Edward Tylor was an early thinker on the reasons why belief in the paranormal was near universal across history and different cultures. He argued that people were from the earliest times deeply puzzled by two phenomena: the difference between a living and a dead body, and the nature of the people in dreams. This led to the belief that life could leave a body and go wandering, as it does in dreams … [raising the] possibility of ultimate immortality [which] was, and still can be, very comforting … Sleep is itself a sort of paranormal experience, and dreaming of a dead person would make it more so. And illness, in early times, must also have been almost a paranormal experience, as would be childbirth, the causes being mysterious.9
What fascinating propositions! We think childbirth is a miracle today: Imagine how miraculous it was ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or a million years ago!
Letting go of my centrism, I can see that Volcano People were not really doing anything different from what Old Testament People were doing: placating a god. And maybe New Testament People are no different from Old Testament People. Sure, sacrifice has become less vogue over the years, but I’m not sure that, for example, sacrificing a beautiful Sunday to go to church is qualitatively different. We’re still trying to placate (that is, influence, or even control) God so he doesn’t abandon us. By influencing our gods through appeasement, we feel safer.
And even when we’re not sacrificing, we pray. Prayer also offers a sense of control. When I pray, I’m communicating with God. The more I believe he hears me, the more in control I must feel, whether it be over a volcanic eruption or my presentation to the shareholders at work next week. Faith, then, does not offer only hope: It affords a sense of control, or agency. “Potency,” Yalom calls it.
Through all of my adventures as a psychologist—student, patient, licensed practitioner—I’ve become convinced that a sense of control is one of the most fundamental human needs, perhaps on par with eating, socializing, and mating. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman taught me about one of the more compelling and poignant manifestations of the need for control, that is, by explaining the mysterious but surprisingly common response to rape: self-blame.10 In a nutshell, many victims would rather blame themselves than admit that the world is a chaotic, unjust place where horrible things happen to innocent people. By taking the blame, she preserves her belief that the world is meaningful and fair, but also attempts to convince herself that she is actually in control so she’ll be able to avoid another catastrophe in the future. In fact, Ronnie argues that the rest of us blame victims for the same reason: We don’t want to consider that innocent people are victimized randomly, which makes us feel safe and in control. Furthermore, when we blame victims—whether of rape or poverty or whatever—it helps us minimize our obligation to help them.
On the other side of the violence coin, it seems that many perpetrators commit violence to assert their control over the world. So many people who are violent as adults were themselves beaten down as children. They had no control, which can be excruciating, humiliating, and devastating. When they begin to find themselves in a position where they can dominate someone else, whether those opportunities begin to appear during their own childhoods or later, some of them take advantage of the situation, and it’s reinforcing to them to exercise some control when they couldn’t before. It’s like payback, in a way, only displacing it from his perpetrator to another innocent victim, someone who was innocent just like he was way back when.
If studying classical civilization had not ruined my faith, studying psychology probably would have anyway. People who spend their lives studying the brain are no longer intimidated by it—nor by consciousness, personality, or its other products. Yes, even the human brain starts to make sense so that one no longer has to throw up his hands and chalk up human nature and experience to souls and spirits or ill-defined cosmic energy fields or whatever. Now, I’m not going to suggest that we will necessarily understand the mind perfectly someday (recall the John Lilly/Gödel paradox discussed above, the proposition that something can’t completely understand itself). However, heading in the direction of understanding may be sufficient to convince one that even the human mind is a product of nature and doesn’t require a God to have created it. Something profound definitely happened to me when I eventually began to appreciate that the human mind is understandable, even if not by me specifically.
We know that the human nervous system is comprised of billions of neurons that transmit electrical signals along their lengths. Most of these lengths are very short, fractions of a millimeter, while some—for example, the ones that transmit sensations from your big toe to your lower spine—might be a meter long. They really are like biological wires, the long ones even have biological insulation called myelin.
