One of the most common questions asked of creative people is: “Where do you get your ideas from?” The answer is often along the lines of “I don’t know” or “It just comes to me”. So I find it interesting that the ancient Greeks attributed creativity to “The Muses”, which were demigods.

On a similar tack, much eastern thought makes a distinction between conscious thought and “no mind” thought, which appears to come “from nothing”. But does “from nothing” mean literally that, or does it mean that we cannot observe the process?

I am able to observe my own intellect doing its thing, but I can never figure out where my best ideas come from. Does that mean they’re beamed into my brain by external intelligences? I’m guessing that’s not so, since no matter how surprising I find my ideas, they’re still recognizably “mine”. For example, I sometimes write poems that startles me with their originality, yet they never incorporate anything I couldn’t know.

I wonder if the reason why creativity appears to come “from nothing” is because our limited conscious can only track a serial process such as the “7-bits, give or take a few” of “short-term memory”. I don’t expect my intellect to track something massively parallel, yet when I see the far-flung connections made by my creativity, it does appear that a lot of connections are being made far faster than I can “think”.

Jaynes wrote his book long before the advent of personal computers. To the best of my recollection he never compared intellect to a serial process and inspiration to a parallel process. If he was alive today, perhaps he’d have made that comparison.

Incidently Michael Persinger (mentioned above) wrote the Foreword.

I recommend it for anyone interested in Jaynes’s work or neurotheology in general.

It amazes me how some see pure speculation as Jaynes does as meaningful in any way. It’s no more scientific than Chariots of the Gods or Scientology. It’s just a story. Try making a predication from this. If visions of God are really about a block between the two cerebral hemispheres, where the other self-image is seen as God, shouldn’t that mean that God is never seen or heard straight in front of us, but off to one side? That’s hard to study, but casual experience doesn’t suggest this is the case. If this were true, shouldn’t those who have had surgery to split the corpus callosum have trouble this way? They don’t.

One doesn’t have to get this exotic to try to discredit religion with pseudoscientific fantasy. For years, many have tried to attribute all of Paul’s spiritual experiences to epilepsy. Yet while neurons in seizure might produce bright lights, moving fortification lines or even a scary face, no seizure has been documented getting anywhere near Jesus Christ speaking to someone about the error of his ways. One can have more complicated symptoms in a post-ictal state, but even there no has this kind of sensory experience just from seizures. Yet some people will say whatever they want about this.

I haven’t seen much that’s reliable in the study of spiritual experiences since William James. The greatest result of neuroimaging of meditation or prayer to me, apart from the minimal findings that some make too much of, is that the brain of someone in those states is pretty much the same as anyone else. It may very well be that if there were a PET scan on the road to Damascus, one could have found that Paul’s brain while seeing Jesus was like seeing anything else, apart from some signs of being generally excited.

The desire to trivialize religion is neither going away nor anywhere reaching fulfillment through science. Whoever wants to reject religion can reject it. Science does a good job of showing that people thousands of years ago didn’t understand how the natural world works, and so rightfully discredits religion somewhat. But to expect science to prove religion is nothing is fantasy. If you look at any approach to do that, you find poor experimenters and crackpot theories. What a waste.

By the way, regarding Osame’s question, “religious mania” is a term some use for bipolar patients who have only religious experiences with their manias. They do form a distinct minority of bipolar patients, but seem to respond to the same medicines. No one has ever seen that much different about them, though at the extreme, where someone just “goes into the Spirit” for a day, no one would call that bipolar disorder. It may be more about religious people having bipolar disorder than about bipolar disorder being some window to God. Someone has to have the mood disorder as well as religious experience to call them bipolar. It’s tricky calling someone like Nietsche bipolar. He had some organic brain disease as I recall - that can easily look bipolar, but not be. Even without another disease, any arrogant egomaniac in history can be called bipolar by someone. That’s far from a firm diagnosis. I’m a neurologist. I see patients with spells, even if they wind up to have purely psychiatric problems.

what do you mean “is invaded by an other that has not forgotten, and it’s winning”?? are you referring to the new islamic fight on the west, or the war on terror of the christian right in america?? how can you say anyone is winning? what kind of unfunded statements are these?? and who are you to say “it is quite obvious” and even speak in the name of those who are none religious? you may see the secularisation of society as suicide, others may see it as the only chance to stop meaning-less religious wars and the long-needed liberation from the “matrix” that religion has put us in too long now…

Oh dear, just could not resist, could you? Got to poke the prez to impress all your friends.

Your comment elucidates a common problem in the study of religion, by those in science…to wit, someone who clearly has not a clue about religion, not one whit of understanding of what it means to individuals and societys, trying to “explain” it. Your comment makes it seem, at least to me, that you hope by explaining it, that it will then go away. As in it is something not to be desired, or wanted, like a bad cold.

But yet, we now see, that the culture that has forgotten it’s religion, rejected it, as some sort of primitive vestige, being invaded by another that has not forgotten, indeed, glorifies it’s religious basis. And it’s wining…it seems rejection of religion equals cultrual death, or suicide. Which is quite obvious to those who have an understanding of relgion. You don’t even have to be actually religious to see this.

Seen in this light, the presidents comments, and this nations response to those comments, are a source of strength, and great power. A beacon of light, even. But like I said, those in academe have no eyes to see.
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By the way…a software upgrade? EVERYBODY, instantaneously? Over the entire globe? Now who beleives in miracles!

I am making a link to your blog from mine, since neurotheology is a common theme.

Cheers.