Hypnotized people are apparently not lying about their hypnotized experiences; those experiences are kinda transpiring, at least on some neurological level. For example, Lewis also describes brain imaging research showing that persons perceiving black-and-white images but told to perceive color under hypnotic suggestion show activation in the color-perceiving parts of their brains! No, this doesn’t mean that one can affect the environment with her mind (like bending spoons or whatever), but it does mean that she can affect her own body with her brain (a finding that must have some relevance for the well-documented placebo effect).
If hypnosis can make the visual areas of our brains see color when color isn’t really there, then hypnosis can make our temporal lobes have spiritual experiences when spirits aren’t really there. While reading Lewis’s discussion, all I could think of was my own father speaking in tongues at our church when I was a little kid, vis-à-vis aboriginal ladies I’ve seen more recently on some anthropology documentary, becoming “possessed” by spirits while dancing around a fire. Given what I know now, it seems more than plausible that my dad and those ladies have been doing the same thing: hypnotizing themselves through the rituals endorsed by their respective cultures, thereby stimulating those spiritual centers in their temporal lobes and having profound experiences of altered states.
I lost the last bit of my own spirituality one day while perusing books about death and dying on the fourth floor of the colossal Perry-Casteñeda Library on the University of Texas campus. It wasn’t long after my Papaw’s funeral in the mid-1990s, the ink not yet totally dry on my new Proud Atheist card. Although I was no longer able to entertain the notion that God or any other god was real, I was still clinging to notions of immortality through some ill-defined mechanism, something that must involve quantum physics and energy fields and other stuff that I would never fully understand. The near-death experience (NDE) gave me hope—particularly that part about atheists having NDEs as often as anybody else, which I naturally interpreted to mean that life after death is for everyone. But even that all fell apart when I came across G-LOC. Whatever breeze had been left in my Sails of Belief in Immortality before that moment finally stopped blowing. I felt it quit, no kidding, standing there; I remember the exact spot.
G-LOC stands for “gravity (or g-force)-induced loss of consciousness.” The basic idea is that if one is suddenly subjected to increased gravitational forces, such as during extreme maneuvers in a jet fighter, she can go unconscious. Medically, the phenomenon is understood well: The force of gravity simply forces blood from the brain so that it pools in the lower extremities and such. Losing consciousness via G-LOC is essentially the same as natural fainting or excessive bleeding, the only difference being that blood leaves the brain for different reasons. Regardless of why blood flow is compromised—whether it be to low blood pressure or extreme gravity—the brain is one of the first organs to succumb, largely because it has the highest elevation and because it demands so much blood way up there. Indeed, this is a function of fainting: to lower the head so that a relatively meager heartbeat can feed the brain adequately, which helps facilitate recovery and prevent brain damage.
While flying a jet, you can’t afford to faint or to put your head between your legs to prevent fainting. So, pilots are trained in those carnival ride-looking human centrifuges to test their limits and so they can learn to identify and cope with G-LOC before it overwhelms them (for example, by slowing down).
Thousands of pilots have been run through these things in laboratories, allowing researchers to study and quantify the G-LOC experience with significant precision. And the punchline: Many pilots, at some point during G-LOC, experience dramatic altered states, eerily—or I guess I should say not so eerily—similar to NDEs. Yes, healthy pilots in G-LOC can experience
tunnel vision and bright lights, floating sensations, automatic movement, autoscopy [sensation of seeing one’s own body from an external perspective], out-of-body experiences, not wanting to be disturbed, paralysis, vivid dreamlets of beautiful places, pleasurable sensations, … euphoria and dissociation, inclusion of friends and family, inclusion of prior memories and thoughts, the experience being very memorable … , confabulation, and a strong urge to understand the experience.19
No wonder atheists have NDEs as often as Christians: It’s because the NDE is a medical phenomenon, not a spiritual one. And no wonder dying people in India tend to see Hindu deities, those in New Guinea see sorcerers, and Native Americans see “Native American objects such as a ‘war eagle,’ deer, moose, bow and arrow, and moccasins.”20 It’s not because life after death is for everybody—it’s because life after death is for nobody. Even the mighty NDE is just another fucking neurological malfunction.