At the end of the neuron, the electrical signal that travels across the cell causes a chemical to be released into the extra-cellular space so that neighboring neurons can receive it. If those neighboring cells receive enough such neurotransmitter, they will initiate their own electrical signals which they can then send elsewhere. And these processes—the electrical transmission, its transformation into a chemical signal, and back into an electrical signal—are understood quite well. Not perfectly, but there’s not an alarming amount of mystery about them anymore.
Those wires running from our toes and other appendages are organized neatly as they enter and ascend the spinal cord up into the brain. There are actually two separate systems working in parallel: one for touch sensations, and one for pain. The touch fibers cross over as they enter the spine and ascend the opposite side (so, your left toe touch fibers ascend the right side of your spinal column). However, the separate pain fibers for that same toe don’t cross over until later (so, your left toe pain fibers ascend the left side of the spinal cord). Turns out this separation of church and state may serve a functional purpose, and hence may have been naturally selected: If we suffer an injury to one side of the spinal cord, we only lose touch or pain to that side, not both. Apparently, if you lose the touch on one side, it helps you function if you can still feel pain, as there is some degree of overlap between the sensations.
Ascending the spinal cord to the brain, the fibers remain neatly organized so that those innervating one body part tend to stay close to those innervating nearby body parts (so, the fibers for the index finger ascend the spinal cord next to those for the middle finger). The organization continues as you ascend the cord and as additional fibers from more elevated parts of the body are added. At some point, if you were to view a horizontal slice through the cord, parallel to the ground, you would have a rough somatosensory map of your body. You could stimulate this thing with an electrical probe and create feelings of touch (or pain) throughout your body in a quite predictable manner.
And the orderliness continues as the fibers arrive at the brain, spreading out over the wrinkly cortex so that those brain parts that process touch in the foot (the right foot in the left hemisphere—don’t forget the crossing-over!) are next to those areas that process touch in the calf of the same leg … and so on.
Of course, those parts of the body where touch is more important (for example, the hands) will involve more brain tissue than those where touch is less important (for example, the abdomen). Fingers can peel fruit, husk seeds and nuts, and manipulate sticks and stones; abdomens just don’t need that kind of precision. Our lips also use more brain than one might suspect. Using them for articulating speech sounds and eating and such demands a lot of brain area, too. Some of the side effects of this are good (for example, it makes kissing such a rich experience), but others are bad (a sore or zit around the lips hurts like hell). By the way, all of this organization is not unique to humans: It works the same way in other mammals but varies accordingly so that, for example, rats have a large area of sensory cortex devoted to their whiskers.
Many students are surprised to learn that the genitals have relatively little brain devoted to them, genitals being the centers of our universes. However, despite how good o
rgasms end up feeling, genitals themselves don’t actually have good spatial resolution—they’re more like abdomens than fingers. Sure, they love to be touched, but they’re not so picky about exactly where. Diffuse pressure works just fine, as long as it keeps moving.
And it’s not just touch; the other senses and such are processed in orderly fashions as well. Right next to the somatosensory cortex processing touch, there is an analogous motor cortex that is devoted to producing motion. As with the somatosensory map, the amount of brain tissue devoted to each body part is in proportion to how important motion is for each respective body part (again, fingers being big, abdomen being small, and in this case, genitals get virtually nothing).
Sounds are processed in a different part of the brain than touch, and that area is also neatly organized, so that sounds at 1,000 Hz are processed near those that process sounds at 1,500 hertz, and relatively far from those that process 10,000 hertz, and so on.
The organization is most remarkable in terms of the visual system. As your imagination may be suggesting, yes, images of the environment are indeed projected onto the back of your eye via a system of lenses not unlike a camera. When photons of light strike light-sensitive cells in the retina, they initiate a surprisingly not-as-complex-as-you-might-expect process in which the electromagnetic energy of photons is transformed into a biological, neural signal, similar to how neurotransmitters relay messages from neuron to neuron throughout the rest of the nervous system.
