Donald Herbert, a fireman, suffered brain damage during a fire, was in a coma for 2½ months, then emerged into a period of “faint” or “minimal” consciousness, where he stayed for more than nine years until “waking up” and reconnecting to his family and friends on May 2, 2005.

“Minimal consciousness” is defined as being aware, but unable to communicate.

See MSNBC report.

Damaged brains like Herbert’s have provided us with many clues about neural functioning (perhaps to the extent that we are overly dependent on that type of analysis). Neurologists will be certainly studying him in an attempt to understand what mechanism could account for his recovery. (Three months earlier, he had been started on a cocktail of three medicines usually used to treat Parkinson’s, ADHD and depression, intended to stimulate neurotransmitters.)

Our interest, though, is neurotheological. How did Herbert’s brain damage, his period of minimal consciousness, and his recovery affect his religiosity, if at all?

We know that loss of consciousness occurs in epileptic seizures, which in turn have been tied to religious or pseudo-religious experience.

In Herbert’s case, as the neurons in the higher levels of his brain were regenerating and weaving themselves together for nearly a decade, while he lay in bed mutely watching TV, finally reaching the critical mass necessary for the restoration of consciousness, did they also recreate the cortical pathways necessary for religious belief and experience? Is Herbert more or less religious now than he was before his accident?

I enter the church and take my seat among the faithful. The priest flips a switch, and the chapel is bathed in a sea of multicolored lasers, sending the worshippers into a deep, healing, unified, spiritual state.

That is the science fiction future a neurotheologist would invent based on the intriguing research reported in the latest issue of Cell Magazine, in a paper entitled Remote Control of Fruit Fly Behavior.

Dumping the awkward electrodes and transcranial magnetic stimulation devices of the past, the researchers implanted a rat gene into a fly, programmed to function only in the neuron of the fly, and to turn itself on only in the presence of a chemical called ATP. They then engineered a “caged” version of ATP which would not affect the neuron unless released by a flash of ultraviolet light.

Zapped with a laser, the re-engineered flies, even after being cruelly decapitated, jumped up and started flapping their wings (the neuron in question was not in the brain, but a “fiber neuron” extending the length of the fly’s body).

In the church of the future, then, baptism will be your injection with the bioengineered God-genes. Sacrament will be the priest placing on your tongue the drug that activates them. Prayer will be soaking yourself in the ultraviolet light that brings them to life.

See also An Off-and-On Switch for Controlling Animals? in the NYT.

“From Joseph’s descriptions of his experiences, he does not fit the pattern neurotheologians believe they have found for ‘religious experiences.’”

That is the conclusion of Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin, two Mormon scholars from BYU, looking at Joseph Smith Jr.’s 1820 vision of God and Jesus, in an article entitled Is Spirituality all in your Head? The article also provides a very simplified but serviceable overview of neurotheology. Continuing:

Joseph did not claim to have had a sense of transcending time and space, but claimed to have seen two real beings. Would Joseph’s brain have demonstrated the same patterns scientists found with meditating Buddhists or praying nuns, or would his brain functions have been substantially different? And what, we wonder, would they discover about the brain functions of some of us during our weekly Sunday meetings?

In Phantoms in the Brain, V S Ramachandran (left) devotes one chapter to the God question. His treatment is notable for its crisp articulation of the problem:

Do our brains contain some sort of circuitry that is actually specialized for religious experinece? Is there a “God module” in our heads? And if such a circuit exists, could it be a product of natural selection? What sorts of Darwinian selection pressures could lead to such a mechanism? Many traits make us uniquely human, but none is more enigmatic than religion—our propensity to believe in God or in some higher power.

Ramachandran focuses on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who have “religious” experiences and fixations, not of the “Jesus bleeding on the cross” nature, but rather ones of religious ecstasy, divine light, and ultimate truth.

The author muses on the fact that the limbic system, where this type of epilepsy is focused, is responsible for emotional response. He proposes and rejects a couple of hypotheses (well, OK, he does not reject the hypothesis that God is actually visiting these people). Unfortunately, he seems to have largely run out of the clever, simple experiments we have come to rely on him for. Eventually he is reduced to proposing that we do the undoable: a “Godectomy”, where the patient’s temporal lobe is removed to see if that shuts down the mystical experiences.