Now I understand why NDEs seem to be associated with some kinds of dying and not others. Your brain has to be deprived of oxygen to have the pleasant dying experience, like through cardiac arrest, bloodletting, or choking. I’ve never heard of an NDE associated with blunt force trauma to the head, even though people almost die from it all the time. Surely, deities and angels would not have some sort of preference for certain types of dying, showing up and offering comfort during a drowning but turning a cold shoulder to a hammer to the head. That obviously would not make sense. But G-LOC makes sense.
Now I understand why all the “research” supporting NDEs is merely anecdotal, that no legitimate controlled experiments have ever validated the phenomenon. The clever experiment would involve putting distinct objects or signs in particular places throughout emergency rooms so that they could only be seen by a hovering out-of-the-body spirit. According to physicist Victor Stenger, “This experiment has been tried several times without a single subject succeeding in reading the message under controlled conditions.”21 In other words, autoscopy is not real, either. It’s just another hallucination. Of course it is, given it’s part of G-LOC. Sure enough, turns out autoscopy can also be elicited during brain surgery.22 I suspect before too long the whole “near-death” experience is going to be something we can purchase for recreation, just like a massage or tour of the Louvre.
At least for me, spirituality can no longer be defended in the face of these medical explanations. I’m afraid that the most sensible assessment is that we really are just biology and chemistry, held together according to the laws of Newtonian physics. Indeed, quantum physics no longer offers an out, as real scientists, such as astrophysicist Dave Goldberg, are now taking the floor to inform us that the new-age spiritualists have misunderstood quantum physics and falsely advertised it through, for instance, the “abomination” of a film What the #$*! Do We Know? Dave specifies that “It is remarkable (and frankly, alarming) the degree to which quantum uncertainty and quantum weirdness get inextricably bound up in certain circles with the idea of a soul, or humans controlling the universe, or some other pseudoscience.”23
I suspect that the faithful would retort by arguing that none of these biological explanations for experience and behavior mean anything, that God simply allows his spiritual centers of our brains to be fooled by LSD and seizures just to provide more temptations for us to rise above. You’ve got to have faith. This is what faith is all about: ignoring demoralizing logic and reason and embracing hope unconditionally.
But I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of trying to make all of this work. It’s too much, a cruel and unusual challenge to my faith. I’m perfectly convinced now that spirituality is all in our heads, our so incredible—but so incredibly fallible—brains, with all their glutamate, glycoproteins, and other goo. Of course there’s no ghost in the machine. It’s just a machine.
And my machine hurts! I don’t want to die. Mark Twain was wrong when he argued that annihilation will be okay because we’ve already experienced it before we were born. He’s wrong because there’s a critical asymmetry that he’s overlooking: When we didn’t exist the first time, we hadn’t had the experience of being alive yet. Now that we have existed, our second episode of annihilation will necessa
rily have a different quality, as it will rob us of the life that we cherish so desperately, and there will be no other episode of existence in which to look forward.
No, I see our situation more like Blaise Pascal, and “marvel that people are not seized with despair at such a miserable condition.”
* * *
1 Voltaire. (1990). Candide. In Candide and other stories (R. Pearson, Trans.; p. 18). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1759).
2 Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great (p. 264). New York: Twelve.
3 Luke 4:12 and Hebrews 11:1, respectively.
4 Hooper, J. & Teresi, D. (1986). The three-pound universe (p. 277). New York: Dell Publishing.
5 Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death (p. 49). New York: The Free Press.
6 The Three-Pound Universe, p. 306.
7 Lucretius. (2007). Lucretius, from de rerum natura (On the nature of things). (W. H. Brown, Trans.). In C. Hitchens (Ed.), The portable atheist: Essential readings for the nonbeliever (p. 3). US: Da Capo Press.
8 Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy (p. 342). New York: Basic Books.
