Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is a fascinating phenomenon with huge potential for teaching us more about the relationship between the brain and religion. Glossolalistic behavior has been reported in a wide variety of cultures, including Tibet, and is thus by no means specific to Christianity. Julian Jaynes (previous post), not surprisingly, positions it in the context of his bicameral brain theories. (Recent research supports this—showing greater right-brain activation after glossalalic episodes.)

Jaynes emphasizes that speaking in tongues inevitably happens in the context of groups and religious services, after various “induction” procedures such as prayer or ritual, and in the presence of strong charismatic figure. His explanation is that these factors are necessary to produce what he calls the “collective cognitive imperative” necessary to go into a deep trance.

The behavior is also widely viewed as being learned, whether consciously or not. Some researchers think it can be learned outside of a religious context: Nicholas Spanos found that 20% of subjects began speaking in tongues spontaneously after listening to genuine samples, the number rising to 70% after further training. Other reports are that people who learn glossolallia in a religious setting can then perform it anywhere, even while driving a car.

Jaynes cites research that glossolalics of any language, and from any religion, make the same, meaningless sounds, which are not human language but rather a pseudo-language, or, less charitably, “babbling”. The use of the term “babbling” is interesting because it’s often applied to babies’ speech acts, and some researchers believe that glossolalia is indeed a form of linguistic regression. They point out the the number of vowels and consonants uses is restricted (by one account, an average of only six phonemes used compared to the 30 typical of adult language).

Jaynes’ neurological explanation is that “rhythmical discharges from subcortical strcutures are coming into play, released by the trance state of lesser cortical control.”

All of the above, however, would seem to be overly objective in nature. Glossalalics themselves report a feeling of release and happiness after episodes—peace, joy, and inner harmony are some of the words that have been used (some also self-report that their speech was meaningful). Perhaps the relaxed, restored body/brain state resulting from speaking in tongues is related to that achieved through meditative practice. Maybe the practice ties into the neurochemical reward structure. (Other effects reported include relief of pain and a strengthened immune system.)

This is somewhat consistent with 1 Corinthians 14:1-14, where Paul emphasizes that a person who speaks in tongues is talking to “God”, and will grow spiritually in the process.

Art courtesy of Ola Rinta-Koski. Larger version is here.

Last week, I proposed 25 research topics for neurotheology. The underlying theme was to find phenomena somehow related to religion—for instance, speaking in tongues occurs in explicitly religious contexts, while some schizophrenics display quasi-religious behavior—and then inquire as to the neural bases of those phenomena.

There is a single researcher who has addressed many more of these topics than any other: Julian Jaynes (picture; Wikipedia entry).

Jaynes was a psychology professor most noted for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, where he laid out his astonshing thesis that consciousness is of recent origin (three millennia ago), and replaced internal voices as the basic means of human self-control. These internal voices were what were referred to as gods, and, he claims, the predecessors of the variety of gods people worship today.

Of course, many people think Jaynes is simply a crackpot; see this Salon article by Mark Wallace for an example. But these critics really need to come up with better attacks. For instance, Wallace says that “Jaynes displays a hallmark trait of the crackpot authority in drawing from widely disparate disciplines to back up a hypothesis that would never even occur to most scientists.” That’s supposed to be bad?

The illustrious Daniel Dennett, for one, is a Jaynes fan, and in his article about Jaynes reprinted in Brainchildren) he provides a highly succinct summary of Jaynes’ hypothesis: that the human brain has gotten a “software upgrade” in recent millennia, while suggesting that many of the details of Jaynes’ theory—even the supposed centerpiece involving auditory hallucinations—are optional.

It is not at all surprising that Jaynes covers nearly half of the issues in my list of 22 research topics for neurotheology: mental illness, brain pathology, hallucinogens, polytheism, hypnosis, music, genetics, speaking in tongues, and at least one I omitted, poetry. Not surprising because Jaynes, in a way, is the original neurotheologist par excellence. In spite of its title, his book is not really about consicousness; indeed, Jaynes spends the entire first chapter making the point that consciousness, appropriately defined, is basically just a tool we humans use to do some things more effectively, but is hardly at the core of our experience.

