[tt] NEJM: Solomon H. Snyder: Seeking God in the Brain: Efforts to Localize Higher Brain Functions

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Solomon H. Snyder: Seeking God in the Brain: Efforts to 
Localize Higher Brain Functions
The New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 358(1), 3 January 2008, pp 6-7

[Perspective]

Dr. Snyder is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University 
School of Medicine, Baltimore.

Neuroscientists have long eschewed global questions about brain function, 
and books reviewing the current state of neuroscience usually allocate 
only a small section to "higher functions." But with the advent of novel 
imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomographic scanning and 
functional magnetic resonance imaging, attitudes have begun to change. It 
is now feasible to visualize functions of discrecte brain regions while 
subjects are engaged in diverse activities - doing arithmetic, composing 
songs, writing poetry, or watching pornographic movies. Information about 
which parts of the brain are activated during various mental activities 
has supplemented and, in general, confirmed previous insights derived from 
observations of alterations of thinking and feeling associated with brain 
lesions, epilepsy, and the use of diverse drugs.

Efforts to elucidate higher brain functions have intersected with a 
burgeoning literature on the neural underpinnings of not only language and 
art but also religion. At one extreme, some scientists, such as Francis 
Collins, in The Language of God, have even used what we know of molecular 
biology and brain function to argue for the existence of a personal God. 
[1] Collins reviews anthropologic data emphasizing the universality of the 
search for God among a diverse group of primitive and advanced cultures 
over many thousands of years; he interprets this universality as implying 
that some basic structure in the brain "needs God." Similarly, noting that 
humans have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, Collins suggests that 
this characteristic, too, originates in an intrinsic structure of the 
brain. He goes so far as to conclude that the moral law was implanted in 
our brains by God, but many scientists have argued, from the same 
universality, that moral, altruistic behavior is programmed into the brain 
because it facilitates social behavior that leads to the preservation of 
the species.

Others have used similar data to argue that all of religion is an artifact 
of evolution. Neuroscientist David Linden, for instance, has recently 
suggested specific mechanisms whereby evolutionary alterations in the 
structure of the brain might account for the development of religion as 
well as love, memory, and dreams. [2] As the brain evolved, he explains, 
the overgrown cerebral cortex came to overlie the more primitive, 
emotion-regulating limbic structures, which in turn surmount the most 
primitive brain-stem structures and the associated hypothalamus. Linden 
argues that the accidental linking of these portions of the brain accounts 
for many of the tribulations of humankind - anxiety and other emotional 
disturbances arise in substantial part from the ongoing war between the 
"rational" higher centers and the emotion-laden limbic system. Linden 
argues that if an "intelligent designer" had assembled the brain, it would 
surely have done an elegant, impeccable job, but the more we learn about 
the brain, the more clearly we see that it is an ad hoc concatenation of 
structures designed for unrelated functions - a sort of Rube Goldberg 
contraption. Though the brain somehow manages to function rather 
elegantly, breakdowns manifested in emotional and other disturbances are 
all too frequent.

Linden speculates about the neural mechanisms that may underlie religious 
impulses. He regards religious ideation as reflecting beliefs - such as 
the concept of a virgin birth or the notion of a God who knows every 
thought of every human being - that violate our everyday perception of 
reality. He likens such conceptualizations to the confabulations that 
persons with split brains arrive at in order to make sense of the 
incompatible data encountered by the two separated hemispheres.

In his recent book The Soul in the Brain, British neurologist Michael 
Trimble looks to his area of expertise, epilepsy, to explore a possible 
relationship between the human brain and religion: religiosity, he notes, 
is often brought to the fore by seizures. [3] Trimble points out that some 
of the greatest religious figures in history had what were probably 
complex partial seizures, which are known to be associated with religious 
ideation. For instance, during Saint Paul's conversion on the road to 
Damascus, he is said not only to have suffered 3 days of blindness but 
also to have fallen to the ground frequently and experienced ecstatic 
visions. Muhammad described falling episodes accompanied by visual and 
auditory hallucinations. Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism, reported 
lapses of consciousness and speech arrest, noting that "When I came to . . 
. I found myself lying on my back looking up at heaven." Joan of Arc 
reported, "I heard this voice [of an angel] . . . accompanied also by a 
great light." [3]

