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.

LSD and other pyschotropic drugs (including DMT; previous post) are likely to play a key role in any neurotheology research program. They evoke behaviors and experiences which clearly have much in common with the religious and are experimental design-friendly.

The New York Times ran an interview with Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD, on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The following struck me:

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature,” he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. “Outside is pure energy and colorless substance,” he said. “All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

54% of Americans believe in demons, demonic possession, and exorcisms (Wikipedia). That’s not surprising, because most believe in the Bible, which tells many stories (especially in the New Testament) of demons. In one famous case, Jesus cast out a legion of malevolent spirits from a man into 2000 pigs who then leaped into the ocean (Mark 5)—offering a new twist on the old koan about dogs possessing Buddha-nature.

Possession and exorcism are enjoying increased visibility. This year we had another exorcism movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (IMDB), based loosely on the true story of a demonic possession in Germany. And it was widely reported that Pope Benedict XVI spoke to a group of exorcists right after his investiture, praising their “important work”.

Exorcisms play an important role in Roman Catholic theology. Baptisms, actually, are a kind of mini-exorcism. In the past, the church also taught that every newborn was possessed by an indwelling demon because of its intimate contact with its mother’s birth canal, a demon which had to be exorcised with a special prayer. Pope John Paul II is reported to have performed three exorcisms during his 23-year papacy. New exorcism guidelines were issued by the Church in 1999, the first revisions in more than 350 years. Devils can now be cast out in local languages, not just Latin. The new rules counsel that less than 1% of people coming to the Church for exorcisms are really possessed—the rest merely need psychiatric treatment. (Of course, other flavors of Christianity as well as non-Christian religions—including Hinduism and Islam—have possession-related theologies as well.)

The “official” secular view of exorcisms, in contrast, is that alleged cases of demonic possession are “merely” brain disorders, such as epilepsy, Tourette’s, schizophrenia, or dissociative identity disorder. However, these medical explanations of the possession phenomenon may not be able to explain some aspects of possession, such as great physical strength (reported in both Biblical and more recent episodes of possession). Of course, as with stigmata, there may be cases of people faking possession, or acting out possession, but it seems highly unlikely that all demonic infestations could be written off as fakery.

Like other religious manifestations, demonic possession is of deep interest to neurotheology. It’s known to be connected to other phenomena like speaking in tongues (some of the possessed speak in unknown languages). You can think of it as a sort of converse to religious megalomania. Most importantly, it’s a known, identifiable phenomenon which can be studied and measured.

In fact, that’s just what Channel 4 in the UK attempted last year, performing an exorcism on live TV while monitoring the subject’s brain (Telegraph article). At the outset, this project seemed profoundly promising. According to an article in Scotland’s Sunday Herald, C4’s Matthew Robinson “highlighted the programme’s scientific elements and insisted the experiment was legitimate”, saying

This is a unique scientific investigation of a much-misunderstood religious practice. Exorcism remains shrouded in mystery. It has always been considered off-limits as far as scientific investigation is concerned, like most apparently inexplicable religious phenomena. But the emergence of neurotheology is changing that.

According to the pre-event publicity, Dr Peter Fenwick (Google search), the noted NDE expert, would monitor the subject’s brain activity. The TV exorcism would be performed by an Anglican priest while cutting-edge neuro-imaging technology monitored activity in the adult male subject’s brain.

The reality was much less enlightening. Inexplicably, C4’s own website appears to contain no content about the show other than some background information about neurotheology. Dr. Fenwick disappears, and instead we are left with the unknown Dr. Jonathan Bird, a “neuro-psychiatrist” who said he observed “very little activity in the parietal region of the brain”, this analysis not based on the promised “cutting edge neuroimaging technology” but rather a plain old electroencephalograph. He also noted “some asymmetry in the temporal lobe”, concluding, “whether that is a brain process or a spiritual process, I leave to the experts.” Where are those experts when you really need them!?

