We Are Our Brains

by D. F. Swaab

  Incidentally, studies on the efficacy of prayer are beset by unique methodological obstacles:

  • Sometimes only the first name of the person being prayed for was mentioned, and in some cases only the photo was shown. Would that be enough for God to be able to identify the individual in question?

  • How do you prevent people in the control group from being prayed for? Many people in hospitals might well be receiving the benefit of prayers from partners, friends, or acquaintances.

  • You might also wonder, even as a believer, whether God listens to everyone who prays and whether he is prepared and able to intervene in the affairs of humankind.

  • Believers could also ask themselves whether God’s ways are a legitimate object of study and whether God would allow himself to be tested (“Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” Deuteronomy 6:16).

  In the face of all these methodological problems, the only way to establish whether praying for someone else is effective would be through a well-controlled experimental study with animals. As yet I haven’t come across one.

  RELIGIOUS MANIA

  When one person has a delusion, they are considered crazy. When millions of people have the same delusion, they call it religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  Certain neurological and psychiatric disorders can give rise to religious mania, at least if religion has been programmed into the brain during an individual’s youth. After an epileptic seizure patients can lose contact with reality, and a quarter of these psychoses take a religious form. Religious delusions can also result from mania, depression, or schizophrenia or constitute the first symptom of frontotemporal dementia. The murder, in 2003, of the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh was, for instance, committed at the “command of Jesus” by the twenty-five-year-old schizophrenia sufferer Mijailo Mijailović, who had stopped taking his medication. He thought he’d been chosen by Jesus and couldn’t resist the voices that were instructing him to kill. John Nash, who in 1994 won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, had been diagnosed at the age of twenty-nine with paranoid schizophrenia. Some of his delusions were religious in nature; he saw himself as a secret messianic figure and the biblical Esau. Near-death experiences can also have a religious slant. One woman with a lung embolism claimed that Jesus himself had sent her back from heaven to earth to look after her children.

  Ger Klein, a former Dutch state secretary for education and science, wrote a vivid description of his own religious mania. I met him in the summer of 1975, when he was forced to cut 200 million guilders from his budget in the space of a single week. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research (NIN), which was waiting for a new director; the Institute for War Documentation (RIOD), headed by the historian Loe de Jong; the Dutch astronomical satellite program; and several other important bodies. I was a thirty-one-year-old researcher at the time, and although I had no administrative experience whatsoever, I took it upon myself to try, with the rest of the NIN’s staff, to get the government decision reversed. After talks with all the parliamentary factions and a hard-fought campaign, we ultimately succeeded; the House of Representatives voted unanimously to preserve the institute. In the negotiations that followed, Klein and I got along well, despite our very different interests, backgrounds, and characters.

  In 1978, Loe de Jong revealed at a press conference that Willem Aantjes, the leader of a new party called the Christian Democratic Appeal, had signed up with the SS during World War II. Klein, who only shortly before had been responsible for the RIOD in his capacity of state secretary, was dismayed. According to Klein, De Jong was completely out of order in subjecting Aantjes to what was in effect a summary execution. Klein thought that De Jong, with whom he’d clashed in the past, should have left the government to deal with this issue. Getting more and more agitated, he started preparing for the upcoming debate in the House like a man possessed. By four o’clock in the morning he’d already drunk three liters of strong coffee. But the Labor Party elected someone else as spokesman for the debate, and to make matters worse, Klein was torn to shreds by the education minister, Arie Pais. When he drove back home after the debate on November 17, 1978, he suddenly felt as if he had been given an almighty punch in the forehead. That marked the start of his manic phase, which he compellingly described in his 1994 book Over de Rooie (Seeing Red). He was under the impression that he’d undergone a brain operation and was being controlled by external forces. A booming voice said to him, “You are not just God, no, you are the God of Gods.” He went and stood outside a supermarket, announcing to all passersby that a humanist salvation awaited them. He wasn’t at all surprised when people hurried away, rather than stopping to listen, because that meant they had taken the urgency of his message seriously. Later he took off all his clothes and ran in circles around his house in the middle of winter. This manic period made way for a terrible depression a few months later.

  After reading Klein’s enthralling book, I wrote to him to ask if he still remembered me and to tell him that now, nineteen years on, we both had a common interest: manic depression. By way of a subtle hint, I enclosed some of our publications on postmortem studies of the brain tissue of patients with the disorder. I received a long and kind letter back, which I still preserve between the pages of his book. “Of course I remember the consultations between your delegation and the ministry about the closure of the Institute.… The decision to ax it following the budgetary cuts that were forced on me almost cost me my political career, but I’m sure you must be satisfied with what was achieved.… The research into manic depression naturally interests me very much. As a layman I know little about it: Perhaps we could meet in the near future so that you could explain the medical advances in this field to me. Would this be a possibility?” Of course I immediately invited him to visit the institute. However, he died two years later, in December 1998, without having taken up my invitation.

  TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY: MESSAGES FROM GOD

  I don’t want to go to heaven; I wouldn’t know anyone there.

  Harm Edens, HP/De Tijd

  There shall not be found among you anyone … who uses divination, … or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.… For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD.

  Deuteronomy 18:10–12

  Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy sometimes have ecstatic experiences, making them think that they are in direct contact with God and receiving orders from him. One man had visions of a bright light and a figure resembling Jesus. He turned out to have a tumor in the temporal lobe that was causing epileptic activity. After it had been removed, the ecstatic seizures disappeared for good. The divine visions in attacks of this kind are usually very brief—between thirty seconds and a couple of minutes—but they can permanently affect a person’s personality, transforming them emotionally or inducing hyperreligiosity. Between attacks, these individuals often develop Geschwind syndrome, whose symptoms include obsessive writing, loss of interest in sex, and extreme religiousness. This rare form of epilepsy may well explain the behavior of various historical figures.

  When the apostle Paul was still using his Hebrew name Saul and was on the way to Damascus to track down and imprison Christians, he had an ecstatic experience: “As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied.… For three days [Saul] was blind” (Acts 9:1–9). It seems distinctly possible that the apostle had temporal lobe epilepsy, as there are other known cases in which it has provoked ecstatic experiences culminating in temporary cortical blindness and conversion to Christianity. The text of Corinthians 12:1–9 and the visual hallucinations reported by Luke, Paul’s chronicler, lend weight to this diagnosis. In one of the hallucinations Jesus spoke to him encouragingly; in another he fell into a trance while praying in Jerusalem and saw Jesus.
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  The Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, had a history of epileptic seizures linked to religious experiences from the age of six. He had his first visions in A.D. 610. While asleep in a remote place in the hills near Mecca, he heard a voice that he later ascribed to the Archangel Gabriel, who commanded him, “Read” (iqra). He answered, “I cannot read.” The voice repeated, “Read, in the name of Allah who created!” Terrified that something was wrong with him, Muhammad considered throwing himself down the mountain. But he subsequently heard a voice saying, “O Muhammad! You are the Messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel.” From the first time in the cave of Hira he continued to receive revelations from Gabriel up to the time of his death. These were subsequently written down and collected as the suras of the Qur’an.

  Joan of Arc was born in 1412 to a farmer in the French village of Domrémy and was burned to death at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, at the age of nineteen. Her life history, including her epileptic attacks, was minutely documented by the Inquisition and the Catholic Church. She was thirteen when she first heard the voice of God. It came from the right and was usually preceded by a bright light on the same side. Not long after the voice, saints appeared to give her daily advice during her campaigns. Her epileptic attacks were sometimes provoked by church bells, the sound of which affected her deeply and caused her to drop to her knees and pray, even on the battlefield. The ecstatic seizures were accompanied by a feeling of bliss, making her cry when they were over. Between seizures she displayed all eighteen characteristics of Geschwind syndrome, including emotionality, euphoria, a conviction of dedication, a lack of humor, modesty, a strong moral sense, asexuality, impatience, aggression, depression, suicidal tendencies, and extreme piety.

  In 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to the hospital in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He was suffering from epilepsy, along with many other health problems. During bouts of psychosis he had visual and auditory hallucinations as well as bizarre religious and paranoid delusions. During one such attack, he cut off a piece of his ear and sent it as a present to a local prostitute named Rachel. In between attacks he displayed Geschwind syndrome characteristics. His hypergraphia manifested itself not just in the over six hundred letters he wrote to his brother but also in his enormous productivity as an artist, turning out an oil painting every other day. He’d become increasingly religious from the age of twenty and reread the Bible obsessively. He wanted to become a pastor but was rejected on the grounds of his personality. In 1887 he spent his time translating the Bible into French, German, and English. On Sundays he went to four different churches, and on the wall of his house in Arles he wrote, “I am the Holy Ghost.”

  In 1849, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested for being a member of a liberal group of intellectuals and sentenced to death. After a mock execution in which he and fellow prisoners stood waiting to be shot by a firing squad, he heard that his sentence had been commuted to four years of exile with hard labor in Siberia. He suffered hundreds of epileptic seizures, and his novel The Idiot contains lyrical descriptions of his religious experiences during the ecstatic periods just before the seizures. He wouldn’t have missed them for the world: “You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure. Mahomet, in his Qur’an, said he had seen Paradise and had gone into it. All these stupid clever men are quite sure that he was a liar and a charlatan. But no, he did not lie, he really had been in Paradise during an attack of epilepsy; he was a victim of this disease as I am. I do not know whether this joy lasts for seconds or hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the delights of this world.” This account shows how the ecstatic periods, which last only a few minutes at most, can seem much longer. Dostoyevsky also wrote about the religious visions he experienced, describing how heaven came down to earth and absorbed him, how he felt the presence of God and was filled with it, and cried, “Yes, God exists.” After that, he remembered nothing, which suggests that he subsequently had a generalized epileptic seizure. His seizures were frequent, coming once a week or every three days, and are also described in his book Demons (The Possessed): “There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s something not earthly.… If it lasted more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they are worth it.”