9 Wolpert, L. (2007). Six impossible things before breakfast (p. 144). New York: W.W. Norton.
10 Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma (pp. 123-132). New York: The Free Press.
11 Regarding animal research, I wouldn’t do it, either. However, it’s important to realize that literally millions more animals are euthanized at animal shelters than in scientific laboratories every year. If you want to save animals—which I agree is a noble cause—you’ll get much more bang for your buck by focusing on the neutering and spaying movement or by volunteering at your local animal shelter as opposed to, say, protesting at universities that conduct animal research.
12 The Three-Pound Universe, p. 211-212.
13 Sacks, O. (1985). Reminiscence. In The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales (p. 130). New York: Summit Books. See also: Sacks, O. (1995). The landscape of his dreams. In An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales (pp. 153-187). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
14 It’s a bit ironic: Brain tissue itself doesn’t actually have pain receptors in it, so this doesn’t hurt. This is also why a brain tumor can get as big as a baseball before the patient notices.
15 Penfield, W. & Perot, P. (1963). The brain’s record of auditory and visual experience: A final summary and discussion. Brain, 86, 596-696.
16 Ramachandran, V. S. (1999). God and the limbic system. In Phantoms in the brain (pp. 175 & 179). New York: Quill.
17 For example, The Three-Pound Universe, pp. 1-3; 329-330; 352.
18 Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, p. 109; his discussion of hypnosis that follows is on p. 110-115.
19 Whinnery, J. E. (1997). Psychophysiologic correlates of unconsciousness and near-death experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 15, 231-258.
20 Groth-Marnat, G. (1994). Cross-cultural perspectives on the near-death experience. Australian Parapsychological Review, 19, 7-11.
21 Stenger, V. (2012, April 16). Life after death: Evaluating the evidence. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/life-after-death-examinin_b_1428710.html
22 For example, Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature, 419, 269-270. Actually, many of Wilder Penfield’s patients had described autoscopic-like sensations decades ago.
23 Newitz, A. (2014, June 16). 10 scientific ideas that scientists wish you would stop misusing [Web blog post for io9]. Retrieved from http://io9.com/10-scientific-ideas-that-scientists-wish-you-would-stop-1591309822
CHAPTER 6
The Doomsday Defense
I ain’t happy about it, but I’d rather feel like shit than be full of shit.
— Suicidal Tendencies, “You Can’t Bring Me Down”
BESIDES HELPING ME COME TO TERMS with my spirituality (lack thereof, that is), college transformed my attitudes about other matters, and in similarly dramatic fashion. The other ground-shaking life-changer was learning about defense mechanisms, acknowledging their reality and how they affect our lives, if not run them sometimes.
Indeed, as a young undergraduate student, I had been defensive about defense mechanisms! I used to scoff when an instructor introduced the notion, almost always in the context of Sigmund Freud and some nonsense about penis envy or something. Hell, I had done LSD and had myriad other “mind-expanding” experiences—there was no way some silver-spoon, douchebag professor from New England was gonna teach me and my tattoos about consciousness and reality! But I can see now that I was wrong, simply not willing to admit that my contact with reality was somehow compromised. I’m telling you now, it was (and it still is).
When teaching my own college courses these days, I don’t talk about the transformation of my spirituality directly, given that it’s a little personal and doesn’t flow well with many curricula. However, I do like to disclose to my students how I was wrong about defense mechanisms, which often arises naturally in psychology courses. At the very least, I’m hoping that students will be encouraged to examine themselves and entertain the prospect that they, too, might be mistaken about the notion as well, just as I was sitting in the same seat twenty-something years ago. I want to demonstrate firsthand that it doesn’t have to be humiliating to admit when you’ve been wrong. In fact, as I argue to the class, such behavior can be liberating, if you allow it to be. It’s hard to say it without sounding cliché, but there really is something empowering about being able to appreciate and embrace our mistakes—including our misperceptions of reality, and those of ourselves. You really can’t grow without it. It’s excruciating at first but gets much easier with practice.
