Fingerprints of God (22 page)

Mary smiled kindly. “Well, I have a gift of faith. And I’m going to pray that you receive that gift, too.”

Many scientists would say that Jordan Sinclair and Mary are cursed with faulty wiring in their brains. If God is an electrician in this case, He miscalculated the voltage with tragic results. On a regular basis, the electricity in their temporal lobe surges and the circuit breaker flips on. The visions or transcendent feelings that the faulty wiring creates are nothing more than hallucinations.

But suppose the proper analogy is not an electrical storm but a radio transmission, in which the brain is a radio receiver. This thought did not originate with me. Several scientists I interviewed proposed the idea. In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program to varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low—in the case of an atheist, so low it’s inaudible. Many hear their favorite programs every now and again. Others, through no fault of their own, have the volume turned up too high, or they are receiving a cacophony of noise that makes no sense, as if they were tuning in to stations transmitting from Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, while they drive through rural Georgia. If this analogy is carried further—and it is, by an increasing number of scientists—then the “sender” is separate from the “receiver.” The content of the transmission does not originate in the brain, any more than the host of
All Things Considered
is physically in your radio. This is not to say that
all
our thoughts come from another, spiritual, realm, any more than everything we hear comes through the radio. It merely suggests that perhaps people suffering with an overactive temporal lobe are able to tune in to another dimension of reality, which the rest of us are unable to access. Maybe Saint Paul and Joan of Arc and Dostoyevsky were not crazy. Maybe they just had better antennae.

And maybe that was the case for Terrence Ayala as well.

Terrence smiled graciously when I met him at Henry Ford Hospital, even though I had kept him waiting for some time. A handsome forty-seven-year-old African-American, lean and muscular in his pullover sweater,Terrence spoke softly, almost shyly. I thought it a winning trait for a man with his résumé: Princeton University, the University of Virginia Law School, most recently a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida.

Several years earlier, Terrence had undergone an operation that left him with a stuttering problem. His words, though they spilled drop by drop from his mouth, glistened with insight and originality. As I listened to him, I thought:
This is a man who sees the world differently.

What Terrence sees is either hallucination or an alternate reality, depending on your point of view. Terrence told me that when he falls asleep at night, “frequently there’s this dark presence, usually off to the upper right side of my body. If I’m lying down it will usually be looming over me. And I have a sense that it is a very evil presence. I can see it now—well, I can re-create that experience. It’s a very palpable, powerful experience.”

“And the presence seems just as real as, say, the walls, the table in the room ... ?” I asked.

“Oh yes! It’s as though there’s another person in the room.”

I remembered Michael Persinger’s “Sensed Presence.”We decided to call the presence “Bob.” I asked Terrence if he thought Bob was onto-logically real.

“Well, it’s part of my reality,” he responded.

“Do you think your brain picks up information that, say, mine can’t perceive?” I asked. “I mean, do you think you can tune in to alternate realities, or states of consciousness, that I can’t?”

“Absolutely,” he said. He leaned forward.“If you look in a room full of people dancing, the majority of folks will be going to one beat, but there may be others who are tuning in to five or six or seven rhythms. And they can not only tune into them but move in consonance with those sounds, whereas other folks are just sticking to what others would agree is the dominant beat.”

He laughed. “I wish I could tune in more frequently to the one everyone else is trying to dance to.”

“When was the last time you saw Bob?” I asked.

“Not in the last two or three months,” he said. “They changed my medication.”

“Oh. They changed your medicine and that helped?” I asked.

“Helped?” he repeated.

I was startled. “Do you feel it’s a loss?”

“I do,” Terrence said. He had grown, if not fond of, then accustomed to his extra sense that he believed allowed him to tap into a different dimension.

“You know, we pay a lot of money to musicians who can hear different vibes and harmonies and express them for those of us who have not spent time training those abilities. We pay visual artists to make perceptible the images they have in their minds. And I guess this goes into a whole area of what we would call mental illness, and why we classify these things as
illnesses
rather than just
differences
.We have a habit of trying to bring people into conformity through medication and modern science and all kinds of things.
Who knows what realities we’re medicating away?
”

This is the pivotal question. Are we medicating away realities or delusions? Science believes it has the dispositive answer. For, like magicians with their trick rabbits, scientists can now make these “realities” appear or disappear at will.

Recently a group of Swiss researchers was evaluating a twenty-two-year-old woman for possible brain surgery.
²⁰
She had no psychiatric history. The researchers were homing in on a particular spot in the brain—the junction of the temporal lobes (emotional self) and the parietal lobes (the area that orients your body in space and in relation to other objects). When the surgeon electrically stimulated that area, the patient felt the presence of another person behind her.When they increased the voltage, she saw the “person” was young, of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. In the next stimulation, she observed a “man” sitting behind her, clasping her in his arms, which, she allowed, was rather unpleasant. Finally the researchers stimulated her brain while she performed a naming test, holding a card in her right hand. She reported that the man, now behind her to her right, was getting pushy (probably smarting from her earlier rebuff) and trying to interfere with her task. “He wants to take the card,” she told the researchers. “He doesn’t want me to read.”

Stimulating alternate “realities” is a bit of a party trick. Making them disappear is far more common. Indeed, that is what epilepsy specialists are paid to do. It’s called
treatment
. They lesion, or cut into, the brain and remove the offending tissue, or they medicate the brain and tamp down the electrical spikes.
Voilà
, the spiritual experiences disappear.

In fact, New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky still remembers the day he made visions of Jesus go away. More than twenty years ago, when he worked as a resident at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Devinsky was called to consult on a woman who had a brain lesion.

