God all in your head (ritual, Creator, mystic, beliefs)

[St0ne]

Now this is old news, 1999 in fact so I don't know if it has been posted before (was RF even around in 99?) and because the forum search function leaves a lot to be desired I was unable to find any previous posts.

http://atheistempire.com/reference/brain/main.html

Firstly ignore the domain name these articles are not of their making they are a collection from a number of newspapers from the time of the original story. If anyone knows of more recent info on the topic please post.

Do you think this suggests further evidence for or against god? The research brings up a number of interesting questions if further experimentation has confirmed these initial ones.

[ΩRôghênΩ]

Synopsis: Findings seem to point to a region of the brain commonly referred to as the 'God Spot' or 'God Module', that when stimulated creates hallucinations that are interpreted as mystical or spiritual experiences

it makes sense that god would give us that so we could connect with him. those hallucinations could be god putting them into our head. why not?

[ΩRôghênΩ]

The resulting hallucinations may be the cause of mystical, spiritual and paranormal experiences as they can give feelings such as a presence in the room or an out of body experience. In the case of epileptics, this may be the reason for many of them becoming obsessed with religion. For those who experience the stimulation it is explained related to their own personal beliefs; a visit from an angel or lost loved one, an extraterrestrial encounter, a higher plane of consciousness or a visit from God.

God seems very smart to give us a physical organ which can process spiritual effects, basically chanting the divine into our spirit via our mind through our body

[ΩRôghênΩ]

"Scientists, philosophers and atheists have long argued that God and spirituality are constructs of the human mind, although that opinion generally hasn't been a popular one. After centuries of bloody holy wars and fierce theological dispute, the controversy of the Creator's existence has taken a strange new turn: humanity may finally have uncovered tangible evidence that the phenomenon of religious faith is all in our heads.
Literally.
A group of neuroscientists at the University of California at San Diego has identified a region of the human brain that appears to be linked to thoughts of spiritual matters and prayer. Their findings tentatively suggest that we as a species are genetically programmed to believe in God."

How does this disprove god. rather, it shows that god places his spiritual wants from us into our physical bodies.

[Sunstone]

St0ne, I suspect that if one wanted to argue this structure in the temporal lobe is capable of processing information in a way that allows us to percieve the supernatural, then one could reasonably do so.

That is, there might be nothing in principle different from the way the brain processes sensory information into "sight", and the way the brain processes information into "the supernatural".

Whether or not it is reasonable to make such an argument is something I cannot tell from the articles you cited. So I googled Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, who was given as the lead researcher in the articles I read. The following statement of his comes from an interview by the Australian Broadcasting Corp conducted in May, 2005:

Natasha Mitchell: Too busy. Look he charts what is really the extraordinary momentum that the brain sciences have gathered over the last 20 years. But look he’s worried too, because he has a sense that neuroscience is trying to create a theory of everything, that it simply isn’t qualified to offer. He’s worried about reductionist explanations of human nature. Do you share his concern?

Ramachandran: There are two problems which are sometimes confounded. One is if you reduce everything to neurons, like falling in love, or ambition, or pride, or joy, or the self - my God does that mean there’s no love? And that’s a fallacy because you know explaining something doesn’t mean you explain it away. So for example – supposing two people are making love and a crazy scientist comes along and says “look, this is just neurons in the septum and neurons in the hypothalamic nuclei, these are all the neurons that are firing away, that’s all there is to it”. And then the lover turns to his girlfriend and says “you mean that’s it, it’s just chemicals, it’s neurons firing away, you’re not really in love?” She could then argue “no, on the contrary this proves it’s all real, that I’m not faking it”. “Look, look at the pattern of activity, it shows it’s real.”

Just to emphasise that when you explain something in terms of component parts you enrich your understanding a bit you certainly don’t diminish from the experience or detract from the experience. That fear is not justified.

From:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/min...s/s1358883.htm


The problem here, St0ne, is that we know so little about how this so called "God spot" in the temporal lobe works in natural circumstances that it is very difficult at this point to tell much about whether it is evidence that experiences of the supernatural are hallucinations, or whether they are something more than hallucinations. It seems true we have induced hallucinations in the lab by stimulating this spot, and it seems true that some epileptics experience hallucinations when the spot is stimulated, but none of that conclusively indicates that normal, healthy people who claim to have experienced the supernatural were hallucinating due to a dysfunction of this spot.

Let's go one step further now. Suppose that some normal, healthy person experiences the supernatural. What is really going on? Is his or her experience definitive of the supernatural? Is it comprehensive of the supernatural? Has s/he seen the whole picture, so to speak?

I suspect the answer to all those questions is "no". The way the brain works with every sense is that it reduces the volume of information recieved by the senses. The brain simplifies the information it recieves. Or, to be crude, it dumbs it down. If your eyes start out with 1000 photons of light striking them in an instant, by the time that information gets processed into sight, it is as if the information from 9999 of those photons was lost in processing. So, if this "God spot" processes information like the other areas of the brain do, and there's no reason to believe that it doesn't, whatever information it recieves about the supernatural is remarkably dumbed down by the time the brain comes up with a notion of "supernatural". We cannot reasonably argue, therefore, that there is evidence this "God spot" tells us anymore about what is really "out there" than we can argue our brain tells us what electromagnetic energy is.

But what do you yourself make of all this?

[St0ne]

I somewhat agree sunstone, and it's value as evidence simply depends on which way you look at it, anther interesting note was that people suffering epilepsy had larger\reactive 'god spots', maybe this indicates a higher level of 'connectedness' with god, in days where less was known about epilepsy many thought seizures indicated posession by demons, if this 'god spot' actually indicates a connection with god it may be that epilepsy which was though to be the work of the devil is actually the work of god, ironic.

[Sunstone]

What really surprises me about this is that the so called "God spot" is located in the temporal lobe. As far as I know, that's the higher brain, most recently evolved. I had thought that the brain structures involved in mystical experiences were located in the older brain.

[bill]

Originally Posted by Sunstone

What really surprises me about this is that the so called "God spot" is located in the temporal lobe. As far as I know, that's the higher brain, most recently evolved. I had thought that the brain structures involved in mystical experiences were located in the older brain.

It is dubious to call this area of the brain associated with religious experience in epilepsy a God spot. There are documented cases of persons changing sexual orientation in after a seizure affecting the temporal lobe, and back again after another. What is beyond dispute is that epilepsy disrupts the normal flow of consciousness. Most do not have religious experiences however. I could imagine coming back from one of these trips and find eating scrambled eggs a religious experience.

One could argue that we are genetically programmed to conceive Gods in a normal state of consciousness also.

[Zsr1973]

It doesn't matter what "gives" the experience, only the weight of truth in the experience.