and love for your fellow man, is a mistake that comes from an electrical impulse that’s gone awry. But I’ll tell you what the real bottom line is for me: I don’t care where it comes from. I’m much happier feeling the way that I do now about spirituality and religion and tolerance and compassion. I’m a more decent human being every day because of it.”

  The Cosmic Electrician

  Jordan Sinclair’s story piqued my curiosity about how, precisely, a brain generates otherworldly beliefs. Or, for those who believe in God, I will put it this way: Is there a cosmic electrician who wires people’s temporal lobes to let Him communicate with them—and if so, what does the wiring look like? Now some neurologists are exploring the same questions—zeroing in on epilepsy, not to dismiss spiritual experience as brain dysfunction, but to understand it. On the theory that the extreme can elucidate the commonplace, they are trying to decipher the mechanics of how a spiritual experience unfolds in the brain.

  As Jeffrey Saver, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, put it,“These patients give us clues as to what parts of the human brain are involved when all of us have a numinous experience.”

  Studies suggest that when pollsters interview Americans in depth, some 60 percent report that they have had an experience of the presence of God or a “patterning” of events in their life that persuades them that they are part of a cosmic design.17

  “We know that this is a universal response across cultures,” Saver continued. “And patients with these disorders give us an insight into the biologic hardwiring that underpins this universal human experience.”

  “So are you saying that if there were a God who wanted to communicate with us,” I asked,“He or She would use the temporal lobes?”

  “There have been two general hypotheses about how God might communicate with us,” Saver explained, smoothly adopting my God terminology. “One is that there’s some specific sensory organ that exists only to have contact with the divine. And so far we have no evidence that that sense organ exists. The other view is that we encounter the divine through our usual sensory faculties—through taste, smell, vision, our usual senses—but that when we encounter the divine, that contact is touched by, stamped by, some additional marker indicating that it is of special meaning, of special ultimacy. And the part of the human brain that stamps events as having these special qualities is the temporal limbic system. So that would be the way that a divine presence would manifest itself—if there were such a contact,” he added hastily.

  Let’s look a bit closer at this part of the brain, and the “temporal limbic system.” From the side, the brain looks like a boxing glove, and the temporal lobes are where the thumbs would be, covering the ears. The temporal lobes are the gateway for, among other things, ideas and emotions, particularly about yourself. Their brief includes hearing (remember, the lobes are close to the ears), language comprehension, conceptualizing, memory, and attaching meaning and significance to events. Within the temporal lobes is the limbic system. Think of it as a loop that performs a certain function, like the cooling system under the hood of a car. There are more than half a dozen regions involved in the limbic loop, but for our purposes, we will focus on two.

  The hippocampus is the memory center, ess
ential for the formation and storage of long-term memories. Next to the hippocampus is the amygdala, which serves as the fight-or-flight messenger: stimulate that area and you’re likely to scamper away in terror or snarl in aggression. Working together, the hippocampus and the amygdala stamp people, places, and things with meaning. A woman who was bitten by a dog when she was a girl will shrink from my yellow Lab because her memory of dogs has been stamped with a particular emotional meaning (fear). But for someone like me, who grew up surrounded by dogs, my yellow Lab evokes only love and warm memories. Same dog, same parts of the brain, different meaning.

  Now let’s look at what happens when a person suffers a seizure. At the start of the seizure, the cells in the brain begin to move in rhythm with one another, creating a powerful synchrony. The symptoms the person exhibits depend on the area of the brain in which this rhythmical spiking occurs. If the seizure zeroes in on the motor area of the brain, you might see the right thumb twitch or the left arm jerk around. If the electrical storm occurs in the temporal lobe—which is likely, since the temporal lobe is the most electrically unstable part of the brain—then the person could experience an emotionally vivid aura—that is, the beginning of a seizure.

  Because of the spiking, all these normal emotions have an exclamation point after them. They’re scrawled in huge red capital letters. People may hear music or words, presumably from their memory bank—and instead of being just snatches of remembered sound, they are music from the heavenly spheres or messages from God. They may see flashes of light and interpret it as an angel visiting from heaven. They may feel a sense of unreality and disconnection from the world and believe that they are experiencing an alternate reality. They may sense the presence of another being and believe that presence is God, or the devil. They can feel terror or (in very rare cases) ecstasy. And these sights, sounds, and feelings have cosmic weight, because the storm in their brain is telling them so.

  If this electrical storm rolls through often enough, it physically rewires the brain. And in this may lurk a clue as to why many people—Christian Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews, Sufi mystics—seem to look at the world through the prism of faith. It may be that their brains are tailor-made for God.

  Tailor-made for God

  On January 22, 2007, I drove into the sprawling complex of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The day was bitterly cold, gray, with snow flurries threatening a storm that would soon drop a foot of snow on the city. Yet this was nothing compared with the neurological storms that I was about to witness. Dr. Gregory Barkley, the director of the epilepsy clinic, had graciously set up appointments for me to interview patients whose epileptic seizures had transcendent elements.

  One of them was Mary. In the photo I took of her, Mary wears a royal-blue turtleneck and black pants. Her brown hair is streaked with gray and worn in a pageboy style reminiscent of the 1970s. Her head is cocked to the right, her narrow shoulders droop, and her lips press together in a sad, straight line.

