[kronas]

Originally posted by Ramrod
Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili of the Nuclear Medicine Division at the University of Pennsylvania have been conducting brain-imaging experiments on highly proficient mediators in order to identify those other brain areas where activity is linked to religious experience. One of their most interesting findings was decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobule. Our sense of distinction between self and world may well lie in this brain area.

It is certainly described in the mystical literature of all the world's great religions as a state of ultimate unity. And when a person is in this state he or she loses all sense of discrete being, and even the difference between self and others is obliterated.

Such experiences are often described as a perfect union with God, and would appear to be mediated by the posterior superior temporal lobule, which is what helps us diffentiate between self and non-self. So altered activity in this area might be linked with a sense of unity with the world.

A decreased sense of awareness of the boundaries between the self and the external world could lead to a sense of oneness with others, thereby generating a sense of community and cohesiveness. This could explain why religious sentiment could be of positive benefit for the survival of tribes. This could also explain why natural selection favoured the evolution of a religious centre in the brain.

But Newberg and D'Aquili have an even more parsimonious neurological explanation for God. They point out that one natural function of our brains is constantly to infer the causes of events we witness. But what happens when no cause is discernible?

Newberg and D'Aquili postulate that the brain invokes gods, powers, spirits or some similar causal agent. When we find no discernible rules we can use to our advantage, we construct myths to help orientate ourselves within that disquieting universe.

But even if the final location of God is in the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain, this might not be a final victory for atheists. Finding the existence of a neural structure which sustains religious experience could simply be evidence that a higher power so contructed humans as to possess the capacity to experience the divine.

nice one ramrod :p

/me saves this for future refrence :p