“She was talking about Christ, and Christ was speaking to her, and she was in a state of religious fervor, just talking nonstop about this,” Devinsky recalls.

The brain scan showed an abnormality in her right temporal lobe, and her EEG showed that the region was experiencing continuous seizure.

“And when we used medications intravenously to shut down the seizure, the religious ideation stopped immediately,” he says. “So here is a woman with a known structural problem—a lesion on her right temporal lobe—who had a well-documented seizure on her EEG, who had religious ideation that she could not control, it was just coming out of her in an almost violent form—not quite psychotic, but verging on that—and it was shut down immediately by treating her with medication.”

You could conclude that if this woman’s relationship with Christ vanished with a dose of medication, that experience was merely brain activity, not a connection with another reality.

But you could also argue that this proves nothing about the existence of God. Consider, once again, the brain as a radio. Let’s say you open the lid and remove some components and wires: that’s called
le sioning
the brain. Or say you pour maple syrup over the connections: that’s called seizure medication. Either way, chances are the radio will not be picking up
All Things Considered
, even though the program is in fact broadcasting. In the same way, if there is an alternate reality, if there is a God who is constantly sending out signals, surgery or medication can destroy the ability to receive them—but God could still be speaking.

As I considered all I had learned about temporal lobe epilepsy, I realized I had circled back to the same irritating conundrum. Is the transcendent experience of an epileptic like music playing on a CD player—a closed loop dependent on nothing but the machinery? Or is it like a radio—tuning in to a hidden spiritual reality outside your physical brain?

Most scientists believe the question has been answered. It’s all in your head. But that points more to the nature of scientific inquiry than to truth. Neurologists cannot climb inside Terrance Ayala’s head and witness his alternate realities. Therefore under the rules of modern science—which require observation and precise measurements—Terrence’s experience loses every time. It is a little like playing a basketball game in which the mystics’ hoop is considered out of bounds. No matter how many times Terrence Ayala and Sophy Burnham and Don Eaton shoot the ball through the hoop, they cannot score points. But in fact, the ball still swished through the net.

Most of us have never suffered an epileptic seizure and resulting visions. But most have enjoyed some more run-of-the-mill moments of transcendence. I wondered: How do neurologists explain the experiences of “normal” people?

According to Michael Persinger at Laurentian University, people’s spiritual experiences fall along a spectrum, with an atheist like Sigmund Freud sitting at one end and a mystic like Joan of Arc at the other. Somewhere in between are you, me, and anyone else who has shivered with a numinous experience. Persinger hypothesized that a person’s spirituality correlates to his brain-wave activity. The more “temporal lobe signs” a “normal” person shows, the more likely he or she is to encounter God.

Persinger studied more than 1,000 people over ten years, comparing “normal populations” and “special normal populations” and clinical populations.
²¹
“Special normal populations” included creative people: artists, drama students, writers, and (oddly, I thought) women who experienced the psychological symptoms of false pregnancies. Clinical populations included people with epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder. He found a continuum of brain activity. The nonartistic drone showed average brain-wave activity, like the cold porridge of the mama bear. The artistic people showed more spike bursts: “theta” activity over the temporal lobes, which is a relaxed state of consciousness. They also presented discrepancies between the right side of the brain and the left. Persinger concluded that artists’ elevated activity sparked creativity—the porridge was
just right.
But the clinical populations—they were too hot, and their brains’ excessive temporal lobe activity brought anxiety, thoughts of suicide, and an intense, dominating, and often intrusive fantasy life.

What Persinger’s work suggests is that anyone with a temporal lobe has a gateway to the divine, or at least to divine feelings. How strong those feelings are depends on the way your brain fires.You don’t have to be crazy to feel “God.” You just have to be human.

I asked Orrin Devinsky about my own mystical experience, a little baby experience, to be sure, but one that is seared into my memory and changed my view of the world. I told him about the incident eleven years earlier, when I had been interviewing a woman about her cancer and her religious faith.

“And suddenly I felt this numinous presence all around us,” I recounted. “She felt it, too. Do you have any idea what would explain that?”

“I think the way you’re wired, what was going on in your brain at that time, your past history—combined with that woman’s story—profoundly affected you at some level,” he speculated. “Maybe it kindled or reawakened a neural state that exists dormantly within your mind, and it triggered the right frequencies, and the right resonances, and the right connections, to reawaken that feeling. And the way that manifested itself within your nervous system was to trigger a specific type of religious experience.”

“Does that exclude the possibility that there might have actually been something spiritual?” I asked.“I mean, does the fact that we might be able to explain it with brain function eliminate the possibility that there might actually be something spiritual going on?”

“No!”
Devinsky said, and I was surprised by the heat of his answer. “I think the two can clearly exist together. Say there was a man and a woman who loved each other and when they looked at each other, they experienced that emotion that we refer to as love. There would be a change in their brain state, and probably a change in the temporal lobe as well. Does that negate the presence of true love between them? Of course not.When you get to spirituality, as a scientist I think it really becomes extremely difficult to say anything other than ‘It’s possible.’ ”

It makes sense that those epiphanies physically alter the brain as well as one’s life. After all, being bitten by a dog, or memorizing 2 + 2 = 4, lays down permanent tracks in the brain. What might a moment with God do?

The brain of someone suffering with temporal lobe epilepsy is like a stallion that has not yet been broken and trained. It becomes too activated, it spooks too easily, and for those people, their spiritual experiences are wild, ragged, scary things, galloping through a forest with low-hanging limbs. For them, nothing but a shot of tranquilizer or an operation will calm down their wild lobes—and then, often but not always, the religious experiences disappear.