How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Yes, say the authors, who believe they have “uncovered solid evidence that the mystical experiences of their subjects—the altered states of mind they described as the absorption of the self into something larger—were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events … .” It is an odd distinction to make, which the authors do throughout the book. “A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfirings of a bundle of nerve cells.”

  Indeed, I am one such skeptic, but I fail to see the difference (outside a minor linguistic distinction) between a delusion and a decrease in OAA activity. In this case, delusion is simply a descriptive term for what happens when the OAA shuts down and the brain loses the ability to distinguish self from non-self. But it is still all in the brain. Unless, of course, you believe that these neurologically triggered mystical experiences actually serve as a conduit to a real spiritual world where God (or what the authors call the “Absolute Unitary Being”) resides. That is, in fact, what they believe: “ … our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something, that the mind’s machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine.” Thankfully they are honest enough to admit that this conclusion “is a terrifically unscientific idea” and that to accept it “we must second-guess all our assumptions about material reality.” In the end they do just that.

  The strength of Why God Won’t Go Away lies in the original research conducted by the authors, and the brain correlates of mystical states they have identified, that together go a long way toward explicating the experiences of religious mystics. For the billions of believers who have never had a mystical experience, however, explanations for their faith are more likely grounded in the psychology and sociology of belief where, for example, the number one predictor of anyone’s religious faith is that of their parents, modified by siblings and peer groups, mentors, education, age, cultural experiences, and other variables (see Chapter 4). This is not a critique, since the authors focused their attention on the neurological correlates of belief only, but the book does unravel when they seek an evolutionary origin for religion.

  As compelling as such evolutionary explanations are—and surely this must be where the ultimate reason for belief lies (see Chapter 7)—much of the authors’ case depends on explanation in the just-so storytelling mode. (Critics of sociobiology will find much fodder for their cannons here.) We are told, for example, that religion alleviated the “existential gloom” facing our paleolithic ancestors who were “taken off their game by the soul-sapping notion that no matter how hard they struggled, how skillfully they hunted, how fiercely they battled, or how creatively they thought, death was always waiting, and that their lives added up to nothing in the end. The promises of religion protected early humans from such self-defeating fatalism, and allowed them to struggle tirelessly but optimistically for survival.” That’s interesting. Prove it.

  The authors also fall into the trap of thinking of human evolution as almost entirely centered around men on the hunt, a paradigm abandoned decades ago in favor of more sophisticated models of social evolution that stress the importance of relationships, hierarchy, dominance, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and various forms of social exchange. It is out of this paradigm, in conjunction with psychosocial models, that a fuller explanation for why God won’t go away is to be found (again, see Chapter 7).

  In related research, a story that broke as I was writing this chapter came out in the pages of the journal Nature. Swiss neuroscientists Olaf Blanke, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, and Theodor Landis, from the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, through electrical brain stimulation of a forty-three-year old woman who was suffering from severe epileptic seizures, discovered a part of the brain that can induce Out-of-Body Experiences. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and have a long tradition of harboring religious and spiritual overtones, as if the experience itself was a conduit to a transcendent state or spiritual dimension. The scientists repeatedly generated OBEs in this woman through electrical stimulation of her brain’s right angular gyrus, part of the temporal lobe that is thought to play a role in the way that the brain analyzes sensory information and monitors the difference between self and non-self (as in the Orientation Association Area, or OAA, described in the research above). Blanke and associates believe that when the angular gyrus misfires it can produce the sense of floating outside of the body: “Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient’s arms and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.” Figure 1 shows the area of the brain electrically stimulated to produce OBEs.

  Figure 1. Three-dimensional surface reconstruction of the right hemisphere of the brain from magnetic-resonance imaging.

  In initial mild stimulations, the patient reported that she was “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height.” More intense stimulation led her to report “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Two additional stimulations induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling.” They then asked the patient to stare at her outstretched legs while they stimulated her brain. This led her to seeing her legs “becoming shorter.” When they had her first bend her legs and then applied the electrical stimulation, “she reported that her legs appeared to be moving quickly towards her face, and [she] took evasive action.” The same thing happened with her arms when the experiment was duplicated. Blanke and associates concluded: “These observations indicate that OBEs and complex somatosensory illusions can be artificially induced by electrical stimulation of the cortex. The association of these phenomena and their anatomical selectivity suggest that they have a common origin in body-related processing, an idea that is supported by the restriction of these visual experiences to the patient’s own body … . It is possible that the experience of dissociation of self from the body is a result of failure to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.”

