Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been putting nuns and Buddhist meditators into a scanning machine (separately, of course) to measure how their brains function during spiritual experiences. He discovered that religious experiences have a profound impact on the brain: both nuns and meditators showed heightened activity in the frontal lobes of the brain when they were in spiritual states. Newberg also studied Pentecostals while they were speaking in tongues and discovered exactly the opposite phenomenon – a marked decline in the frontal lobes. (John Micklethwait and Adrain Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World pg. 145-46.)
5 comments:
we eagerly await the repeat of the experiment, next time with Stoliner and Humanist Jews as subjects
Wait, why is Sarah Palin's picture included in this post?
She is a Pentecostal. One wonders if this explains something about her. :)
to be fair...analytical philosopher William Alston is also pentecostal. I'm not sure we should be so quick to compare "In Me Own Words" by Bigfoot with "Thinking in Tongues; Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy"...let alone the deliverances of brain scans with the suspected deliverances of God.
I'm reading a book that discusses this study at length. Actually, there were similarities between all three groups (Carmelite nuns, Buddhist Monks, and Pentecostals) in the function of the thalamus. Ultimately you're talking about different paths in experiencing (for lack of any adequate word) transcendence. Many of the same brain functions apparent in all three groups mentioned above can also be reproduced with hallucinogenic drugs. Types of brain function and intelligence are not always linked.
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