Other aspects of the on-the-air stunt also don’t ring true. We are told that the subject, named “Colin”, claimed he had been “possessed by evil spirits” for many years—but are given no information on his symptomology. The “deliverance” consisted mainly of prayer, strangely devoid of rotating heads or projectile vomiting. Afterwards, Colin made the odd comment that “it was the most relaxed deliverance I have ever had.” Well, how many exactly has he had?

A robust theory of neurotheology will include a compelling story about diabolical possessions. Too bad C4’s program failed so miserably in helping us arrive at one.

A new course at the University of Florida, Neurotheology: The Interface between the Brain and the Divine, may be the only university course in neurotheology taught anywhere in the world—does anyone know of others?

The course has been developed by Dr. Lou Ritz, an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the university. According to his biography, his research interests are concerned with spinal cord injury and repair. One paper he’s written involves watching how cats balance themselves with their tails, then shows how breaking their tails (called sacrocaudal transection; ouch!) leads them to lose their balance and fall more often. He’s also a co-director of the Center for Spirituality and Health at UF.

From the syllabus:

Are religious and spiritual experiences brain-based? If they are, what are the implications to understanding brain circuitry? If they are not, what are the implications to our understanding of who we are? Our course – Neurotheology -will investigate the neural correlates of religious and spiritual experiences and the implications of such relationships.

Topics to be explored include: organization of higher cortical function in the human brain; effects of cortical brain lesions on our perception of reality; the variety of religious experiences; modern brain imaging; meditation and spiritual experiences; brain correlates of meditation; eastern and western views of the mind; how the brain constructs reality; attention and awareness; mind-body medicine; psychedelics and mystical experiences; the neurobiology of emotions; the God gene – the genetic basis of spiritual experiences.

I’d like to see the detailed syllabus for this course, including the reading materials. And it would be great if Dr. Ritz could turn the course into a book providing a balanced overview of the field—in spite of all that’s been written, such an overview still does not exist.

Is God an accident? That’s the title of an article by Paul Bloom, a Yale psychology professor, in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Coming from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Bloom points out the “built-in” systems often called “folk physics” and “folk sociology”, which he describes as “two different computers in the brain”. The sociology half of this hard-wired dualism, if you will, permits us to conceive of abstract human-like entities independent of a specific incarnation. The same social engine, one of whose jobs is to infer agency and intent, indiscriminately finds such agency and intent even where it does not exist in reality. Voilà: God and disembodied souls.

I haven’t read anything else by Bloom (he is the author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human). His theory seems compelling as far as it goes, but…

Calling religion or God an “accident” certainly is catchy and looks good on the magazine’s cover. But is it really accurate? In fact, Bloom never uses the term accident again anywhere in the article. A feathery appendage a bird develops to protect itself from the cold turning out to be useful in flying—that’s an accident. That’s different from what’s happening here. The systems are functioning exactly as designed. The anthropomorphization module is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. All detectors yield false positives by their very nature. But they have mechanisms are in place to recover from those false positives. If we see a leaf moving, infer the presence of a predator, we freeze, then look again and finally realize it’s just the wind, and return to normal. The real question is: why does religious anthropomorphization bypass any similar corrective mechanism?

Second, from an evolutionary standpoint, we know there are spandrels, but one which decreases fitness will be selected away. If belief in God is such a spandrel (accident) and is a negative or waste of energy for the species, it should have been deselected, but it wasn’t. Why? Or are there evolutionary advantages to supernatural belief? If so, the story isn’t complete without identifying them.

A subset of this problem—probably impossible to ever answer—is why the dualistic body/mind model was selected for humans. Could there be fitness-decreasing aspects to an integrated body/mind model? If not, why wasn’t it selected? Or is evolution simply taking its time getting us there?

Finally, where do meditation or other spiritual practices—which, like Boyer (previous post) and Atran (previous post), Bloom completely ignores—fit into this picture? Presumably, in terms of his folk physics vs. folk sociology dichotomy, practice has the effect of unifying the two engines. To borrow Dogen’s words: “cast off the gap between body and mind.” This raises the intriguing question of what kind of neurological implementation of the dual model might be amenable to such unification.