Instead of consciousness, what the book is really about is God, or god, or gods, how they functioned before the advent of consciousness as we know it today (as verbalized messages from the right brain to the left), and how their vestiges constitute what we think of as religion today. In other words, “Breakdown” is really the “Bible”, so to speak, of neurotheology.

Love Jaynes or hate him, his theory remains, after 30 years, indisputably the single most comprehensive, wide-ranging, imaginative hypothesis available.

Reading this book, I had the uncanny feeling that perhaps our country is slipping back into bicamerality—by which I don’t mean having two houses of Congress, but rather Jaynes’ pre-conscious state. After all, we now have a President who said he was “told” by “God”—a voice, in other words—to invade Iraq, and a country which responded by electing him to another term.

I’ve chosen to celebrate the first anniversary of Numenware—thanks to all my avid readers for their support—with a list of 25 top neurotheology research issues, along with an index to posts that relate to each topic.

1. Meditation. What are the short- and long-term effects of meditation of brain function and structure? (How meditation improves brain function, Meditate and thicken your cortex, Two types of meditation, two types of brain patterns?, Meditation stabilizes perception)
2. Transcendental experience. What are the neurological analogs of transcendental experience—for instance, a particular balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems?
3. Mental illness. Can we map the relationship between religious-themed behaviors on the part of mentally ill people such as schizophrenics and “normal” religious behavior to the neurological factors underlying that mental illness?
4. Brain pathology. Can we correlate changes in religious behaviors with neuroarchitectural changes and pathologies, such as lobotomies? (Lobotomobile, Religion in the minimally conscious)
5. Hallucinogens. Can we correlate religious-like behaviors that arise under the influence of hallucinogens with the know neurochemical effect of such substances? (Freedom of neuroreligion, Supremes OK getting high at church, LSD’s Albert Hoffman on the colorless substance of reality)
6. Age. Can we correlate the development of “religious” belief (belief in the supernatural and/or afterlife) with the development of the brain in children? ) Is there a neurological correlate to the fact that major religious leaders have had their ephiphanies in their thirties? (Studying children’s belief in the afterlife, Developmental neurotheology, Neurological basis of average age of enlightenment)
7. Species. Can we correlate the difference between primates’ primitive religious behaviors (or those of other advanced mammals) and those of humans with our knowledge of how the human brain has developed over theirs? (Neurozootheology)
8. Gender. How do men and women differ in religious belief and behavior, and can we establish a correlation between that and how they differ in brain structure? (Neurotheology of gender)
9. Polytheism. Can we correlate the difference between monotheistic and polytheistic beliefs with neurological factors?
10. Motor systems. Do “religious people”—in particular meditators—have identifiable differences in motor functioning which can be related to brain structure? (Motor systems, Mirror neurons and neurotheology)
11. East vs. West. Can a relationship be found between known differences in brain structure and function in Occidentals vs. Orientals and the types of religious beliefs and behaviors that have emerged in West and East?
12. Agent hypothesis. Can we design experiments to prove the hypothesis that belief in God is a “spandrel” or “exaptation” of natural selection for a bias for humans to see agency in the world? (Is God an accident?, Why do humans believe in religion?, Pascal Boyer on neurotheology)
13. Dreaming. What is the correlation between experiences of God or the supernatural while dreaming vs. while awake and known differences in neurological processing in the two states? (Dreaming of God)
14. Hypnosis. Is religious belief a form of, or share mechanisms with, hypnosis? (Hypnosis and cognitive processing)
15. Music. Religious ceremony often involves music, and music may evoke religious feelings; meaning that the neurology of music may be able to provide insight into the neurology of religion. (Neuromusicology, Mozart effect II, Religious music in your brain)
16. Zen. Can we find neurotheological references in historical Buddhist literature such as the writings of Dogen? (The sound of one hemisphere clapping)
17. Genetics. In addition to historiocultural, “meme”-like factors underlying religion, could there be specific genetic factors as well, such as ones that might predispose certain people to religious behavior or belief? (Gautama’s Darwinian boost, The Mystical Mind)
18. Aliens. Could belief in aliens or UFOs share an underlying neurological mechanism with the belief in God or the supernatural? (What is it like to believe you were kidnapped by an alien?)
19. Fringe phenomena. Are phenomena such as possession and stigmata real, and if so can we understand their neural basis? (Neurology of possession, Stigmata)
20. Emotions. Emotions are a hot area in neuroscience; can we relate the knowledge gained to religious emotions, such as love of God? (Neuroscience of divine love)
21. Near-death experiences. What is the neurology underlying NDEs and how does it connect to the fact that they often involve religious imagery? (Adaptive value of near-death experiences
22. Speaking in tongues. What are the neural mechanisms related to glossolalia, and how are they related to neurology known to be religiously relevant?

