Brain Surgery and Levels of Spirituality
Interesting article in Nature this week reporting on Italian researchers and their findings with brain surgery affecting spiritual experiences.
Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace… Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.
It goes on to detail that two specific locations in the back of the brain that, when damaged, can increase spirituality, whereas damage to frontal areas show no such affect.
Further, in one of the most interesting portions of the article, it draws a distinction between areas of the brain that show activity with religious beliefs and spirituality:
Previous studies have shown that a broad network of frontal and parietal brain regions underlies religious beliefs. But spirituality does not seem to involve exactly the same regions of the brain as religion.
Thoughts?
Interesting, as always, but I’m amazed that writers of these kinds of articles just never really seem to get the subtlety of how every experience of every type of course maps somewhere and somehow in our brains, but it doesn’t mean everything is caused by our brains or is limited to simple brain chemistry.
I think you are dismissing this too easily – the reported spiritual experiences varied considerably after the brain structure itself was altered. Further, only alterations of certain parts of the brain caused this change in spiritual experiences.
That’s stronger than mapping an experience to a region of the brain. That’s changing the degree of experience by changing a physical structure.
But why can’t it mean just that? Why can’t the spiritual be the product of our own physicality?
It seems to me that all the evidence points toward our being “part of” a wider energy field. Our brains are particularly attuned to receiving/interpreting pieces of that field. Hence, if you mess with the brain at all, you will mess with the interpretation of the experience that arose from being part of the wider field, similar to altering the tuning of the radio. The signal is still going strong but the box has been subtly altered to make our hearing it different.
Re: #3
Are you arguing for solipcism? That there’s no way of knowing (or firmly believing) that there is an external world beyond just our brains and experience as interpreted by that brain? That seems to me what your question is pointing to…
Solipsism? Who said that? Is there really someone outside me who his speaking? No, couldn’t be. I must have alternate personalities who talk to me, offering insights to which my primary personality is blind. I’ll call this one Habakkuk. Habakkuk seems like a good name for someone who can’t spell.
I guess when you say that it’s reasonable to think that all we can experience is a product of our brains, it seems to me you are arguing for solipcism. If you believe there IS a reality outside yourself, and if people across cultures and time have similar experiences that they refer to as spiritual, why can’t there be an external element to these? Why privilege other things in this world outside ourselves as having a reality that we in our interpretations get approximately “right” but refuse to grant that kind of status to the realities that people interpret as spiritual?
Jonah (who is sure you’re not just a bad dream of his)
Perhaps it could be external. But since we all co-evolved in relatively similar surroundings, it seems plausible and worth exploring whether spirituality does originate in the brain.
Of course, I also think it’s worth exploring if it originates outside of it. Things like the large hadron collider really interest me. I’d also like to see more serious studies of the mind-body connection, etc. But in the meantime, what we already know gives plenty of reason for skepticism and perhaps even initially privileging the internal over the external.
Why be skeptical of this genre of experience more than the other ones we all share? Why are some things we experience in better correspondence with external realities but not the ones that we experience as “spiritual” (which, again, to me are all based on a feeling of interconnection, which I argue is THE key truth of the external world)?
I didn’t say that’s all there is. You said that it can’t be just that, and I simply asked why not?
I guess that it can be just that. If so, I’d love an argument though why we shouldn’t consider all our other interpreted feelings as simply being that, as well. Are you willing to live according to a commitment that our sense of being free is also possibly/likely simply a product of our brains? The idea of justice as purely a social convention that we’ve reified, projecting it as existing beyond the human realm? All values, all morality as having NO external reality influencing our experience of them?
I’m sure you can imagine your own world of experience as purely coming from your brain and millennia of social milieu, and perhaps you can even think it’s bold and beautiful in its own way. I bet , however, just like David Hume when it came to where his philosophical examinations took him, you can’t LIVE it. And if that’s so, then what’s the point of such philosophizing?
This is an incomprehensible argument for me. If I understand you, you are saying that if reality is X and not Y, then we can’t “live it.” How does one live reality? I live IN reality, and my existence is part of that reality. I assume that means I can and do to some degree influence reality. So, I am not fully determined, something I think you and I agree on; thus, I am “living it.”
Seems to me that if there is a natural explanation for an experience or phenomena. Why not accept it. Take serendipity for example. The other day I was thinking of someone and then they called. Well, how many people do I know? How many people call me at work. Stretch that out over ten years and the odds get smaller and smaller. What’s more impressive is that I actually had a friend, and he in deed decided to call me.
With Mormonism’s insistence that the soul is the united body and spirit, I see less contradiction between the physical realms and the spiritual realms. Mormonism is inherently materialistic, so I think we have more room to navigate when studies reveal these kind of results. But I like what Habakkuk says about serendipity.
Of course you feel free, that this experience of freedom is the reality you live in. I argue that you feel this way because you are interpreting correctly the nature of the wider universe, which is indeterminate. Perhaps you agree with me that this is an accurate description of reality external to you, perhaps you don’t.
If you do hold that this is the nature of the wider universe (and hence perhaps why you feel free), however, I still need an argument from you about why you’d privilege your experience of being free as something you’d assert as truly being part of the wider reality while not granting the same to the human experience of deep interconnectedness (which I have argued many times as the sine qua non of “spiritual experiences”).
If you don’t hold that what you interpret as at least some degree of “being free to act” is characteristic of wider reality, then it seems to me that you are either a solipcist (there is no wider reality beyond me) or you are living an experience different than your philosophy–which, if I understand you, is one that entertains the possibility that the kind of experiences of interconnection that many label as “spiritual” is all a matter of brain chemistry. So, unless you give me a reason that brain chemistry does not determine all actions/feelings/emotions, it seems reasonable for me to claim that your everyday experience of the world would be counter to your philosophy–i.e., you’d not be “living” your philosophy.
I think you are trying to have the best of both worlds, and I don’t think it’s a solid position. I think you need to make a choice–either freedom or determinism. If you choose freedom, which I think you will (or already do), then I think to be consistent you would also have to choose the possibility that all other things you/people experience are likewise built into the nature of the wider universe beyond ourselves. This choice then would make it impossible to easily dismiss someone’s experience of true, deep connection to something beyond his or herself as false–i.e., that interconnection is not something that is characteristic of Reality itself.