Three years ago, British biologist Richard Dawkins agreed to become a guinea pig in an unprecedented experiment: neurosurgeon Michael Persinger said that he can evoke a religious feeling in any person by "irradiating" specific areas of his brain with electromagnetic pulses! Richard Dawkins, known for his biological theories as well as criticism of religious views, volunteered to test the electromagnetic device invented by Persinger.
Clues to the solution
Many researchers, like the neurosurgeon named, saw it in the brain as the keys to understanding the nature of religious feeling. Others try to discern them in psychological, genetic and biochemical realms. Scientific approaches to religious reality have historical precedents. So, at the beginning of the 20th century, similar attempts were made by Sigmund Freud and William James. Modern natural scientists are armed, unlike their predecessors, with a powerful instrumental base, but it still does not quite cope with the task at hand, for the human brain is the most complex and sophisticated object of scientific research. This is convincingly illustrated by the theories below.
Theories
Stuart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordam University in New York, argues that belief in the real existence of supernatural beings "is an illusion that we inherited from ancient times." This illusion, according to Guthrie, was generated by the desire of our distant ancestors to project their own qualities onto the gods, that is, people fell into anthropomorphism. Stuart Guthrie believes that it is in anthropomorphism that the roots of the religious worldview should be sought, since it helped people adapt to very unfavorable living conditions and increased their chances of survival. For millennia, natural selection has supported the unconscious tendencies of anthropomorphism that went beyond real objects and events and encompassed all of nature as a whole. Over time, people have convinced themselves thatthat the whole world around them is nothing more than a performance, staged by a skilled director.
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Involvement in bliss
The University of Pennsylvania neurosurgeon Andrew Newberg focused on the tendency of people from different religious backgrounds to share similar mystical experiences. This commonality is evidence of visions generated by the same neurological processes. To test this hypothesis, Newberg examined the brains of twenty adherents of spiritualistic practices, including reciting Christian prayers and performing Buddhist meditations. To do this, he used the well-known computed tomography procedure. When the subject, a Franciscan nun, felt "dissolving into the Christian consciousness," radioactive fluid was injected into her intravenously, entering the brain and entering the nerve cells. The nun was then moved to a CT scan camera to re-scan her brain. It turned outthat the image reflected the levels of activity of brain cells immediately after the injection of the radioactive fluid, when the nun was still in a state of contemplation! The activity of nerve cells decreased in the frontal and occipital regions of the brain, which are responsible for orientation in space. According to Newberg, religious experiences are triggered by rhythmic processes such as dancing, chanting and chanting mantras, which give rise to a feeling of ineffable bliss.giving rise to a feeling of inexpressible bliss.giving rise to a feeling of inexpressible bliss.
Solenoids around the head
The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who treated epileptics in the 1950s, implanted electrodes in various parts of the brain in preparing patients for cranial surgery and asked them about the sensations. Since there are no pain receptors in the brain, the patients operated on did not need anesthesia. So, when the temporal lobes were exposed to this effect, the patients heard unknown voices and saw ghosts! Based on this discovery, Michael Persinger designed a special helmet with solenoids around the head that transmit electromagnetic pulses to specific areas of the brain. Persinger tested this device on several hundred volunteers and found that 80 percent of them experienced a "presence" feeling.
Skeptics tried to challenge the results of these experiments, but to no avail.
The genetic component of the problem
Dean Haymer of the National Cancer Institute (USA) has tried to bridge the gap between religious sensibilities and the scientific approach. In the 1980s, 84 pairs of twins were examined at the University of Minnesota, which identified the genetic component of "genuine religiosity." Dean Haymer later examined a thousand smokers for a genetic addiction to smoking. Haymer focused on studying genes associated with neurotransmitters called monoamines. These include serotonin and dopamine, which help regulate mood. Some substances act on them as psychotropic drugs such as LSD and mescaline, known for their hallucinogenic properties.
Epic with the drug DMT
New Mexico psychiatrist Rick Strassman linked spiritualistic sensations to the effects of a single substance, dimethyl tryptamine (DMT), which is secreted in our own brains and plays an important role in shaping consciousness. According to Strassman, it is DMT that provokes mystical visions, hallucinations, experiences of states close to death, sensations of abductions (alien abductions), etc. DMT, first synthesized by a Canadian chemist back in 1931, became the main active ingredient in hallucinogenic tea consumed by Indians Amazon and parishioners of two churches in Brazil. Pure DMT, taken by mouth, has no effect on the body because enzymes in the gut paralyze its activity. However, in the 1950s, Hungarian chemist Stephen Szara establishedthat DMT injections have an extremely powerful hallucinogenic effect, albeit in less than an hour. In 1965, scientists were able to isolate DMT from human blood, and in 1972, a group of experts led by Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod isolated this substance from brain tissue.
The nature of the visions
Until a certain point, Strassman's DMT activities had met his expectations. Many of his volunteer subjects who took the drug reported quasi-religious feelings of bliss they experienced, about “wasting time,” about life after death, about contacts with a higher being who bestows all those who suffer with their participation, etc. Others talked about "leaving the body" and about the aspiration of the liberated soul along a long tunnel to the luminous deity. Almost half of the participants in the study "contacted" alien beings, elves, robots, giant insects. These terrible creatures weren't always friendly. One of the participants in the experiment told how he was eaten by giant insectoids (insect-like) …
G. Gordeev