So yes, after years of both receiving and administering psychotherapy and evaluating thousands of patients—from disgruntled cheerleaders to psychotic murderers—I have ultimately come to believe that defense mechanisms are as real as biological organs, like hearts, lungs, and kidneys. No, I’m not talking about all the details of wanting to kill your dad so you can screw your mom, but the general notion of emotional repression is, undoubtedly, a profound and pervasive part of our lives.
It’s fascinating to listen to neo-Freudian psychologist Phebe Cramer speculate how the repression or denial of aversive stimulation begins as early as any other human behavior. She cites her late colleague René Spitz who argued that even the most fundamental act of sleeping may be “the prototype of all defense.”1 Certainly, sleep is more about rest, recovery, and growth than anything else, but I’m intrigued when I remind myself that excessive sleeping is a textbook symptom of depression. I think about how much I crave sleep when I’m down myself. Why? Because I want to avoid reality, plain and simple. Sometimes when I wake up on a depressed day, I don’t want to think or perceive or even be for a while—so I don’t: I go back to sleep. If we appreciate sleep as a potential mechanism of denying reality, we might conceptualize suicide as the epitome of it.
Phebe points out that infant life is strewn with frustration and excessive stimulation. We’re failing at everything we attempt, whether sitting up, crawling, or communicating with others. I’ve learned elsewhere that some developmental neuroscientists suspect that simply being conscious as a baby may be overwhelming at times, as one is still trying to learn the basics of the most fundamental experiences, such as depth perception and how to predict how something must feel in the hand depending on how it looks to the eye. Perhaps some of the inexplicable crying we see so often is due to confusion as much as anything else. Those toys we give our kids where they put blocks of different shapes through holes is a lot more educational than some people reckon; kids really are in the process of figuring all that stuff out. Given that these issues had to be dilemmas at some point during our neural development, imagine the perplexity that must be aroused when Daddy comes home from work and slams the door on his way in and ignores me! All of this ha
s to be too much to handle at times, perhaps making sleep even more precious during infancy than it is during adulthood.
As kids mature they acquire more options to avoid noxious stimulation through more advanced motor movements and cognitive operations. Phebe provides an elegant example of research in which a preverbal baby is left with a stranger. When mom leaves the room, the baby cries. When the stranger picks the baby up but positions her so that she can’t see who is holding her, she relaxes a bit. However, when turned to face the caretaking stranger, she turns her head to avoid looking at him (that is, she denies him, or represses his presence—perhaps pretending, on some level, that it’s mom holding her instead?). Sure enough, when the baby is not allowed to exclude the stranger from her field of vision, she resumes crying. The whole scene reminds me of similar behavior as an adult, when we reflexively cover our eyes and ears when we don’t want to see or hear something, like during a horror movie.
Repression gets much more interesting and sophisticated as we develop even more control over our mental faculties. At some point, we learn how to control our attention, including by numbing it down so much that it’s almost like we’re sleeping while awake. Dissociation is a phenomenon with which we’re all familiar, as it can happen even when we’re not being emotionally defensive. When teaching, I like to illustrate via the example in which we drive our cars along familiar routes and end up getting to our destination without having really paid attention to what we were doing along the way. We were on autopilot, our mind elsewhere, so much so that we might even be alarmed that we made it all! Sometimes I cannot, for the life of me, recall having passed through a certain traffic light, but I know that I must have. Such “zoning out” is often used in benign situations to cope with boredom while we sit in class or some other lecture, again almost forgetting where we are at times. Regarding repression, something similar but more profound can happen when we are being traumatized, such as being assaulted by another person. Specifically, some of the most intense instances of dissociation we hear about are actually common reactions to sexual assault. For an example from the grey area between boredom and assault, I used to dissociate often when my dad was yelling at me growing up. I’d be looking at him, nodding, but my mind was elsewhere. I’m serious: I couldn’t recall what he said half the time, despite the fact he was yelling quite loudly.
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