Some of the neurons from the eye are only indirectly involved in seeing, as they detour to the primitive “reptilian” midbrain where things like eye movements and pupil dilation are controlled (this is why a “vegetative” patient like Terri Schiavo with profound loss of cortical, “mammalian” brain tissue can still appear to be looking around but she’s not really “seeing” in the traditional sense). Those fibers that do the actual seeing travel to the thalamus, which fine-tunes and filters the information, contributing to the smooth and steady perception that we’ll eventually see. (Interesting to note: Last I heard, the thalamus is one place where LSD has its effects, essentially reducing the brain’s ability to make vision smooth and steady.) From the thalamus, visual stimulation goes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain, where it is further processed and ultimately brought into consciousness.
Magnificently, the seeing fibers arrive at the visual cortex in an orderly fashion analogous to the other senses, so that portions of our visual field that are near one another are processed near one another in the cortex. Does this mean if we could look directly at a brain, itself in the process of seeing, that we could see a picture of our visual field on the brain’s cortex?
Not exactly—but almost! In the early 1980s, Roger Tootell and his colleagues injected a monkey with radioactive glucose, which is absorbed into neural cells as they become increasingly active (that is, stimulated). He directed the monkey’s gaze towards a screen upon which a stimulus was displayed, something akin to a wagon wheel (the monkey, of course, is under general anesthesia; it doesn’t know what is happening, just like when you had your wisdom teeth or gall bladder removed or whatever).
The monkey is later sacrificed for science, and its brain is studied.11 Unfathomably, the section of brain that is devoted to processing the area of real-world space occupied by the light-wheel literally has a freaking “picture” of the freaking wheel on it! No, you wouldn’t actually be able to see the wheel on the brain if observing the brain directly while all of this was happening, but the radioactive glucose allows us to see which cells were most active, in retrospect.
The very sobering point: Brains are surprisingly orderly, sensible, and predictable, just as you would imagine an evolved machine to be. The more you learn about brains, the less amazing—no, let me take that back—the less mysterious they are. And as the brain becomes increasingly demystified, the less we have to assume something spiritual or transcendent behind it all. And the less we have to assume spirits behind the brain, the less we have to assume spirits behind anything else.
Now, I readily admit that somatosensory, motor, tonotopic, and retinotopic maps do little to account for the more complex human experiences, such as memory, abstraction, and self-awareness. However, the unfortunate but fascinating phenomenon of epileptic seizures does.
Recall that a seizure is the problem in which neurons in the brain become hyperactive, firing spontaneously and excessively, whether due to genetically inherited anomalies or to environmentally acquired injuries. In some seizures, consciousness is maintained but one can lose control of her motor functions. A shaking might start in her fingers because the first cells to run amok are in the finger part of her motor cortex discussed above. But as the hyperactivity spreads over the surface of that strip of brain, it takes over her hand next, then arm, then shoulder, then head—a devilish puppeteer who will even go as far as to make her crap her pants. Some patients may engage in more complex behaviors, like she might eat or brush her teeth while in an epileptic trance—or even go to a party and have a great time, believing afterwards that she had been at home sleeping.12 Spastic cells in other areas will affect the senses so that one might feel a wind that isn’t there or smell oranges or feces for no legitimate reason.
The most interesting experiences occur when the temporal lobes are affected, those parts of the brain that seem particularly important in emotions and memories. A temporal lobe seizure may overwhelm the patient with joy, fear, sadness, rage, nostalgia, or even orgasm. Déjà vu is common in this condition because it, too, is nothing mystical but just another short circuit of sorts. Memories might be superimposed on reality, like for Oliver Sacks’ patient Mrs. O. C.: “I know you’re there, Dr. Sacks. I know I’m an old woman with a stroke in an old people’s home, but I feel I’m a child in Ireland again—I feel my mother’s arms, I see her, I hear her voice singing.”13 It seems, then, that even our emotions and memories—those parts of us which we cherish and pride for making us particularly human—are mechanized in the brain, at least to some degree.
