The Exorcism

Ken Hollings

February 2005

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Religion on the brain

Neuropsychologist Michael Persinger of Canada's Laurentian University in Ontario argues that religious experience is created within the brain. Current studies suggest that our sense of self is produced by the left temporal lobe, located in the logical and precise hemisphere of our brains, which helps maintain the boundary between individual consciousness and the outside world. Shut that lobe down, and you feel at one with the Universe – a prime form of religious experience. Stimulate the right temporal lobe, on the creative and more emotional side of our brains, and a right hemispheric sense of self is invoked, which we tend to experience as a 'separate' entity.

With an old motorcycle helmet fitted with solenoids emitting mild electromagnetic fields around the wearer's temples, Persinger claims to have stimulated this 'sensed presence' in the minds of over 80% of his test subjects, inspiring within them the feeling of 'something greater' and the 'infinite possibilities to existence'. Persinger's work has put him at the forefront of 'neurotheology', a radical new attempt to study how our brains might have invented God rather than the other way around.

Such an approach has some equally shocking precedents. In 1933 Montreal neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield discovered that when he electrically stimulated certain nerve cells in the temporal lobe, the patient would 'relive' previous experiences in convincing sensory detail. During the 1960s, behavioural physiologist Jose Delgado of Yale University went even further, implanting electrodes into the brains of live animals and controlling their behaviour via radio signals. In one famous experiment, he successfully stopped a charging bull in its tracks.

In his controversial 1976 publication, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that the sensation commonly described as 'having a religious experience' is merely a side effect of the feverish interactivity between the right and left halves of our brain. Our ancient ancestors, he suggested, lacked a strong enough sense of individual identity to explain such exchanges as anything but voices and visions from the gods on high.

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