Deconstructing divinity

Ellen Gould White had her first religious vision at the age of 16. “While praying, the power of God came upon me as I never had felt it before,” she said. “I was surrounded with light, and was rising higher and higher from the earth.” During this episode, she foresaw the second coming of Christ and saw those following him enter the New Jerusalem, while those who denied his presence were cast into eternal darkness.

Gould White continued to have religious visions. Often, they were accompanied by a sensation of bright lights, the aroma of flowers, and the repetition of a single word, such as “glory.” During these times, she claimed to be in the presence of Jesus, angels, or spirits, who revealed strict moral codes to be adhered to and prophesied future events.

News of Gould White’s visions spread quickly throughout the religious community to which she belonged, then known as the Millerites. She began to write extensively about her experiences, publishing 49 books and over 5,000 articles during her lifetime. Gould White’s visionary experiences and writings became instrumental in the development of a new religious movement, now known as the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which boasts a worldwide membership of over 12 million people. Her writings are still widely read throughout Adventist congregations, and are even today used by church leaders for policy development.

Was Ellen Gould White truly divinely inspired? Were her visions authentic? Or were 12 million people misled?

Neurology professor Gregory Holmes believes that Ellen’s religious visions were the result of a neurological condition called temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).

The temporal lobes are a section of the brain associated with higher cognitive processes such as attention and interpretation of visual and auditory input, and are located on either side of the brain just above the ears. Importantly, the temporal lobes are associated with the limbic system, which is responsible for attaching emotion to stimuli.

At times, individuals with TLE have seizures, which occur when there is a significant increase in electrical activity in some part of the brain — you can think of them as electrical storms in the brain. In TLE patients, these are rarely the type of seizures which involve physical convulsions; to the outsider the individual may simply look vacant and be uncommunicative.

Holmes’ hypothesis regarding Ellen White’s visions is supported by research on the clinical presentation of temporal lobe epilepsy. Seizures experienced by these patients are often preceded by “auras” involving sensations of bright lights and fragrances (such as “burning toast” for those who remember Wilder Penfield’s CBC Heritage Minute). During the seizure itself, patients engage in automatisms such as wringing their hands, pacing back and forth, or repeating particular words. They often have visual and auditory hallucinations which are religious or supernatural in nature. These hallucinations are very likely the visions that are commonly believed to be divine in nature.

Even during the periods between seizures, patients with TLE exhibit specific personality traits. They tend to display hypergraphia (extensive and obsessive writing), hyposexuality (a lack of sexual desire), hypermorality (obsessively following some high moral standard), as well as a preoccupation with religious and philosophical issues.

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So far, the experiences and personality of Ellen Gould White bear an uncanny resemblance to that of TLE patients. She wrote extensively (and, one could argue, obsessively), strived for a high moral standard (writing extensively on the evils of everything from masturbation to eating eggs), and had religious experiences that closely mimic the seizures associated with TLE.

Holmes’ case was further strengthened when he learned of a traumatic head injury Ellen received during childhood. She was hit in the head with a stone during a fight at school, and fell unconscious for three weeks. Severe head injuries such as this one are recognized by the medical community as contributing to an individual’s risk of developing an epileptic disorder.

A number of neuroscientists besides Holmes have studied the connection between temporal lobe epilepsy and religiosity.

Vilayanur Ramachandran decided to examine responsiveness to religious stimuli in TLE patients by presenting them with themed words on a computer screen while measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR). GSR is a measure of how much a person sweats in response to some stimulus, with an increase in GSR taken to mean an increase in emotional responsivity. For example, if you were a subject of the study and the following word appeared on the screen:

BOOBS

Your GSR would likely increase. TLE patients, on the other hand, exhibited no observable GSR reaction.

Alternatively, if you were to see on the screen these words:

BABY JESUS

Your GSR would change only slightly. TLE patients, however, showed a strikingly large reaction.

This was the first study to definitively implicate the temporal lobes in physical religious experience. It also corroborates clinical reports of hyposexuality and hyperreligiosity in temporal lobe epileptics.

“We think what’s critical is the connection between the sensory areas in the temporal lobes and the amygdala, which is the gateway to the emotional centres in the brain. The strength of these connections is what determines how emotionally salient something is,” Ramachandran explains. “Somehow the activity of these specific neural circuits is more conducive to religious belief; it makes patients more prone to religious belief.”

Ellen White Gould is not the only religious leader thought to have suffered from TLE. Ramachandran and others have speculated that the visions of Mohammed, Moses, and Saint Paul may all be due to abnormal activity in the temporal lobes.

Eve LaPlante’s recently published book, Seized, describes the experiences of various historical figures and artists who may also have suffered from this condition, including Lewis Carroll, Soren Kierkegaard, and van Gogh. Notably, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy (diagnosed by neurologist Sigmund Freud) and described profoundly religious experiences. “The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move,” he wrote to a friend. “I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth, and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself; yes, God exists, I cried.”

If the temporal lobes and associated limbic structures are responsible for the production of religious experiences, then we must ask the question: is it possible to stimulate this area of the brain and induce a religious experience in a neurologically healthy individual?

In the late 1990s, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University created a device to do just that. His creation, now known as the “God Helmet,” uses weak electrical fields to stimulate the temporal lobes of those wearing the apparatus.

