Sacred Disease: A Neuroscience of Godby Lorenzo Lazzerini Ospri
“About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from Heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, 'Saul, Saul, Why do you persecute me?'
[...][Finally] my companions had to lead me by the hand into Damascus, because the brilliance of the light had blinded me.”
Recounting above is Saul of Tarsus, better known as St. Paul, the founder of Christianity. The guy was a fierce persecutor of the early followers of Jesus, until the day he had his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus. The incident he narrates is a fairly dramatic personal experience, but it turns out such episodes are not all that uncommon. Indeed, while most people tend to stick to their parents' faith, the leading cause of adult religious conversions is a personal mystic experience like St. Paul's.
Granted, not all of them result in the inception of a major monotheistic religion, but on the other hand virtually all founders of new faiths aver a personal revelation from God; so it was for Moses beckoned by a voice from a burning bush, and for Mohammad, taken up in rapturous flight by a horse-riding angel.
Similar events are reported nowadays in sufficient number to make them accessible to scientific study. So we can now ask, what causes some to people to experience God?
Well, first of all there's more to religious experiences than just having visions or hearing voices. In some instances, in fact, explicit perceptions are altogether absent. Always present though is a powerful feeling that what you're experiencing is deeply meaningful, in some sort of ineffable way, impossible to verbalize. These so-called “numinous perceptions” can take various specific forms, from an intense awareness of the presence of God, or a spirit, or a cosmic force; to a sudden epiphany about the interconnectedness of all beings in the universe.
Here's the best of all visionary poets trying to convey his own numinous experience:
“When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.”
{William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell}
Alongside numinosity and ineffability, the third distinguishing mark of a full-fledged religious experience is -it goes without saying- an overwhelming emotional response; typically, blissful joy.
Now, it might seem exceedingly hard for science to take on this issue, but the simple truth is that as a natural phenomenon, even religious experiences must have a natural cause.
As it happens, there's one condition known to produce bizarre religious-like disturbances in its sufferers, a disorder of the brain that may even yield some clue vis-a-vis the early spread of new religious doctrines in the past.
Sometimes, after an infection, trauma, or lesion due to, e.g., lack of oxygen, neurons start firing electrical signals in an anomalous or excessive manner, so that normal brain function is temporarily impaired. The consequence is a seizure (or “ictal event”), which can be as subtle as perceiving a ringing in one's ear, or as dramatic as generalized convulsions of the whole body - depending on the brain area(s) affected.
If the origin of the abnormal brain activity is the hippocampus, amygdala, or their overlying cortex, the disorder is called temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).
TLE seizures are usually of the subtle kind: unless they spread to the rest of the brain, they do not cause convulsions, and those affected might not even realize they're having a seizure. The most common effect is just a sensory or cognitive disturbance. Affected people can suddenly hallucinate a strong smell, or a bright light, as part of a “sensory aura”. Cognitive auras, on the other hand, can be far more outlandish, ranging from inexplicable sensations of deja vu or jamais vu (incongruous sense of familiarity or unfamiliarity),to an unprovoked upwelling of fear, anger, or joy. Radical changes in consciousness, such as depersonalization and derealization, can occur too: for the brief duration of the seizure (usually around 1 minute), the affected individual undergoes a breakdown of his own sense of self, so that bodily sensations and actions subjectively don't feel like the belong to one's self, or relate to one's own identity, while the world around also looks hazy, unreal, dream-like.
Cognitive auras are rare, occurring in about 10% of TLE patients, but oftentimes they can be evoked by electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe during epilepsy surgery.
Needless to say, these events can be so deeply disconcerting, so far removed from ordinary experience, and so imbued with intrinsic emotional valence, that religious conversions are quite a common outcome for these patients. Even more intriguingly, depersonalization and derealization are two virtually omnipresent features of non-epilepsy-related religious experiences too. The feeling of unreality of the self and the world in these cases typically precedes a world-shattering epiphany about the “true reality” of the cosmos, often compared to seeing through a veil for the first time in one's life:
“The eyes of the uncultured individual are clouded, as the Indians say, by the Veil of Maya. To him is revealed not the Thing-in-itself, but only the phenomenon in space and time. [...] In his limited knowledge, he sees not the inner nature of things, which is One.”
{Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation}
The important point here is that there's nothing intrinsically spiritual about these experiences, but their extraordinary nature makes them particularly susceptible to culturally-mediated religious interpretations.
A small minority (0.5%) of all TLE patients report as their primary peri-ictal symptom an overwhelming feeling of joy. Their ictal fits are called “ecstatic seizures”, and the most illustrious sufferer (although the word “sufferer” doesn't really apply here) was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the greatest Russian novelists of all time.
Let's get it straight from him:
[...][Finally] my companions had to lead me by the hand into Damascus, because the brilliance of the light had blinded me.”
Recounting above is Saul of Tarsus, better known as St. Paul, the founder of Christianity. The guy was a fierce persecutor of the early followers of Jesus, until the day he had his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus. The incident he narrates is a fairly dramatic personal experience, but it turns out such episodes are not all that uncommon. Indeed, while most people tend to stick to their parents' faith, the leading cause of adult religious conversions is a personal mystic experience like St. Paul's.
Granted, not all of them result in the inception of a major monotheistic religion, but on the other hand virtually all founders of new faiths aver a personal revelation from God; so it was for Moses beckoned by a voice from a burning bush, and for Mohammad, taken up in rapturous flight by a horse-riding angel.
Similar events are reported nowadays in sufficient number to make them accessible to scientific study. So we can now ask, what causes some to people to experience God?
Well, first of all there's more to religious experiences than just having visions or hearing voices. In some instances, in fact, explicit perceptions are altogether absent. Always present though is a powerful feeling that what you're experiencing is deeply meaningful, in some sort of ineffable way, impossible to verbalize. These so-called “numinous perceptions” can take various specific forms, from an intense awareness of the presence of God, or a spirit, or a cosmic force; to a sudden epiphany about the interconnectedness of all beings in the universe.
Here's the best of all visionary poets trying to convey his own numinous experience:
“When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.”
{William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell}
Alongside numinosity and ineffability, the third distinguishing mark of a full-fledged religious experience is -it goes without saying- an overwhelming emotional response; typically, blissful joy.
Now, it might seem exceedingly hard for science to take on this issue, but the simple truth is that as a natural phenomenon, even religious experiences must have a natural cause.
As it happens, there's one condition known to produce bizarre religious-like disturbances in its sufferers, a disorder of the brain that may even yield some clue vis-a-vis the early spread of new religious doctrines in the past.
Sometimes, after an infection, trauma, or lesion due to, e.g., lack of oxygen, neurons start firing electrical signals in an anomalous or excessive manner, so that normal brain function is temporarily impaired. The consequence is a seizure (or “ictal event”), which can be as subtle as perceiving a ringing in one's ear, or as dramatic as generalized convulsions of the whole body - depending on the brain area(s) affected.
If the origin of the abnormal brain activity is the hippocampus, amygdala, or their overlying cortex, the disorder is called temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).
TLE seizures are usually of the subtle kind: unless they spread to the rest of the brain, they do not cause convulsions, and those affected might not even realize they're having a seizure. The most common effect is just a sensory or cognitive disturbance. Affected people can suddenly hallucinate a strong smell, or a bright light, as part of a “sensory aura”. Cognitive auras, on the other hand, can be far more outlandish, ranging from inexplicable sensations of deja vu or jamais vu (incongruous sense of familiarity or unfamiliarity),to an unprovoked upwelling of fear, anger, or joy. Radical changes in consciousness, such as depersonalization and derealization, can occur too: for the brief duration of the seizure (usually around 1 minute), the affected individual undergoes a breakdown of his own sense of self, so that bodily sensations and actions subjectively don't feel like the belong to one's self, or relate to one's own identity, while the world around also looks hazy, unreal, dream-like.
Cognitive auras are rare, occurring in about 10% of TLE patients, but oftentimes they can be evoked by electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe during epilepsy surgery.