  Many may be disappointed to hear that people from non-Western cultures with this syndrome have never reported seeing Jesus or a Western image of God during a seizure. In Haiti, temporal lobe epilepsy is interpreted as possession by the spirits of the dead and a voodoo curse. It seems that the divine image imprinted in our brains during early development reemerges during epileptic seizures, along with artistic, literary, political, or religious creations and our mental store of thoughts and convictions.

  PUBLIC REACTIONS TO MY VIEWS ON RELIGION

  Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

  Robert Frost

  It all started amicably. Around nine years ago, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an article (September 30, 2000) about a lecture I’d given on the brain and religion, using the title of my lecture as a headline: “We Are Our Brains.” Not long afterward, Monsignor Everard de Jong, the auxiliary bishop of Roermond, wrote a long, eloquent letter to the newspaper setting out his criticism (which boiled down to us being more than our brains) and ending with the question, “Surely Professor Swaab’s wife doesn’t love him solely—or primarily—for his perishable brain?” A little later he came up to me in the intermission of another debate and introduced himself as the author of the letter.

  “I’m delighted to hear that,” I said, “because I think I can answer your question. My wife said that if my brain was transplanted into the body of Steve McQueen, she wouldn’t object at all.” The bishop, completely perplexed, responded with a glassy look. Apparently he’d never heard of Steve McQueen. After Cees Dekker presented a copy of his book Looking Up in Flatland, about science and faith, to the education minister Ronald Plasterk, I was invited to join a debate with Dekker—as was Monsignor de Jong. As soon as I saw him I asked him if he now knew who Steve McQueen was. He had to admit that he still didn’t! The bishop subsequently made a sympathetic attempt to put me back on the straight and narrow by sending me a copy of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary. The book hasn’t shaken my unbelief, though.

  In 2005, two television producers, Rob Muntz and Paul Jan van de Wint, asked me if I wanted to take part in a television program about the brain and religion. At the time their names meant nothing to me, and I wasn’t aware of their wild reputation, but we got along very well. Van de Wint planned to interview five believers in their homes and five atheists in church, while in between Muntz asked passersby for their views. The program was to be broadcast by an educational organization called RVU. That all sounded fine to me. We had a nice conversation, and I agreed to take part. Later, the interviews with the believers were dropped on the grounds that they were too boring.

  The interview with me, the first in the series, took place in St. Nicholas Church in Amsterdam. I talked about the ecstatic experiences of Joan of Arc, the apostle Paul, and the Prophet Muhammad, as well as about manic patients who think that they are God and schizophrenic patients who receive instructions from God. I also talked about the way in which you can induce out-of-body experiences (like the ones associated with near-death experiences) through electrical stimulation of the cortex. We discussed the aspects of our behavior that are fixed at a very early stage of development, including aggressive behavior and what that implies about our moral accountability for our actions. I also spoke about my personal views on religion, heaven, and life after death.

  At an advance screening just before
the start of the series, which turned out to be called God Doesn’t Exist, I was dismayed to see for the first time the absurd clips that had been edited into the interviews (images of a black woman being crucified, for instance), and I realized that we were in for trouble. But it was too late to do anything about it. I was then asked to take the stage to give my comments.

  What did I think of the program? I hid my concern and said, “Great—just a shame about all that chattering in between the clips.” It was a lively evening, but my family left feeling worried about the broadcasting of the interview—rightly so, as it turned out.

  On June 4, St. Nicholas Church instituted summary proceedings in an attempt to ban the broadcast. But the RVU had kept to its agreements with the church and paid the fee of €50 an hour for using the premises. The RVU’s offer to display a message both before and after the broadcast in which the church distanced itself from the program was accepted by the court, and the application to ban the program was turned down. Meanwhile, Muntz and Van de Wint got hate mail from thousands of Christians. The Dutch Roman Catholic and Protestant churches protested jointly before the broadcast but couldn’t stop it going ahead. It was rescheduled to a time when the fewest people would be watching (a few minutes before midnight), and the Sunday rerun was scrapped. Those around me were encouraging about the interview, but a lot of people were alienated by the film clips. On June 9, the Reformed Political Party and the Christian Union blocs in the House of Representatives requested that the “downright blasphemous program be banned.” Their written questions were sent to the prime minister and the ministers responsible for justice and the media. According to the main Dutch press agency ANP, the blocs believed that the broadcast “mocked God and the Christian faith deliberately and in the most damaging way possible.” I never heard any more of those formal complaints, nor of the criminal complaint filed on June 23, 2005, by the League Against Blasphemy and Swearing against the RVU program on the grounds that it was “blasphemous and insulting.” So much for the famous Dutch tolerance.