Neuroreport reports research showing that meditation thickens your cortex.

We know that meditation changes brain wave patterns. But could that be due to changes in the brain’s physical structure? That’s the question the researchers asked. They stuck the meditators in an MRI machine, measured their cortical thickness (how?), and found it had increased.

From the abstract:

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical thickness in 20 participants with extensive Insight meditation experience, which involves focused attention to internal experiences. Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent cortical plasticity associated with meditation practice.

That’s great, because I’ve been really worried about that age-related cortical thinning thing.

The article itself is available only by subscription, but according to a news report on the findings:

Most of the brain regions identified to be changed through meditation were found in the right hemisphere, which is essential for sustaining attention. And attention is the focus of the meditation.

Dogen, in his later years, emphasized that to find the truth you would have to leave your family and join a monastery, but this study was of regular people with jobs and families who meditated just 40 minutes per day on average.

It seems obvious that a thicker cortex is a “good” thing, but why? Is it that new brain cells have grown, or simply that the intra-neuronal geometry and distance changes? Which layer of the cortex grew thicker, and how does that tie into theories of cortical functioning? Finally, if the cortex grows thicker presumably some other parts of the brain are getting compressed—which ones, and with what effect?

Bill O’Reilly (picture; website) is the talking head on Fox News that everyone loves to hate. Now—unlikely as it may seem—he turns out to be the latest advocate for neurotheology! On his Wednesday show, he took up the controversy about the Dalai Lama’s planned speech on the neuroscience of meditation at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience next month in Washington. 544 researchers have signed a petition against his appearance (NYT), which seems odd, because he’s appearing not as a scientist, of course, but as part of a new “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society” track “featuring leaders from fields outside of neuroscience whose work relates to subjects of interest to neuroscientists”.

Bill’s guest was Dr. Stuart Dryer, a neuroscientist from the University of Houston who studies such things as embyronic neuronal development in vertebrates, and is opposed to the Dalai Lama’s speech. Bill took him to task in typical O’Reilly-esque fashion, accusing him as coming off as “anti-spiritual”, adding, “The Dalai Lama’s a good guy.”

Somebody should have warned Dryer what he was getting into going onto O’Reilly’s show. I like Bill, but he’s a bully (and pervert) who doesn’t invite guests to hear their opinions, but to lecture them:

The Dalai Lama is being asked to talk about meditation. He claims that you can train the brain to be more compassionate and more positive. That seems to be pretty fascinating and something you might want to hear about.

Bill opined that next year they might want to invite someone to talk about the neurophysiology of prayer as well, since he hears that makes people more loving too.

I’m a little bit conflicted about Bill giving neurotheology such high visibility in the popular culture, especially in his largely right-wing demographic. Before you know it Bush will be pushing more faith-based initiatives claiming that they are good for the brain, or something like that. At the same time, exposure to the basic concept of neurotheology—which, after all, states that physical processes in the brain are a key element in religious experience—could only be helpful. On the other hand, we should not lose sight of one of the scientists’ points: that the research on meditation and the brain is still in its infancy.

In any case, I do think Carol Barnes, who is president of the neuroscience society and responsible for the invitation, had it right:

The practice of meditation is a human behavior, and the Dalai Lama is extraordinarily skilled at it and at promoting qualities of peace and compassion that I thought could bring us together. That’s not the way it’s gone so far.

We complete our three-part examination of Landmark Forum from the religiobiological perspective (Part I, Part II), wherein we ponder the plausibility of Landmark’s efficaciousness based on the neurotheological or religiobiological assumption: that religious experience and development is correlated with biology and/or neurology.

Body-mind aspects. The religiobiological assumption would lead us to expect religions and personal development programs to be more effective to the extent they address the body side of the body-mind issue. This could range from rules or practices for eating, to various forms of physical practice. Zen, for instance, has its kinhin walking meditation, as well as its ōryōki eating system. A high level of religious or personal development would seem to be impossible without a smooth integration of body and mind, and thus we would expect the religion or program to talk about it or address it through its practices.