Trimble recalls that in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the 
19th-century psychologist William James also highlighted the trances, 
visions, and auditory hallucinations associated with religion, emphasizing 
the ineffable, altered state of consciousness of most religious mystics. 
Such mystical states, encountered in most religions, remarks Trimble, are 
extraordinarily similar to the mental states elicited by psychedelic drugs 
such as LSD and mescaline. Almost 50 years ago, the psychiatrist Walter 
Pahnke came to this conclusion on the basis of experiments in which the 
psychedelic drug psilocybin was administered to students at the Harvard 
Divinity School. More recently, Roland Griffiths and colleagues have 
replicated these studies in a more rigorous fashion and found that 
subjects receiving psilocybin reported long-lasting changes in a religious 
sense of self. [4] Drugs whose mechanism of action is understood can be 
powerful tools for elucidating the molecular basis of mental states - we 
know much more about the neurotransmitters that mediate emotions, for 
instance, from studying the actions of antidepressant drugs than from 
direct manipulations of the brain - and psychedelic drugs are known to act 
as agonists of one subtype of serotonin receptors. [4] Since serotonin 
neurons arise from a discrete set of raphe nuclei in the brain, it may be 
possible to narrow the search for the biologic cause of at least one type 
of religiosity to these few cells.

But given the variability of what we mean by "religion" and "poetry," 
attempts to localize such purported functions within the brain are always 
fraught with hazards. With his focus on epileptic causes of both religious 
and creative impulses, Trimble enumerates several candidate regions, most 
of them in the temporal lobe - an area that receives a substantial input 
from serotonin neurons - which is consistent with what we know of sites of 
action of psychedelic drugs. In this issue of the Journal, Sanai and 
colleagues (pages 18-27) report on a study in which they mapped sites 
involved in diverse modes of language use in patients with gliomas who 
were undergoing debulking of their tumors. They found a far wider 
dispersal than might have been expected, with parietal and temporal as 
well as frontal regions providing important contributions. However, any 
extrapolation from a mapping of brain areas that mediate language use to 
likely cerebral contributions to religious or creative dispositions would 
be highly speculative.

So where do all these brain explorations lead us? In seeking a general 
relationship between religious states, poetry, and music, Trimble ascribes 
all three to the right, nondominant side of the brain. He assumes that 
integration of the activity of the right-sided emotional brain with that 
of the left-sided analytic brain gives rise to the greatest intellectual 
achievements in the arts. I suspect that major advances in science, too, 
are the product of more than pure reason - in the finest scientists I have 
encountered, I have always detected a notable creative, artistic flair. 
[5] Artistic, intuitive approaches are evident even in the most abstract 
intellectual achievements, such as Einstein's theories. Needless to say, a 
simple dichotomy of right and left brains is a gross oversimplification. 
Nonetheless, as imaging technology and associated cognitive testing become 
ever more sophisticated, we may be able to discriminate ways in which 
religious and creative sensibilities relate to one another and to brain 
areas that mediate emotions that are deranged in psychiatric illness. 
Whether any of these advances will provide the answer to the cerebral 
basis of religion, if one exists, is anybody's guess.

REFERENCES

1. Collins FS. The language of God: a scientist presents evidence for 
belief. New York: Free Press, 2007. [Context Link]

2. Linden DJ. The accidental mind: how brain evolution has given us love, 
memory, dreams, and God. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007. [Context 
Link]

3. Trimble MR. The soul in the brain: the cerebral basis of language, art, 
and belief. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. [Context 
Link]

4. Griffiths RR, Richards WA, McCann U, Jesse R. Psilocybin can occasion 
mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal 
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 
2006;187:268-83. [Context Link]

5. Snyder SH. The audacity principle in science. Proc Am Philos Soc 
2005;149:141-58. [Context Link]