Needless to say, these events can be so deeply disconcerting, so far removed from ordinary experience, and so imbued with intrinsic emotional valence, that religious conversions are quite a common outcome for these patients. Even more intriguingly, depersonalization and derealization are two virtually omnipresent features of non-epilepsy-related religious experiences too. The feeling of unreality of the self and the world in these cases typically precedes a world-shattering epiphany about the “true reality” of the cosmos, often compared to seeing through a veil for the first time in one's life:
“The eyes of the uncultured individual are clouded, as the Indians say, by the Veil of Maya. To him is revealed not the Thing-in-itself, but only the phenomenon in space and time. [...] In his limited knowledge, he sees not the inner nature of things, which is One.”
{Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation}
The important point here is that there's nothing intrinsically spiritual about these experiences, but their extraordinary nature makes them particularly susceptible to culturally-mediated religious interpretations.
A small minority (0.5%) of all TLE patients report as their primary peri-ictal symptom an overwhelming feeling of joy. Their ictal fits are called “ecstatic seizures”, and the most illustrious sufferer (although the word “sufferer” doesn't really apply here) was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the greatest Russian novelists of all time.
Let's get it straight from him:
“The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth, and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself; yes, God exists, I cried, You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure. Mahomet, in his Koran, said he had seen Paradise and had gone into it. All these stupid clever men are quite sure that he was a liar and a charlatan. But no, he did not lie, he really had been in Paradise during an attack of epilepsy; he was a victim of this disease as I am. I do not know whether this joy lasts for seconds or hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the delights of this world.”
All known cases of ecstatic seizures are from temporal lobe patients, and appear to be associated with hyper-synchronous discharges of electrical impulses between two limbic areas: the hippocampus and the septal nuclei.
The hippocampus is a crescent-shaped structure buried beneath the temporal cortex thought to be involved in memory, spatial navigation, and behavioral inhibition, while the septal nuclei are an anterior offshoot of the hippocampus, probably involved in the inhibition of fear, and the experience of pleasure. If you implant an electrode into the septal area of a mouse, the happy rodent will keep pressing a lever in order to self-stimulate it.
Dostoyevsky's son was also epileptic, which suggests an hereditary basis. Other cases have a more dramatic etiology. A young man working as a clerk in California started having, out of the blue, bizarre episodes of altered consciousness, such as alternate feelings of detachment and deep insight, sudden flashes of light suffusing the world with ineffable joy, and the occasional vision of “a bearded man resembling Jesus Christ”. The man, up until then mostly indifferent to religious matters, underwent a radical conversion, and started preaching to anybody who'd listen.
Shortly thereafter he was hospitalized, and a brain CAT scan revealed a right anterior temporal astrocytoma. Following resection of the tumor, the ecstatic seizures and associated religious fervor vanished as swiftly as they'd appeared.
“A man reported that God had given him a mission to bring Law to the world, and that God and the Virgin Mary commanded him not to eat until success was achieved.”
TLE is also a leading cause of post-ictal psychosis. When a seizure subsides, normal behavior resumes, and the individual is perfectly lucid. It's not until one to five days later, that the delusions and hallucinations start to appear. The patient becomes paranoid and aggressive. Peculiar delusions take hold that are, in a staggering 25% of all cases, of a religious nature.
All known cases of ecstatic seizures are from temporal lobe patients, and appear to be associated with hyper-synchronous discharges of electrical impulses between two limbic areas: the hippocampus and the septal nuclei.
The hippocampus is a crescent-shaped structure buried beneath the temporal cortex thought to be involved in memory, spatial navigation, and behavioral inhibition, while the septal nuclei are an anterior offshoot of the hippocampus, probably involved in the inhibition of fear, and the experience of pleasure. If you implant an electrode into the septal area of a mouse, the happy rodent will keep pressing a lever in order to self-stimulate it.