Eighty per cent of subjects who volunteered for this experiment reported a strong feeling of a presence in the room with them. “The fundamental experience is the sensed presence,” Persinger said, “and our data indicates that the sensed presence — the feeling of another entity, of something beyond yourself, perhaps bigger than yourself, bigger in space and bigger in time — can be stimulated by simply activating the right hemisphere, in particular, the temporal lobe.”

That is, unless you happen to be Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist, agreed to participate in Persinger’s experiment for the BBC Horizons documentary, God on the Brain. He was “deeply disappointed” that his experience with the God Helmet amounted to little more than a slight twitch in his leg. (Maybe he should try Gould White’s route and let one of his many adversaries throw a rock at his head.)

Persinger explains Dawkins’ anomalous outcome with reference to something called “temporal lobe sensitivity.” Essentially, each of us has temporal lobes that vary along a continuum in their responsivity and activity. At one end of the continuum are the temporal lobe epileptics, and at the other end is, well, Richard Dawkins. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, Persinger hypothesizes, and that can explain the presence of religious experiences in those of us without epilepsy. He believes that many normal people can experience what he calls “micro-seizures” — nothing more than a slight increase in temporal lobe activity, which may be interpreted as a religious experience.

If, like me, you fall more towards the Richard Dawkins end of the continuum but would like to know what a religious experience feels like, you can purchase the commercial version of the God Helmet — the Shakti Headset — for only $285 US. That’s right, you too can feel a presence in your very own house for 10 easy payments of $28.50! (Plus $18 shipping and handling.)

The question is whether there is a difference between the experiences induced through temporal lobe stimulation and true religious experiences. Is God nothing more than abnormal brain activity?

According to U of M religious studies professor emeritus, Klaus Klostermaier, “Most major religious traditions have stringent criteria to separate genuine experiences from hallucinations and other psychic phenomena. Drug- or illness-induced ‘experiences’ or brain-stimulated effects would be counted out. Indian traditions, for example, make the ethical behaviour of a person who claims to have a religious experience a major criterion for its authenticity. The Catholic Church initiates a very stringent process before it acknowledges a claimed religious experience as genuine.”

In this light, perhaps the experiences of Persinger’s subjects and owners of the Shakti Headset would be discounted as not being the stuff of a true religious experience.

But it is clear that the brain is somehow involved in true religious experiences — we could not perceive or remember them any other way. What happens in the brains of people experiencing what Klostermaier would consider a genuine religious experience? Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili wanted to find out.

They chose to examine Buddhist meditation and the Catholic “centring prayer,” as both involved a poignant sense of religious enrapture and a feeling of being connected to a different reality. During their practices, nuns focused on a particular word or Bible passage, and Buddhists focused on a particular image. At the very peak of the practice, Newberg and D’Aquili measured where blood was flowing in the brain. Since oxygen transported by the blood is essential for neural processes, increased blood flow corresponds to increased brain activity.

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They were astonished not only by the pattern of brain activity they found, but also by the striking similarity between the Buddhists and the nuns. Both showed decreased activity in the parietal lobes — areas associated with one’s sense of body orientation in the physical space it occupies. This decrease in activity is thought to underlie the loss of self-awareness described by these practitioners.

While activity in the parietal lobes decreased, activity proportionally increased in the thalamus — the area of brain responsible for creating a sense of reality, Newberg suggests, or for interpreting sensations in a lucid way.

This is extremely unusual. Normally, the thalamus and parietal lobes act in concert, decreasing or increasing their activity simultaneously. The increased activity in the thalamus suggests that the loss of physical self-awareness (from the drop in parietal lobe activity) itself feels “real.” The thalamus communicates this new reality to the prefrontal cortex where it is interpreted according to previous beliefs — which is why the nuns interpreted the experience as being in the presence of God and the Buddhists interpreted it as achieving oneness with the universe.

Conspicuously absent from Newberg and D’Aquili’s research is any mention of the temporal lobes. This discrepancy is a current source of debate between Persinger and Newberg, and may be partially explained by differences in the nature of the religious events experienced by Persinger’s experimental participants and Newberg’s religious “experts.”

That the scientific studies discussed above implicate certain areas of the brain in religious experiences in no way precludes the existence of the supernatural. Rather, as the nuns in Newberg’s study indicated, what these researchers do is merely take pictures of brains “on God.”

“For all we know, the thalamus could be responding to incoming stimuli from an unrecognized or unseen source (which some people might call God),” Newberg notes. “But it could also be responding to conceptual activity that is occurring in various parts of the brain.”

Moreover, while it appears likely that Ellen Gould White suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, this does not invalidate the beliefs of current Seventh-day Adventist practitioners. As Dr. Molleurus Copernicus observed in Adventist Currents magazine, “even though Ellen's trances probably were not the kind of visions she believed them to be, she clearly was a person of vision. She envisioned medical institutions, schools, and publishing houses in various locations around the world; suggested far-reaching changes in denominational organization; and demonstrated at times great insight into the mission of her church.”

Do religious experiences come from the temporal lobes, as we see in Ellen Gould White? Is it a difference in activity between the parietal lobes and thalamus, as we see in nuns and Buddhists engaged in religious experiences? Or is it some other area of the brain that we have not considered yet? Could an external supernatural force be the real cause?

Did God create the brain, or did the brain create God?

To temporal lobe epileptics who believe they experience the Almighty, the answers to these questions are perhaps of little significance. During his exile in Siberia, Dostoyevsky wrote: “You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure. [ . . . ] 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.”