  This is an exceptionally important study that goes a long way toward providing a normal explanation for what has long been considered to be paranormal phenomena, associated not only with near-death experiences, but with remote viewing, alien abductions, auditory and visual hallucinations (particularly, for our purposes here, those affiliated with religious epiphanies), and other mental ephemera and psychological anomalies. This study should stimulate other neuroscientists to explore adjacent regions of the brain to see if they can replicate other such phenomena, such as alien abductions and visual and auditory hallucinations. Although caution is called for because the subject pool was only one, all our brains are wired in a similar manner so there is little reason to think that stimulation of this brain region in other patients will not corroborate the finding. In fact, last December the British medical journal Lancet published a Dutch study in which 344 cardiac patients were resuscitated from clinical death. About 12 percent reported Near-Death Experiences where they saw the light at the end of a tunnel. Some even reported speaking to dead relatives. If these studies are corroborated it means yet another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain, from pure neural activity. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain, and these studies are another step in the long historical tradition where mysterious phenomena are subsumed under the blanket of science and naturalism.

  Paranormal beliefs in general, in fact, may be related to brain chemistry. The July 2002 is
sue of New Scientist magazine reported the proceedings from a meeting of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies in Paris, in which a study was presented showing that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. The research was conducted by neurologist Peter Brugger of the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Brugger’s subjects consisted of twenty self-professed believers and twenty self-confessed skeptics. His methodology was to briefly flash images on a screen to see if there was a difference between believers and skeptics on what they thought they observed. In one experiment real faces and scrambled faces were shown. In another experiment real and scrambled words were flashed. Brugger found that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one. Skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen. The dopamine variable was added when Brugger gave his subjects L-dopa, normally used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. (Dopamine is also involved in the brain’s reward and motivation system and has some relevance for the treatment of drug addiction.) Although both groups made more mistakes under the influence of L-dopa, skeptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing. This finding suggests that paranormal thoughts and beliefs may be associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. The significant effect is that L-dopa makes skeptics less skeptical. By contrast, and surprisingly, L-dopa did not seem to increase the tendency of believers to see coincidences or relationships between the words and images. Brugger concluded that this could mean that there is a plateau effect for believers, with more dopamine having relatively little effect above their belief threshold.

  GODS, ANGELS, AND ESP: WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE ABOUT THE SUPERNATURAL

  It is possible that studies like these will begin to explain at least some of the reasons why people believe in paranormal, supernatural, and spiritual entities. Just how many believe in such ephemera? According to the Scripps Howard News Service, in a study conducted in collaboration with Ohio University, Americans overwhelmingly believe in the angels that heralded the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago and think they still walk the Earth today. In a survey of 1,127 adults, one out of every five Americans believes he or she has seen an angel or knows someone who has. Of those 1,127 adults polled, 77 percent answered “Yes” to the question: “Do you believe angels, that is, some kind of heavenly beings who visit Earth, in fact exist?” Another 73 percent believe angels still “come into the world even in these modern days.” Belief in angelic beings cuts across almost all ranges of education, income, and lifestyle. Women and young people are slightly more likely to believe than are men or older Americans, but a majority of almost every demographic group are angel believers.

  Consider the following account given by Catherine Forbes, seventy-two, of Derby, Kansas: “Yes, I absolutely believe in angels. I met one.” The circumstances of this experience are telling. After the death of her husband, Forbes decided to take a trip to Jerusalem with a friend in 1953. On their way through the Dallas airport they got lost and became anxious. “All of a sudden, the nicest voice I ever heard said, ‘May I help you?’ I turned around and saw a clean-cut young man, just the most handsome, beautiful man. He picked up my luggage and showed me where to go and which people I was to be traveling with. I turned around to thank him, and he had absolutely disappeared.” Although there was no flash of light, the helpful young man had disappeared from sight in an apparently impossible fashion, she said. “I know some people will think I’m off my rocker, but I know what I saw.”

