vancouversun | When neuroscientist Andrew Newberg scanned the brain of “Kevin,” a
staunch atheist, while he was meditating, he made a fascinating
discovery. “Compared with the Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, whose
brains I’d also scanned, Kevin’s brain operated in a significantly
different way,” he says.
“He had far more activity in the
prefrontal cortex, the area that controls emotional feelings and
mediates attention. Kevin’s brain appeared to be functioning in a highly
analytical way, even when he was in a resting state.”
Would
Newberg find something similar if he scanned my brain? I, too, am an
atheist. This is largely the result of my upbringing (my father is a
theoretical physicist, who, as a former director general of Cern, set up
the Large Hadron Collider that is searching for the Higgs boson, or
so-called “God” particle – though many physicists loathe that phrase),
but also of prolonged investigations into other religions to see if I
was “missing” something central to billions of people worldwide.
When people speak in tongues, they’re gone, they’re in a completely altered state. But most of the time they’re normal people like us
In
this spirit, several years ago, I attended an “Alpha” course, a 10-week
introduction to evangelical Christianity. It utterly failed to convince
me but, during a service, another “recruit,” Mark, fell to his knees,
babbling “in tongues.” When he came round, he was convinced he had been
possessed by the Holy Spirit. I watched, bemused. Why had he entered
this transcendental state, while I was completely unmoved? Was he
deluded, or was he genuinely a conduit of God? Or were our brains simply
wired differently?
“When people speak in tongues, they’re gone,
they’re in a completely altered state. But most of the time they’re
normal people like us, with jobs and children – they don’t show any sign
of being delusional,” says Newberg. “Scans of their brains – when
they’re ’possessed’ – show very different results to scans of Buddhist
monks or Carmelite nuns in prayer or meditation. There you see increased
frontal lobe activity in the areas concerned with concentration, but
the speakers in tongues had decreased activity in the same area, which
would give them the sensation that someone else was ’running the show’.”
And
what about me? “I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a harder time
letting go of frontal lobe activity, so you tend to observe and take a
more critical eye of events, while other people’s brains allow them to
simply surrender to events around them.”