When that most highly esteemed profession of brain surgery came about, doctors began to treat seizures by destroying (or sequestering) those brain cells that continue to misfire despite gallons of medication. Amazingly, these surgeries are done while the patients are awake so that the surgeon can poke the brain and consult with the patient in order to make sure she’s in the right spot.14 And sure enough, by applying electrical current to different parts of the brain via a tiny electrode, the surgeon can control the patient a bit like a puppet, eliciting experiences akin to those described during spontaneous seizures.
One of the prolific pioneers in the field, Wilder Penfield, specialized in evoking sights, sounds, and other subjective experiences that were often difficult for patients to describe. Some of these appeared to be hallucinations, such as when patient #36 reported, “Yes, I hear … a woman calling … It seemed to be at the lumber yard … [but] I have never been around any lumber yard.”15 Other hallucinations were more like memories, as they were verified to have been based in actual experiences, such as that for patient #38: “Yes, Doctor, yes, Doctor! Now I hear people laughing—my friends in South Africa … two cousins, Bessie and Ann Wheliaw.” Penfield could also cause emotional experiences with his electrode: One patient laughed, another cried—but fear was most accessible. Patient #30 reported, “Yes, I felt just terrified for an instant.” Number 15, a 14-year-old girl exclaimed, “Oh, everybody is shouting at me again, make them stop! … Something dreadful is going to happen … I saw someone coming toward me as though he were going to hit me.” Other patients had more spiritual-like experiences, like #14 who apparently felt some sort of transcendent connection to Penfield’s anesthesiologist: “I almost spiritually spoke to that woman” (the anesthesiologist was actually male). Number #23 reported, “I am going to die … God said I am going to die.”
That we can conjure God’s voice with an electrode is actually not as surprising as it is interesting. Popular neuroscientist V. S. Ra
machandran explains that “Every medical student” is taught that spontaneous seizures can cause patients to have “deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communication with God.”16 Whether due to more subtle, enduring brain dysfunction or simply because such patients are so moved by the spiritual seizure experience, some “become preoccupied with religious and moral issues even during the seizure-free … periods.” Many experts now wonder whether some historical religious figures from Joan of Arc to the Apostle Paul may have had temporal lobe epilepsy themselves, as some of their experiences were apparently consistent with the diagnosis.17 The more you read about all this stuff, the more you begin to entertain the demoralizing, frustrating accusation: “It’s all in your head.” Not just our fears and insecurities, but also our religion.
Yes, for whatever reason evolution deemed fit, there clearly are brain areas or mechanisms that mediate spiritual experiences. Seizures can stimulate these pathologically, or we can stimulate them deliberately by taking LSD or ecstasy and such. As Lewis Wolpert says, “A simple drug like LSD could only have such effects if the circuits for these experiences were already in the brain.”18 I don’t think we know why they are there, but they apparently are.
And maybe we don’t even need seizures or LSD to stimulate them! Lewis goes on to discuss the provocative hypothesis that hypnosis has a role in—if it cannot explain entirely—elements of religious ritual. Hypnosis is one of the more mysterious phenomena in all of psychology, on par with dreaming, if not more interesting in ways. Now, we know that hypnosis cannot force people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise, so don’t get any crazy ideas about using it to get laid or having people rob banks for you. However, Lewis cites mind-boggling research showing that hypnosis can, for example, induce anesthesia or hallucinations or—get this—cause one’s physical reaction to a skin-prick tuberculosis test administered to one arm to manifest on the other (non-pricked) arm! Given that, it’s a little anticlimactic when Lewis cites other research showing that people can be hypnotically induced to recount events that haven’t even happened, such as having heard gunshots in the night or, of course, being abducted by aliens.
Optimistic Nihilism Page 13