Landmark Forum completely ignores the body side of the equation. Of course, so do many other religions and systems, but the fact remains that here, at least, we find no particular support for Landmark’s promised effectiveness.

Philosophy. I’ll go out on a limb here and attempt to summarize the Landmark philosophy.

1. People form and then get stuck in suboptimal identities and worldviews.
2. The present contains the seeds of myriad possibilities.
3. Language creates reality.
4. Things are meaningless.

Philosophy—we could equally well call it ideology, or theology, or theory—forms an integral part of most religious frameworks, although in some, like Zen, it plays a lesser role. It can serve as a a guidepost and motivator and provide context to experiential development. From a religiobiological standpoint, philosophy per se is suspect in terms of its religious effect since its higher-level cortical impact is unlikely to (or we don’t know how it might) lead to any long-term changes in neurobiological structure. In order for it to be an effective part of the religion or system, at a minimum it needs to be sustained and highly coherent and targeted.

In Landmark’s case, the teaching of the philosophy is not sustained, by definition, since the program lasts only three days, although there are a number of follow-on programs. Nor, in spite of my basic sympathy for the four points above, is it coherent or targeted. It’s more like an appetizer platter.

Although it’s not my role here to critique the Landmark philosophy, I do have to object to or comment on some of these ponits.

Point 1—that people form and become prisoners of their identity and concepts—is hardly new, but certainly worthwhile to present, especially to a demographic that probably has spent little or no time pondering such things. But Landmark presents this in a vacuum, the entire discussion assuming a disembodied “I” outside the process that is apparently free of misshapen identities but explored no further.

Point 2—that language creates reality (this is not my interpretation—Landmark itself says “language may in fact be what brings that world into being”)—is actually wrong. Doubtless language is a powerful instrument for channeling and reinforcing ideas, and calling attention to that fact is useful. But as a Go player, for instance, I know the sequence of moves I plan in my mind is perfectly real, long before it takes any linguistic form, if indeed it ever does.

Point 4—that nothing means anything—is startling in the lack of connection to anything else coming before or after it on the platter. And given Landmark’s focus on terminology, or “distinctions”, it’s doubly odd that they would present this as the linchpin of their philosophy without bothering to talk about what “meaning” means.

Summary. From the religiobiological standpoint, we find nothing in particular about the Landmark program that would indicate it’s likely to be effective.

So why, to revisit the issue raised in our second post, do so many people feel they have benefited from programs such as Landmark Forum? One commentator sums it up well:

The programs have given people a positive direction and focus, and surrounded them with like-minded folks for reinforcement. They have helped them achieve peace of mind or to accomplish goals they had been unable to accomplish heretofore. They have helped with personal relationships with spouses and children or helped them justify getting out of relationships with their friends and family. The program has forced them to be more self-conscious, forced them to think and examine their lives, something most people don’t do on an ordinary Tuesday. Any time a rational person reflects on his or her life, or on some of the bigger issues in life, it feels good or it puts things in perspective. Either way, it is usually satisfying.

In other words, even if you interpret my three-part analysis as weakening Landmark’s claim to being effective (as opposed to the alternative, namely weakening the religiobiological assumption), Landmark seems to be a perfectly good program for a certain category of people and is almost certainly worth the time and money for them.

Recap. Below I bring together the six aspects that I identified in this series as being relevant in examining any framework from the religiobiological stance.

1. Talking (vs. doing). What is the balance between talking/preaching and doing?
2. Language (terminology). Does the system define and use a coherent terminology mapping to its worldview and practices?
3. Practice. Is there a structured, regular practice which would correlate to long-term neurobiological development?
4. Therapy. Does the system deal, directly or indirectly, with traumatic or damaging life experiences which can hinder early stages of development?
5. Body-mind aspects. Does the system address the body side of the body-mind equation?
6. Philosophy. Is the philosophy coherent, targeted, and sustained?

Clearly, there is ample room to improve on this list.

This post continues our project, which started with this post, of adopting the religiobiological stance in looking at the Landmark Forum.

