BRAIN WAVES OR BEATIFIC VISION?
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
By David O'Reilly
Philadelphia Inquirer
June 16, 2009

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As mystical experiences go, Barbara Bradley Hagerty's transcendent moment
was not the kind that launches a new world religion. Still, it changed her
forever.

The day was June 10, 1995. Hagerty, religion reporter for National Public
Radio, was interviewing a terminally ill melanoma patient, Kathy, whose
sunny outlook and trust in Jesus seemed to have prolonged her life,
inexplicably, for years.

Then, as they talked, "I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end,"
Hagerty writes in her new book, Fingerprints of God, a survey of modern
scientific investigation into religious experience.

"The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle
[of lamplight] and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy." She, too, felt
something and had "fallen silent in mid-sentence."

"I felt an unseen caress, engulfed by a presence I could feel but not
touch," Hagerty continues. "I was paralyzed. . . . After a minute, although
it seemed longer, the presence melted away."

What was it she sensed? Jesus? An angelic being? Or, as one researcher later
suggested, had the temporal lobe of her brain been briefly hyperstimulated?
This, he told her, likely induced the illusion of an unseen presence.

Whatever it was, it proved the "continental divide in my life," Hagerty said
during a recent interview. "I decided I should investigate, the way we
journalists do."

Her investigation grew into Fingerprints of God <http://bit.ly/63yJN>, a
lucid overview of an essential question: Is mystical experience truly a
glimpse of the divine, the eternal, the absolute? Or are the seemingly
transformative moments known variously as "enlightenment" or "beatific
vision" or cosmic bliss merely swells and quells in brain activity,
signifying nothing beyond ourselves?

"I knew this had some risks," said Hagerty, who grew up in a devout
Christian Science family but had parted with the faith as an adult.

She would be poking at the very foundation of religion: the phenomenon of
transcendent moments, the kind that had transformed Paul, Muhammad, Moses,
Buddha, Indian shamans, Hindu sages - perhaps even Jesus - and thence whole
civilizations.

"The main thing was, what if God is a sham?" Hagerty worried. "What if
religion is all tissue paper?"

Her "radical project" would take her into monasteries, a trailer park,
research labs, an Indian peyote ritual (she just watched), and a Canadian
brain stimulation exercise that sought to replicate her 1995 experience of
an "unseen presence."

The body of scientific research into religious experience is so diverse that
Fingerprints of God never lingers for long on any one topic. But it serves
as a broad and readable introduction to the growing field of
"neurotheology."

Typical of the many stories in the book is that of the Rev. Scott McDermott,
former pastor of Washington Crossing United Methodist Church in Bucks
County.

One day in 1996 McDermott - who has a doctorate in New Testament theology -
struck up a conversation with a Pentecostal preacher from Toronto. When the
man told McDermott he would pray for him, McDermott suddenly fell on his
back with a vision of the ancient Holy Land, and saw himself running "from
Jericho to Jerusalem."

For 90 minutes McDermott lay on the floor, pumping his arms and legs until
he saw himself arriving at the Temple. There he found Jesus waiting for him,
he said, "his arms outstretched."

McDermott had been exceptionally prayerful even as a teenager. Still, the
intensity and suddenness of his vision - which compelled him to leave Bucks
for a pastorate in Toronto - astonished him. What was it that he experienced
that day?

At Hagerty's request, McDermott submitted to a brain scan at the Hospital of
the University of Pennsylvania. There, Andrew Newberg, a radiologist now
famous for his studies of the brain functions associated with spiritual
practices, observed McDermott's brain activity.

Newberg observed which parts of McDermott's brain "lit up" while he prayed.
But what really surprised him was McDermott's thalamus, a tiny region in the
brain that regulates the processing of sights and sounds and other data.

Newberg, who has scanned thousands of human brains, including meditating
monks and nuns both Christian and Buddhist, told Hagerty that he has found
asymmetrical thalami to be a kind of "spiritual marker," often associated
with "spiritual virtuosos."

Those asymmetries are typically in the range of 3 to 5 percent. McDermott's
thalamus was 15 percent asymmetrical, the most pronounced Newberg had ever
seen.

Hagerty also visits the workings of dopamine, serotonin, the DRD4 gene, the
VMAT2 gene, identical-twin studies, the frontal lobes of the brain,
epilepsy, theta waves, and gamma rhythms in religious experience.

Each seems to offer a tantalizing glimpse into the "truth" of such
experiences. But on the ultimate question - do human brains simply generate
religious sensations, or can some of us perceive realms of being - Hagerty
says there is no way of being certain.

"You can have two views of it and they're both valid," Hagerty concluded.

She emerged from her quest with a sense that "the instruments of brain
science are picking up something beyond this material world." But she admits
that may be, at least in part, because she is not comfortable with the idea
of an absurd, meaningless universe.

Intellectually, at least, she discounts the idea of a God who intervenes in
human affairs.

"I came to define God by his handiwork," she writes. "A craftsman who builds
the hope of eternity into our genes, a master electrician and chemist who
outfits our brains to access another dimension, a guru who rewards our
spiritual efforts by allowing us to feel united with all things, an
intelligence that pervades every atom and every nanosecond, all time and
space, in the throes of death or the ecstasy of life."

But emotionally, she finds the idea of an "infinite mind" not quite
comforting enough, and so maintains a "binary view of God."

"In my everyday life I'm living out a human story," she said, and so she
turns sometimes to the life of Jesus "as a way to model my life."

"The [concept of God] I can defend intellectually at a cocktail party is
infinite," she said with a laugh. "But the one that helps me is 'What would
Jesus say to me?'

"I feel I can have both."