In fact, Bear and Fedio (1977) conducted a study in which they used self report measures given to temporal lobe patients to categorize the characteristics of what is called temporal lobe personality. They came up with religiosity and sense of personal destiny among other traits. They also found that once these patients had temporal lobectemies all of these symptoms decreased (reference).

The rest of the chapter is an interesting, but not entirely relevant meditation on the theory of evolution, including the contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, unlike Darwin, thought evolution could not explain the advent of advanced human capabilities like being able to do math, which developed far in advance of there being any selectional advantage associated with them, and invoked Providence as the explanation for such capabilities.

Our author’s admirably restrained conclusion is:

There are circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics…we are still a long way from showing that there is a “God module” in the brain that might be genetically specified.

Indeed.

Our condolences to our Catholic brothers and sisters on the death of their leader John Paul II, and congratulations on his being posthumously annointed the foremost human being of the 20th century.

The late Pope had a reputation as an intellectual, and a bridge builder. So is it safe to assume he had a learned, mature appreciation of Buddhism? Hardly. His thoughts on Buddhism are at the level of a gross caricature, belying his reputation as a thoughtful scholar.

In his 1995 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, His Holiness commented (emphasis in the original):

…it is not inappropriate to caution those Christians who enthusiastically welcome certain ideas originating in the religious traditions of the Far East—for example, techniques and methods of meditation…

Note how the pontiff limits his concern to Westerners adopting such “traditions”; he apparently does not feel all the Asians believing in them are worth worrying about.

The Pope goes on to reveal his ignorance by claiming fallaciously:

…the Buddhist tradition…[has] an almost exclusively negative soteriology…the “enlightenment” experienced by Buddha comes down to the convicition that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and of suffering for man. To liberate oneself from this evil, one must free oneself from this world, necessitating a break with the ties that join us to external reality…

The dearly departed Holy Father then proceeds to debunk the theories of a relationship between Christian mysticism and eastern religions:

Saint John of the Cross does not merely propose detachment from the world. He proposes detachment from the world in order to unite onesefl to that which is outside of the world—by this I do not mean nirvana, but a personal God…Carmelite mysticism begins at the point where the reflections of Buddha end…

The Bishop of Rome continues in a highly chauvinistic and nearly racist vein. He credits Christianity with giving Western civilization its “positive approach to the world”, and, astonishingly, attributes the achievements of science and technology to “Judeo-Christian revelation”.

Luckily, we don’t have to worry too much about this. The Pope saves us the trouble of having to seriously consider his ideas on the topic by making his ignorance of the area so blatantly obvious.

It’s fine to say we’ll study the relationship between the brain and people’s belief in God, but what is the nature of this belief in God whose relationship with the brain we are trying to study? That is the topic of the intriguing field of religious cognition.

I ran across the work of Nicholas Gibson, a PhD student at Cambridge. He notes that traditional survey-type research into people’s beliefs in God suffer from the problem that people give the answers they think they are supposed to, so instead he’ll borrow methods from cognitive psychology. One of his research projects included an experiment where subjects were timed in identifying whether certain words were most characteristic of God, mother, or self. He found that “religious” people answered “God” more quickly than others. His conclusion was that

…Evangelical Christians have a greater efficiency of processing with regard to God….a large, well-organised store of readily accessible information about God.

From a psychological perspective that might be an adequate conclusion, but our question is what is the neurological basis of this efficiency in processing, the well organized nature of the knowledge, and its ready accessiblity?

In biology, the reduction in size of an organ or part (as in the return of the uterus to normal size after childbirth, or the shrinking of the childhood organ known as the thymus); can also refer to something very elaborate or complicated, such as a grammatical construction.

We recently went to see As You Like It at the Ahmanson Theater. I’m not a theater critic, so I’ll limit my comments to noting that Rebecca Hall, who played Rosalind, should get out of Shakespeare’s way. We don’t really need every single phrase to be accompanied by giggles, sighs, extraneous eye movements, pauses, hand motions, and pseudo-dramatic twirls.