  There is no doubt that Forbes’s experience was a real one. The question, however, is: was the source of her experience inside or outside the brain? The scientific evidence shows that such experiences are brain-generated, mediated by past experiences (in the form of memories) and the context in which they occur (in this case the airport during an episode of extreme grief). There is no need to call forth supernatural explanations when natural ones will do.

  Yet, the angel belief poll was emblematic of the larger trend in beliefs in spiritual and paranormal phenomena. The Gallup News Service, for example, reported on June 8, 2001, the results from a survey they conducted on paranormal and spiritual beliefs. “The results suggest a significant increase in belief in a number of these experiences over the past decade, including in particular such Halloween-related issues as haunted houses, ghosts, and witches. Only one of the experiences tested has seen a drop in belief since 1990: devil possession. Overall, half or more of Americans believe in two of the issues: psychic or spiritual healing, and extrasensory perception (ESP), and a third or more believe in such things as haunted houses, possession by the devil, ghosts, telepathy, extraterrestrial beings having visited earth, and clairvoyance.”

  There were interesting differences in beliefs by various subpopulations. For example:

  Age: Younger Americans—those 18–29—are much more likely than those who are older to believe in haunted houses, in witches, in ghosts, that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and in clairvoyance. There is little significant difference in belief in the other items by age group. Those thirty and older are somewhat more likely to believe in possession by the devil than are the younger group (perhaps as a result of seeing The Exorcist?). Gender: Women are slightly more likely than men to believe in ghosts and that people can communicate with the dead. Men, on the other hand, are more likely than women to believe in only one of the dimensions tested: that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at some point in the past.

  Education: Americans with the highest levels of education are more likely than others to believe in the power of the mind to heal the body. On the other hand, belief in three of the phenomena tested goes up as the educational level of the respondent goes down: possession by the devil, astrology, and haunted houses. Importance of Religion: Perhaps not surprisingly, the major difference in belief in these phenomena by importance of religion focuses on the devil: 55 percent of those who say religion is very important in their daily lives say they believe in devil possession, compared to just 14 percent of those who say religion is “not very” important to them. Religion is also correlated with belief in extraterrestrials: Those for whom religion is very important are less likely to say they believe in beings from other worlds that may have visited this planet than are those who are less religious.

  Figure 2. Changing belief in paranormal phenomena.

  The change in belief percentages over the past decade are seen in Figure 2.

  The National Science Foundation found similar percentages of belief in pseudoscience as the Gallup Pollsters did in belief in the paranormal. In April 2002, the NSF published their biennial report on the state of science understanding and public attitudes toward science, which included a section on the relationships between science and pseudoscience. The results were alarming:

  30 percent of adult Americans believe that UFOs are space vehicles from other civilizations

  60 percent believe in ESP

  40 percent think that astrology is scientific

  32 percent believe in lucky numbers

  70 percent accept magnetic therapy as scientific

  88 percent agree that alternative medicine is a viable means of treating illness

  The NSF survey summarized the overall findings on pseudoscience this way:

  Belief in pseudoscience, including astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), and alien abductions, is relatively widespread and growing. For example, in response to the 2001 NSF survey, a sizable minority (41 percent) of the public said that astrology was at least somewhat scientific, and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” Gallup polls show substantial gains in almost every category of pseudoscience during the past decade. Such beliefs may sometimes be fueled by the media’s miscommunication of science and the scientific process.

  As f
or alternative or complementary medicine, the NSF report highlighted their findings as such:

  Alternative medicine, defined here as any treatment that has not been proven effective using scientific methods, has been gaining in popularity. One study documented a 50 percent increase in expenditures for alternative therapies and a 25 percent increuse in the use of alternativa therapies between 1990 and 1997. Also, more than two-thirds of those responding to the NSF survey said that magnetic therapy was at least somewhat scientific, although no scientific evidence exists to support claims about its effectiveness in treating pain or any other ailment.

  Of the various alternative modalities, the survey reported magnets as the most popular. “Among those who reported using energy healing, the most frequently cited technique involved the use of magnets. In 2001, NSF survey respondents were asked whether or not they had heard of magnetic therapy, and if they had, whether they thought that it was very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific. A substantial majority of survey respondents (77 percent) had heard of magnetic therapy. Among all who had heard of this treatment, 14 percent said it was very scientific and another 54 percent said it was sort of scientific. Only 25 percent of those surveyed answered correctly, that is, that it is not at all scientific.”