Do kids naturally believe in an afterlife, or is it something they’re taught? Jesse Bering from the University of Arkansas has developed some clever experiments to find the answers to questions like these, described in a recent issue of American Scientist.

For instance, Bering would tell the kids a fable about a mouse eaten by an alligator, and then ask them what kinds of physical or mental functions they thought the dead mouse retained. He found the answers lay along a spectrum—almost none of the kids thought the mouse would be eating something after death (biological behavior), bur increasing numbers thought it might feel hunger, sense something, feel something, want something, or know something. Interestingly, it also took the kids longer to decide as they progressed down this spectrum.

And the younger the children, the more behaviors and feelings they attributed to the dead mouse. The implication here is key: belief in supernatural things is not simply based on cultural indoctrination but is somehow intrinsic in the kids’ young minds. More acculturation—and/or just growing up—actually reduces the tendency to supernatural belief.

Bering’s overall stance on the origin of religion and belief in the supernatural is that it was originally a natural outgrowth of humans systems for making inferences about intentional agents (compare this to Boyer, who emphasizes that the idea of dead people doing things is “memorable” due to its counterintuitiveness). The belief in the supernatural was then found adaptive and selected for due to its effect in preventing people from engaging in destructive behaviors even when they would not be caught.

What is the mechanism by which meditation enhances brain function? At the Investigating the Mind conference held in Washington DC in November 2005, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute, Dr. Wolf Singer (picture), Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, presented an intriguing hypothesis.

Dr. Singer’s research focus is the so-called binding problem: how are processes integrated within the distributed cortical architecture? His theory is that precisely calibrated neural clocks serve to coordinate the massive number of parallel, distributed subprocesses in the brain. Stated differently, various parts of the brain work together—talk to each other—by operating at the same frequency, sort of like neural walkie-talkies.

The frequencies Singer has identified as serving the integrative function are in the beta- and gamma frequency range. That’s interesting because gamma frequencies have also been identified as those enhanced by meditative practice (previous post).

This leads to a radical new hypothesis for how meditation enhances brain function: it improves synchronization, boosting the efficiency with which the parts and processes of the brain can work together.

MIT World has put up a video here of Jeff Hawkins talking about Numenta and his Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) model.

It’s a bit strange. On the one hand Jeff is a kind of naive realist. But then he develops a theory of brain functioning critically dependent on top-down, inside-out feedback and guidance systems. In other words, he says we see donuts because we already know what donuts are supposed to look like. He “understands” that “we” are copartners in constructing our experience of reality—but doesn’t “understand” that he “understands” it.

The same point, from a Buddhist, cognitive science standpoint, is the argument made in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela (details), Evan T. Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. They present a post-cognitivist, post-connectionist view, integrating subject and object, which they call “enactive cognitive science”. Theirs is a “middle way”, between a mechanical view of cognition as a set of robotic sensors, and a simplistic “it’s all in your mind” mentalism. Varela, of course, is the late Chilean biologist known for, among other things, inventing the word neurophenomenology. This book may be one of the few philosophy books in the world with a lengthy explanation of animals whose visual color space is 2-dimensional, or even 5-dimensional (some birds)! The authors’ call for science to incorporate personal experience into its methodologies echoes that of the Dalai Lama—not surprising, since Varela was a student of Tibetan Buddhism.

Of course, Dogen is talking about exactly the same thing in Genjo Koan, where he tells us:

When we experience sights and sounds, body and mind outstretched, we do so directly, not as reflections in a mirror, not as the moon and the water.

The “outstretching” of our body and mind here is precisely the feedback loop down from our beliefs and learned patterns. The word “directly” is 親しく (shitashiku), which could probably also be translated as “intimately”. Dogen is giving us his basic model of cognition, still clear as a bell after 750 years. (Although you could never tell this from other translations.)

