This is Your Brain on God :: Biology Essays Research Papers

With all your science can you checkhow it is, and whence it isthat light comes into the soul? Henry David ThoreauBelief in idol has long been held to be a superstition by the scientific fri barship as the existence of such a higher power cannot be demonstrated through objective observation. While science is unable to attempt whether or not God is real, the field of neurotheology has instead posed a new question that we can find answers to is there activity in the brain specific to religious experience? Can science in fact shed light on Thoreaus question?Through the handling of brain imaging technology, Dr. Andrew Newberg has conducted research in an attempt to find answers to these questions. The participants in his study were Buddhists well-versed in meditation. Newberg used a SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) camera to advance an image of the brain of an individual at the moment he egestes the closing of meditation. Such a picture would enable us to look at the brain as it experiences God.The peak of meditation is clearly a intrinsic state, with each individual attaining it in different manners and having different duration requirements. However, the sensation and meaning behind this moment is consistent among all who reach it. At the peak, the subjects indicate that they lose their sense of individual existence and find out inextricably bound with the universe. There are no discrete objects or beings, no sense of space or the passage of time, no line betwixt the self and the rest of the universe (Newberg 119).As the river flowing east and air jacketMerge in the sea and become one with it,Forgetting that they were ever identify rivers,So do all creatures lose their separatenessWhen they merge at last . . . (Newberg 6-7)Newberg first took baseline images of the brains of the meditators to use as a regulation for comparison (Newberg 5). It was important that these scans of the brain be taken while the subjects were at rest so tha t brain activity while one is plainly relaxed could be differentiated from brain activity while one is having a spiritual experience. The baseline scans showed an even distribution of activity throughout the brain, characterized by a large amount of activity in the posterior, superior parietal lobe and a moderate amount in the prefrontal cortex (Newberg 4).1The subjects because meditated. When they reached the peak, they pulled on a string attached at one end to their finger and at the other to Dr.