Now science has afforded a new spin on White’s spirituality. A leading neurologist who has studied White’s personal history and opus has concluded that, rather than being divinely inspired, her illusions stemmed from a form of epilepsy. “Her whole clinical course suggested to me the high probability that she had temporal lobe epilepsy,” says Gregory Holmes, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire. The multitude of visions, Holmes suggests, were actually epileptic seizures.
The retrospective diagnosis, which has lain quietly in the medical literature for 20 years, is aired in a TV documentary tonight. The programme explores the new and controversial subject of neurotheology, or the role that the brain plays in religious experience. The discoveries that are emerging from this fledgeling science are, depending on your religious views, either deeply fascinating or profoundly disturbing.
They imply that the brain created God, not the other way round; that religious leaders throughout history were touched not by supreme beings but by mental illness; that moments of serenity common to ardent believers of all faiths are simply hiccups in brain chemistry. The findings suggest that our attitudes to religion are underpinned by biology — that some brains are physically built to be more receptive to divine thought, and that this explains why religion induces apathy in some and fervour in others. One scientist has even built a kind of “God helmet” — a headset that can induce the feeling of an unseen presence by bathing the temples in electromagnetic fields.
Holmes was moved to make his diagnosis of White on the strength of one incident in particular. When White was nine, she was hit on the head by a stone thrown by a classmate. She drifted in and out of consciousness — wavering between life and death — for three weeks. As well as being disfigured, she was unable to resume school, and buried herself instead in the Bible. Eight years later she began having visions. Witnesses are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of White immersed in these sacred moments.
One wrote: “In passing into vision, she gives three enrapturing shouts of ‘Glory!’ which echo and re-echo, the second, and especially the third, fainter. For about four or five seconds she seems to drop down like a person in a swoon, or one having lost his strength; she then seems to be instantly filled with superhuman strength. There are frequent movements of the hands and arms, pointing to the right or left, as her head turns. All these movements are made in a most graceful manner. Her eyes are always open, but she does not wink; her head is raised and she is looking upward, not with a vacant stare but with a pleasant _expression,.”
To Holmes, these are the hallmarks of a partial-complex seizure, which are characterised by a heavenwards stare, a temporary loss of consciousness, automatisms (repetitive physical movements) and hallucinations. Even White’s meticulous note-taking — she produced 100,000 pages of notes during her lifetime — suggested hypographia, another feature common to patients undergoing partial-complex seizures.
The Seventh Day Adventist Church convened a series of nine scientists, all believers, to examine Holmes’s claim. They rejected it, saying that White’s injury was to the nose and forehead rather than the sides of the head, near the temporal lobes. The eight-year interval between injury and her first hallucination also weakened the association. But Holmes stands by his conclusion that “although it would be impossible to prove retrospectively that Ellen White suffered from partial-complex seizures, it appears possible that not only her visions, but also her writing and the nature of her revelations, may reflect temporal lobe dysfunction”.
The British arm of the church seems less bothered by the claim. “If God chose someone with epilepsy or any other predisposing mental factor to reveal Himself, it doesn’t substantially change the nature of the revelations,” says John Surridge, communications director for the Seventh Day Adventist Church at its British headquarters in Watford, Herts. “If we look to the Bible, Moses was said to have a mental condition, and maybe that’s just the way God chose to work. In any case, while Ellen White was very influential, our beliefs don’t hang on just her writings. Our beliefs are based on the Bible.
“But some people may use this to reduce religious experience to merely activity in the brain, and remove God completely. We would object to that. Religious experience is an encounter with God, not just a product of the brain.”
It would dismay Surridge to know that some scientists are tending to just this opinion — that God is an artefact of our evolved human minds, and that visions are symptoms of neurological abnormality. As well as Moses, experts are intrigued by St Paul, who famously encountered God in a blinding flash while on the road to Damascus, and St Teresa of Avila, who heard voices and is widely thought to have exhibited signs of schizophrenia.
Pascal Boyer, in his ambitious book Religion Explained, published in 2001, suggested that our ancestors had to be able to outwit unseen predators, and so we developed a protective belief in hidden spirits. This has transmuted today into a belief in the “airy nothing” of religion. For Boyer, an anthropology professor at Washington University, it is no coincidence that religion sprang up around 50,000 years ago, tallying approximately with the emergence of anatomically modern human beings. As soon as our brains became sufficiently evolved to embrace supernatural ideas, Boyer suggests, religion spread like a cerebral virus.
Studies of patients with brain injuries or neurological disorders certainly appear to support the contentious idea that the brain houses a “spirituality circuit”. A proportion of people who develop temporal lobe epilepsy become intensely religious. Tibetan Buddhist monks have had their brains scanned while meditating; some regions showed signs of springing into life while other parts of the brain quietened down. Activity was quelled in the superior parietal lobe, the area that allows a person to orientate himself. When it calms down, a person can feel “lost” in space and time, a common feeling among those engaged in intense religious thought.
However, the Pennsylvania scientists who carried out this pioneering study — Dr Andrew Newberg and the late Eugene d’Aquili — declined to conclude that religion was really all in the mind. Instead of these neurological changes creating divine experiences, they said diplomatically, the brain might be adjusting its activity in order more easily to detect a spiritual reality. One scientist who has perhaps done more than any other to elevate the field of neurotheology to controversial heights is Professor Michael Persinger, a neurologist at Laurentian University in Ontario. Persinger has built a magnet-laden helmet that surrounds the skull with a mild electromagnetic field. It induces a mystical experience — Persinger describes it as a “sensed presence” — in four out of five people who wear it. Importantly, volunteers are told it is an experiment on relaxation rather than a spiritual experience.
Religious people who undergo the experiment, he says, tend to believe that God is with them; less religious guinea pigs feel as if a benevolent stranger is watching over them. Interestingly, Persinger tried his technique on Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and committed atheist. Dawkins did not have a mystical experience; Persinger says a prior test showed that Dawkins has low sensitivity in the temporal lobes, which the helmet stimulates.
The neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, who has just delivered this year’s Reith Lectures, has conducted his own fascinating experiments with temporal lobe epilepsy patients. He found they show a higher brain response to words with religious connotations than to sexually charged words, unlike the general population. For many, this has nailed the link between the temporal lobes and religious thought.
Ramachandran says such research does not devalue religious belief, and that such brain circuits “may be God’s way of putting an antenna in your brain to make you more receptive to Him”. Persinger, who says he is not religious, is bolder: “My research shows that religious experiences are created by the brain.” To Persinger, religion, which promotes the idea that a Creator is looking after us rather in the manner of a benign parent, is a “delusion”.
Persinger’s colleagues cannot understand why he pursues this work with such vigour; they tell him it will damage his reputation, alienate grant-giving bodies and legitimise study of the supernatural. He tells them: “My question is, why shouldn’t we study such questions? The experimental method is the most powerful tool we have. That’s how we find truth from non-truth.”
Courtesy: Buddhist News Network (BNN)