The last two phrases are not mere throw-away Zen-like images. Dogen is specifically contrasting his model with two alternatives. The first, “reflections in a mirror”, is the robot eye. The second, “moon and water”, is the “Matrix”-like simulacrum.

Dogen is saying, in other words, our outstretched body and mind provide a context which shapes and interprets sights and sounds—meeting reality halfway.

Scientific American Mind (website) has a brief article on the science of meditation in its February/March 2006 issue which may be worth a look. But gee, why can’t the editors find a writer who actually knows the field, and devote more than two pages to the topics?

Consider the following:

Neuroscientists have shown that by altering brain-wave patterns, meditation purges negative thoughts.

Umm, not exactly.

What if a person could add 20 minutes of meditation, twice a day, to his deaily routine of 309 minutes on the treadmill and achieve physical and mental harmony?

Well Gee whiz. Why did it take mankind 10,000 years to figure that out?

What is more, if he (Clifford Saron, a UC Davis researcher who wants to do a one-year “Biosphere”-like study of meditators) can identify a brain region that brings about inner peace…

Yep, if we could just find that region…it must be there somewhere!

Picture credit: NOVARTIS VISIONS OF SCIENCE 2003/TOM BARRICK

This image, entitled Pathways of the Mind, was created at St George’s Hospital Medical School by Tom Barrick, using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner that measures the way in which water moves around the brain. It was one of the prize winners in the Visions of Science photographic awards.

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/content/vol331/issue7522/images/small/17926.gif

Do people see God in their dreams? If so, this could contribute to our understanding of how humans view the divine.

Let’s assume we understand the relationship between people’s view of the world when awake and when sleeping. If we then look at how people see God in their dreams, we can map that to a view of God during their waking consciousness.

Personally, I don’t experience the divine during my dreams. But I have some insight during my processes of perception while dreaming. I have an overall sense of what’s happening, but with a relatively vague focus. For instance, I may sense the presence of a group of people, but I don’t see their individual faces in detail. But if I decide to zoom in on them—much like a digital camera zoom—I can then see details. Recently I dreamt I saw a garden, but only vaguely the flower beds—until I zoomed in on them and saw individual petals. During my dreams I do not walk, but rather float. That’s rather convenient, since I can drift over walls and descend the sides of buildings. I also note that I am separate from myself in dreams; my character goes ahead of me, but then I follow it.

Let’s collect information on what people see of God during their dreams, and use our knowledge about the nature of dreams to map that back to equivalent non-dreaming divine experiences.

What does it mean to say someone is divine, a living God? That they share God’s infallibility, or compassion, or wisdom, or omniscience, or power?

From the neurotheological standpoint, the question we want to ask is what mental state do people enter when they view a human they consider godly? This should be easy to “divine” with current neuroimaging techniques. And the results might well cast light on the experience of the non-embodied divinity as well.

We have such a living God in the form of the late
Showa Tenno (picture), commonly known as “Hirohito” in the West. Although he renounced his divinity in the famous ningen sengen, or “declaration of humanity” (人間宣言), there are still many Japanese, most already in their 80s or 90s, that continue to believe him an arahitogami, or “human god” (ç?¾äººç¥ž), the latest in the long line of descendants of the mythical Amaterasu. And no small number may believe the same of his son and current Tenno Heika (official site), no matter what the Constitution may say.

As part of our program of neurotheological research, let’s grab those old Japanese folks before they die, toss them in an MRI machine, and make sure we take a neurological record of their reaction to viewing pictures of the man they believed was God.

Mirror neurons (Wikipedia) are magical brain cells that fire both when performing some act and watching someone else perform it.

In this sense, they can be viewed as the key to learning and sharing behavior, tying the acts we perform to those of others and vice versa. Scholars such as M. Arbib have even proposed that they lie at the heart of language.

Now the NYT, in a Jan. 10 article entitled Cells That Read Minds, has given us a competent, if brief, overview of the field. This has been quite widely blogged.

What’s the neurotheology connection? Normally we think of mirror neurons as being activated via everyday motions such as reaching for a cup, or sticking out your tongue—something even one-day-old babies can imitate.

But what about religious behaviors? Such as bowing, prostrating yourself, or placing your hands together in prayer? If such motions stimulate mirror neurons, especially in young children, there may be grounds to argue that these are hard-wired physical behaviors.