Neurotheology
This article is about Neurotheology. Go here for Neuroethology.
Neurotheology, also known as biotheology, is the study of the neural basis of Spirituality. Neurotheology deals with the neurological and evolutionary basis for Subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual. Neurotheology defines spiritual experiences to include subjective reports such as
- The perception that time, fear or self-consciousness have dissolved
- Spiritual awe
- Oneness with the universe
- Ecstatic trance
- Sudden enlightenment
- Altered states of consciousness
| 'Neurotheology' as a term is also sometimes used in a less scientific context or a philosophical context. Some of these uses, according to the mainstream scientific community, qualify as Pseudoscience. However, it's important to remember that the word "neurotheology" was coined by Aldous Huxley, mainly in a philosophical context.The use of the term neurotheology in published work is currently uncommon. A search on the citation indexing service provided by Institute for Scientific Information returns five articles. Three of these are published in the journal Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, while two are published in American Behavioral Scientist. Work on the neural basis of spirituality has, however, occurred sporadically throughout the 20th century. Keywords for such work are 'deity', 'neurophysiological bases', 'spirituality' and 'mysticism'. |
History and Methodology
Aldous Huxley used the word for the first time in the novel Island. Early studies in the 1950s and 1960s used EEGs to study brain wave patterns correlated with spiritual states. During the 1980s Dr. Michael Persinger stimulated the temporal lobes of human subjects with a weak Magnetic field. His subjects claimed to have a sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room." This work gained a lot of publicity at the time. Current studies use Brain imaging to localize brain regions active, or differentially active, during spiritual experiences. David Wulf, a Psychologist at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, suggests that current brain imaging studies, along with the consistency of spiritual experiences across cultures, history, and religions, "suggest a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain."Criticism
An attempt to marry a materialistic approach like Neuroscience to spirituality naturally attracts much criticism. Some of the criticism is philosophical, dealing with the (percieved) irreconcilability between science and spirituality, while some is more methodological, dealing with the issues of studing an experience as subjective as spirituality.Philosophical criticism
Critics of this approach, like philosopher Ken Wilber and religious scholar Huston Smith, see the more materialistic formulations of the approach as examples of Reductionism and Scientism that are only looking at the superficial aspects of the phenomena, and do not constitute a true explanation of spiritual experience.Scientific criticism
In 2005 Pehr Granqvist, a Psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, questioned Dr. Michael Persinger's findings in a paper published in Neuroscience Letters. Dr. Granqvist believes Dr. Persinger's work was not "double blind." Those conducting Persinger's trials, who were often graduate students, knew what sort of results to expect, with the risk that the knowledge would be transmitted to experimental subjects by unconscious cues. They were also frequently given an idea of what was happening by being asked to fill in questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences before the trials were conducted. Dr. Granqvist set about conducting the experiment double blinded and found that the presence or absence of the field had no relationship with any religious or spiritual experience reported by the participants.However, Dr. Persinger has stood by his findings, arguing that several of his previous experiments have explicitly used double-blind protocols, and that Dr Granqvist failed to fully replicate Persinger's experimental conditions .