  The picture deceives.When Mary talks, she springs to life, a jack-in-the-box whose dramatic gestures sweep you into her sphere and shower you with a joy that belies her chronic disease. Mostly you feel her obsessive love for God.Very few sentences pass her lips without mention of the Blessed Sacrament or Jesus, the lives of ancient saints or present-day nuns.

  Raised Catholic, Mary suffered her first tonic-clonic seizure when she was fifteen years old.With aunts who were nuns and a cousin who became a Jesuit priest, Mary was rich soil for a bumper crop of Catholic faith. I saw something urgent about Mary’s spirituality: it saturated her life, it dominated her vision, it drove her relentlessly to share the Gospel. As she described her life, it seemed that every moment contained dual meaning—in this world and in the spiritual realm.

  Nothing was coincidence. She recalled one afternoon when her seizure lasted only about thirty seconds.“And then I came to, and I said, ‘Well thank you, Lord, I didn’t even bite the sides of my mouth, Jesus!’ And then a week later, I read that a man who had written a book on prayer that I had read, Father Ed Farrell, had died in his afternoon nap. I thought that was so neat, that maybe that was part of the repository of grace in the world. I believe in the mystical body of Christ, so maybe that [brief seizure] was required of me for his happy passage.”

  Or consider the day in 1985 when she was diagnosed with cancer.

  “You want to know something neat?” Mary asked, leaning forward. “They operated on me on August 15, which is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary! And I didn’t pick that date. They did. And the first time I was seen by the surgeon afterwards was the first Saturday in May, and the month of May was dedicated to the Blessed Mother. And then my last appointment with the surgeon was on the feast of the Epiphany.”

  In recent years, researchers have searched for a reason why temporal lobe epilepsy would render a person hyperreligious. Early on, emotional reasons headed the list: the desire for solace from a loving God, for example, or a way to cope with and find meaning in a life punctuated with abrupt fits. But now neurologists are finding physical clues as well. Recently, for example, some researchers found that in people with temporal lobe epilepsy the hippocampus (the memory region) is smaller than normal.18 Other studies showed that the amygdala (the seat of emotions, particularly fear) is larger.19

  While neurologists are not certain what those abnormalities mean, one thing is clear: the brains of people with temporal lobe epilepsy are physically different from yours or mine. And the physical differences are probably dwarfed by the functional differences.

  I thought of Jeffrey Saver’s theory, that the repeated spiking in the temporal lobe’s limbic system can place an exclamation mark after ordinary events, tagging them with cosmic meaning. For most of us, August 15 is just August 15, but for Mary it is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And at some point, this cosmic interpretation of events becomes the norm.

  When you have occasional spikes from seizures, the UCLA neurologist explained, that extra electrical activity creates new connections between nerve cells. The more seizures, the stronger the connections. Eventually, the nerve cells form habits, like knee-jerk reactions of the brain. If your brain during a seizure tells you that certain events (or all events) have “God’s will” stamped on them, then you will see God’s will everywhere all the time, even when your brain is running normally.

  This kind of brain, Saver told me,“is predisposed to have these types of experiences even between their seizures, because that brain had become more tailored toward religious experience.”

  Mary had no doubt her brain was attuned to religious experience. “I know I’m very intuitive,” she said, and I sensed she felt this was a divine gift, not the result of neural circuitry.“I have a friend who’s a psychiatric social worker and she told me once, ‘Mary, you can’t enter into prayer with big groups of people. It’s not safe for you.’ She said, ‘People like you are like very loosely woven screens. You need to protect yourself.’ ”

  I looked up from my furious scribbling, reminded of Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve.”

  Mary smiled at me, then continued. “And I do. Because I pray for people and I start getting their symptoms. I prayed for a girl who’s addicted to cocaine and other substances, and I woke up, and”—Mary pulled up her left sleeve, revealing marks and bruises covering the underside of her arm—“I had all these bruises.”

  She covered her arm quickly, then gazed at me.

  “Mary,” I said, a little flustered, “say I didn’t believe in God. Say I thought this was just an electrical storm in your head. What would you say?”

  Mary smiled kindly. “Well, I have a gift of faith. And I’m going to pray that you receive that gift, too.”

  A God Who Transmits

  Many scientists would say that Jordan Sinclair and Mary are cursed with faulty wiring in their brains. If God is an electrician in this case, He miscalculated the voltage with tragic results. On a regular basis, the electricity in thei
r temporal lobe surges and the circuit breaker flips on. The visions or transcendent feelings that the faulty wiring creates are nothing more than hallucinations.

  But suppose the proper analogy is not an electrical storm but a radio transmission, in which the brain is a radio receiver. This thought did not originate with me. Several scientists I interviewed proposed the idea. In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program to varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low—in the case of an atheist, so low it’s inaudible. Many hear their favorite programs every now and again. Others, through no fault of their own, have the volume turned up too high, or they are receiving a cacophony of noise that makes no sense, as if they were tuning in to stations transmitting from Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, while they drive through rural Georgia. If this analogy is carried further—and it is, by an increasing number of scientists—then the “sender” is separate from the “receiver.” The content of the transmission does not originate in the brain, any more than the host of All Things Considered is physically in your radio. This is not to say that all our thoughts come from another, spiritual, realm, any more than everything we hear comes through the radio. It merely suggests that perhaps people suffering with an overactive temporal lobe are able to tune in to another dimension of reality, which the rest of us are unable to access. Maybe Saint Paul and Joan of Arc and Dostoyevsky were not crazy. Maybe they just had better antennae.