Therapy. Especially in the earlier periods, the Forum focuses on your human relationships, notably broken ones. It urges you to patch things up now with that estranged father or sister, to the point of calling them on your cell phone during the next break. Participants then volunteer to stand in front of the group and talk about these personal problems, resulting in some riveting Dr. Phil moments, in no small part thanks to the savvy, unyielding, quick-on-the-feet, penetrating probing of the facilitator.

Examples:

• the boy who finally forgave his mother and father for trying to raise him white, even though he was obviously mixed, the product of his mother’s amorous dalliance with a black lover

• the distraught wife who forgave herself for exposing her two small children to the horribly traumatic experience of 30 FBI agents bursting into their house at 6am to arrest her drug-dealing husband, whom she had believed when he said he was going straight

• slightly less tragically, the girl who wondered why her boyfriend wouldn’t commit when all she had done was left him at the altar two years earlier

• finally, the boy whose Hispanic father abandoned him, completely alone, to wander the streets, at the age of 9

These stories are moving to the point of tears.

It is this aspect of Landmark that has led some to categorize it as a form of large-group awareness training. Being in front of a large audience, and getting their feedback, unquestionably raises the efficacy of this therapeutic process. And I personally have no doubt that many of these people underwent genuine transformations, although as with most transformations there is the danger of backsliding and need for consolidation that one hopes some kind of follow-up would address.

From a religiobiological standpoint, to my knowledge no has elucidated the neurological mechanism underlying emotional fixations or constantly revisited past traumas—this was the project, after all, that Sigmund Freud gave up on. At the risk of circularity, it would seem undeniable that there is some such schematic substrate which is altered by emotional catharsis. There is little doubt that such catharsis, and thus such neurological changes, are experienced by some Landmark attendees, although probably just those who take advantage of the opportunity to “share” in front of the group and have the benefit of direct interaction with the leader. (The conclusion for would-be Landmark attendees would to be sure to “share”.)

However, there is more to the process of personal growth than merely breaking through emotional pathologies. The breaking through is better seen as a kind of necessary first step, like removing a tree that’s blocking the road. As I interpret the structure of the three-day Landmark experience, and in light of the fact that the emotional components come earlier in the training, that’s also how Landmark itself positions it. So while we can note the apparent success of these dramatic five-minute metamorphoses for those who participate in them, and hypothesize that they are having some kind of neurobiological effect, this alone is not sufficient to conclude that Landmark’s overall effectieness is religiobiologically plausible.

We will continue our examination of Landmark in one final post. But before we leave the topic, what about the issue mentioned by one reader, that a huge majority of attendees surveyed said that the Forum changed their lives for the better?

These survey results deserve close scrutiny. There is no baseline to compare against, the results are completely self-reported, and there is a built-in bias on the part of the participants towards justifying their own expenditure of time and money. At a minimum, they would need to normalized against results from participants in other programs or religions. For instance, how many Baptists feel that their religion improves their lives?

The study in question was apparently carried out by IMC, Inc., but who paid for it? Like any survey, the results can be spun in a number of ways. For instance, the Yankelovich survey reported that “more than 30% of participants thought the Forum did poorly or only fairly in improving their overall effectiveness” (my wording).

The numbers are also biased to the extent the participants are self-selected. For what it’s worth, the largest percentages are 25-34, some college. Another study revealed that prospective participants were significantly more distressed than than their peers and had a higher level of impact of recent negative life events. I am merely saying that the results should be interpreted in this context.

Finally, a note on the positioning of this entire endeavor. I am not trying to criticize Landmark or praise it or say it is good or bad. The point is simply to examine it to see if there are any obvious aspects which could tie in with a neurologically-based theory of religion or personal development. As a reader rightly pointed out, if we find no such aspects, and we haven’t yet, that could just as easily be interpreted as casting doubt on the religiobiology project as a whole or as indicating that there may be types of religious/developmental phenomenon that do not have neural correlates, as that Landmark is unlikely to actually be as effective as claimed.