What I want to write about is the Japanese translation of Jaques’ famous “All the World’s a Stage” soliloquy.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

(By the way, this speech later contains the first recorded usage of the word “puke” in the meaning of “vomit”.)

The Japanese translation we got our hands on, by Fukuda Tsuneari, goes like this in romaji:

Zen-sekai ga hitotsu no butai, soko-dewa danjo wo towanu, ningen wa subete yakusha ni suginai.
全世界がひとつの舞台、そこでは男女を問わぬ、人間はすべて役者に過ぎない。

It’s amazing, although somehow not surprising, that a famous Shakespeare scholar could do such a bad job translating this passage. Given its visibility, it seems he could have spent at least a little more time on it. Here’s how I translate his Japanese back into English (a dangerous endeavor, as I am well aware, but sometimes inevitable):

The world in its entirety is one stage.
There, whether man or woman, all humans are nothing more than actors.

Our professor has managed to pack an astonishing number of bad translation decisions into such a short sentence. Here’s just a few:

• “world” should not be “sekai”, which is a Sino-Japanese compound with nuances of “world of nations”; much better is the native Japanese word “yo”, a common word indicating the world around us

• “all” of “all the world” is translated by placing the Sino-Japanese prefix “zen” in front of “sekai”, again yielding a non-colloquial, stiff result, but more importantly, the implication is of complete geographical coverage, rather than “all aspects” as Shakespeare presumably intended. The Japanese “issai” captures the correct meaning of “all” perfectly

• whereas Shakespeare uses “men and women” just to indicate all the people in the world, perhaps liking the phrase’s meter, Fukuda reads too much into this and inserts the unwieldy “whether man or woman” into his translation

• Fukuda translates the article “a” in “a stage” as “one, single”, although Shakespeare is certainly not emphasizing the singleness of the stage

• after having gummed up his translation with “whether man or woman”, Fukuda ends up needing another word to serve as the subject of the next phrase, and goes with “ningen” (“human”), again too stiff, compared to the colloquial “hitobito” (“people”)

Here is Bob’s translation:

Butai da yo, kono yo wa issai. Hitobito mo mina, tan-naru yakusha.
舞台だよ、この世は一切。人々も皆、単なる役者。

A quantitative metric we can apply to comparing my translation with Fukuda’s is Bob’s Rule of Comparative Length, which states that bad translations are longer. Good editing, then, will tend to reduce the length of the translated text. In this case, the original English is 51 Roman characters; Fukuda’s translation 77; and mine a close match at 50.

In its most recent issue, Fortune magazine coined the word “neuroconservatism”. The image is of conservative policies backed up by, or possibly tweaked to take into account, neuroscientific insights.

Example: A “pure”, libertarian-oriented conservative might like to offer dozens or hundreds of private plans to replace Social Security, but neurosicence tells us that people’s brains aren’t “wired” to deal with having so much choice, so they may end up choosing poorly or not at all. Neuroconservative solution: Give them fewer choices, or at least give them an intelligent default in line with good public policy.

At the moment, this word get zero Google hits.

After grabbing a deputy’s gun and shooting her and a judge in a courthouse, a bad guy in Atlanta took Ashley Smith hostage in her apartment. The plucky girl, unfazed, whipped out her copy of The Purpose-Driven Life, read to him from it, and informed him that God had a purpose for his life (in his case, the purpose apparently being to go to prison to spread His word there, although it seems like he had been on his way to prison anyway, whether or not that was God’s purpose for him. even before he shot the judge to death). He accepted her teachings on the spot, turned himself in, and voila, America has another 15-minute folk hero like Todd Beamer.

Eager to learn more, I visited the book’s website. I’m still a little unclear on the details but “God” is involved. Our purpose as humans seems to be to find His purpose for us (yes, I know that’s a bit circular), glorify Him (he’s apparently a little short in the glory department), or to move on past this little mortal phase to something more interesting.

That got me thinking about what the “meaning” of “purpose” is (or was it was the “purpose” of “meaning”?).

In my case, there’s a big Green Rabbit that also apparently may have a purpose in mind for me, and I’m trying to figure out: is it God or the Rabbit? I’m leaning towards the Rabbit, since there’s strong circumstantial evidence it’s him. Otherwise, why would He (the Rabbit) have made me think of him in the first place?