

Is This Your Brain On God? - onreact-com
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997741

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Oompa
Article sounds interesting, but I want an actual page of text, not a flash
layout. Here's links to each of the articles for those like me:

The God Chemical
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042407...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104240746)

The God Spot
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042915...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104291534)

Spiritual Virtuosos
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043104...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443)

The Biology of Belief
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043517...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104351710)

Near-Death Experiences
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043970...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104397005)

~~~
diiq
Indeed; It took me a good minute to figure out where the content was.

It's worthwhile information, but does anyone else feel like this story get
pulled back into the light once every two years or so?

Telegraphically: "Overactive temporal lobe causes epileptic visions. NDEs.
Meditation increases theta waves and drops parietal lobe activity. Is god
real?"

I'd love to learn what actual progress has been made in understanding why or
how these things work, rather than just the bare correlations. I need to find
a good peer-reviewed journal of, how did they put it, neurotheology?

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randomwalker
Roughly a year ago, over a period of a few months, I had a serious of
"spiritual experiences" that utterly, utterly changed my life.

Only one problem: I don't believe in the supernatural, so the "I found God"
explanation obviously doesn't cut it for me. That left me with a deep need to
learn what the hell happened in my brain.

It appears that we have only recently begun to consider such questions as
topics of legitimate scientific inquiry. The field still seems to attract
whack job "scientists" who think people's brains can be connected by quantum
entanglement (see part 4 of the article). There is a long way to go before I
can have my answers. That's ok, I can wait :-)

~~~
callmeed
_I had a serious of "spiritual experiences" that utterly, utterly changed my
life ... I don't believe in the supernatural_

I'm curious, why were the experiences–while life-changing–not able to change
your stance on the supernatural? Did they at least cause you to question that
belief?

~~~
zach
Presumably the poster's faith in naturalism was too strong to be questioned by
a few brain-hiccups.

------
Alex3917
This is interesting research, but it's poorly described and honestly I doubt
the NYT reporter even really understands it. A few errors also, for example:

"the active ingredient in psilocybin"

Should be the active ingredient in psilocybes (i.e. psilocybe mushrooms).
Psilocybin is a chemical itself, so it doesn't even make sense to describe it
as having active ingredients. (It gets broken down into psilocin by the body,
which is what actually causes the effect.)

If you want to see something on this that is actually kind of interesting,
check out these YouTube videos that were made to promote The Spirit Molecule,
a documentary about DMT:

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+spirit+molec...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+spirit+molecule&search_type=&aq=f)

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pmichaud
I've often struggled with these notions, as they are brought up in the media
in cycles. Our normal faculties are faulty and tenuous, so I don't see why
other, less-used faculties should be discounted because they seem faulty or
tenuous. Seems like an unfair double standard.

One can suppose that there /must/ be an evolutionary advantage to have
developed such senses, but maybe they are a by product of some other feature
of the brain. I mean, early humans didn't need iPhones to figure out how to
trap a boar, but it turns out that we use the same set of faculties to build
both the trap and the iPhone.

------
amadiver
I made a short film about this stuff a few years ago:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWHd5cWjKC8>

( With more robots and Gene Simmons than the npr link )

------
amichail
Putting aside the question of whether God exists, why would it be surprising
that an animal with a brain sophisticated enough to contemplate its own death
would evolve protective mechanisms against that eventuality?

~~~
jrockway
Perhaps, but religion is largely something that we came up with through
thinking. When you need to control a bunch of slaves, it's nice to be able to
say, "your life sucks now, but if you work really hard, there will be PRESENTS
waiting for you when you die! YAY!! It's not me, your hated master, saying
this; it's God! The creator of the whole Universe loves you if you work
yourself to death. So get out there and do it." Very convincing story, and it
mostly worked. (Religion plays on a number of human desires; wanting something
more, wanting to fit in with everyone else, etc.)

It still works today.

~~~
ramoq
Having no spiritual beliefs/religion (aka atheism) satisfies human desires.

Ex. Evolution has several flaws and can never be proven. Even scientifically
it cannot be proven. It is purely the fruit of an individual's imagination,
conviction and desire. Nothing more than this.

~~~
Locke1689
"Scientifically" nothing can be proven. Theories are simple suppositions
(hypotheses) supported by evidence. When we have found an overwhelming body of
evidence in support of a particular theory we consider that theory "proven."
By this standard, we can consider evolution "proven."

In essence, it would take a significantly large corpus of data to refute the
theory of evolution.

~~~
jswinghammer
With empirical observations it takes mountains of evidence to prove your case
and just one piece of evidence to disprove it.

~~~
gjm11
That's rather an oversimplification in practice. "Just one piece of evidence"
can almost always be explained in many, many different ways. Overturning an
apparently well-established theory generally takes a substantial accumulation
of contrary evidence, and preferably the appearance of a new and better
theory.

So, suppose someone found a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian. J B S Haldane
notwithstanding, biologists would not abandon evolution, nor should they.
They'd start looking at possibilities like fraud; previously unknown ways for
things to get fossilized very rapidly; some screwup in their dating of the
relevant bits of rock; and so forth. It would take a whole lot of fossil
rabbits, and preferably some other evidence too, to make "evolution is all
wrong" a better theory than those. That doesn't mean evolution is
unfalsifiable; it means it's got a whole lot of evidence and arguments behind
it, and overturning it would take a correspondingly large weight of evidence.