Dostoyevsky's son was also epileptic, which suggests an hereditary basis. Other cases have a more dramatic etiology. A young man working as a clerk in California started having, out of the blue, bizarre episodes of altered consciousness, such as alternate feelings of detachment and deep insight, sudden flashes of light suffusing the world with ineffable joy, and the occasional vision of “a bearded man resembling Jesus Christ”. The man, up until then mostly indifferent to religious matters, underwent a radical conversion, and started preaching to anybody who'd listen.
Shortly thereafter he was hospitalized, and a brain CAT scan revealed a right anterior temporal astrocytoma. Following resection of the tumor, the ecstatic seizures and associated religious fervor vanished as swiftly as they'd appeared.
“A man reported that God had given him a mission to bring Law to the world, and that God and the Virgin Mary commanded him not to eat until success was achieved.”
TLE is also a leading cause of post-ictal psychosis. When a seizure subsides, normal behavior resumes, and the individual is perfectly lucid. It's not until one to five days later, that the delusions and hallucinations start to appear. The patient becomes paranoid and aggressive. Peculiar delusions take hold that are, in a staggering 25% of all cases, of a religious nature.
This psychotic state is also distinguished by grandiosity and mood elevation. In addition,
this condition can endure for weeks and even devolve into a chronic interictal state, known to the world as Geschwind syndrome. The worst edge gradually wears off, so no overt delusions or hallucinations persist. The person affected isn't manifestly deranged anymore, yet something has changed from her healthy, old self. Her personality has stably acquired new traits, such as grandiosity, emotional intensity, obsessive preoccupation with religious and ethical matters. The condition was first described in a subset (7%) of TLE patients by Norman Geschwind, who also noted a compulsive need to write in these people (“hypergraphia”) and a marked aversion to sex (“hyposexuality”). Barely-literate people start jotting down an unending stream of short stories, and essays, and poems, of invariably religious or moralistic theme.
One patient described by Geschwind in his original paper, quite graciously started issuing devotional prayers for his physicians.
Others have since noted how these patients, far from being humorous chums, soon manifest a rather obnoxious mix of inflexibility and moralism, religious zeal and self-aggrandizement. It's impossible not to draw parallels with historical accounts of certain past religious leaders. If St Paul's flashes of light on the road to Damascus immediately invite the suspicion of simple partial seizures, his copious letters, which make up the bulk of the Christian New Testament, offer further clues. Superbia pauli is the traditional name given to the grandiose attitude transpiring from his letters, and his obsession with sexual mores has left a lasting imprint on Christianity.
Could it be that neurology is, after all, the key to theology, and a couple of our major faiths are the spawn of crackling brain circuits? Such great implications make all the more intriguing the big riddle as to how exactly epilepsy brings about the kind of personality changes seen in Geschwind patients.
The prevailing hypothesis these days is that epileptic discharges in the hippocampus, and anomalous impulses fired by neurons between seizures (inter-ictal spiking) cause a progressive strengthening of neural connections between the temporal cortical areas devoted to object recognition, and limbic structures whose job is to associate subjective meaning to percepts.
Thus, neutral stimuli begin to acquire exaggerated emotional salience, i.e. a numinous quality. Religious preoccupation is assumed by this theory to be a natural reaction by individuals whose daily experience of reality become suffused with meaningfulness as intense as inexplicable.
The “mere content” of the experience cannot be satisfactorily expressed in words because what makes it special, numinous, extraordinary, is precisely just the incongruous valence attributed to it by a dysfunctional corticolimbic network.
Reality cannot live up to the brain's expectations, and ineffability ensues.
This neat little theory has the added virtue of being testable, by imaging, lesion studies, and electrode stimulation studies. To our good fortune, animal models of interictal behavioral syndromes, such as Geschwind, already exist!
If you stably implant an electrode into the amygdala of a mouse, and the mouse survives, you can stimulate it periodically (say, daily). The intensity of the electric jolt you give has one notable consequence: there's a threshold above which a perfectly normal animal has a seizure. If you set the stimulation intensity just below this threshold, initially the rodent is not affected at all. After several days on this protocol, however, the selfsame stimulation intensity starts evoking seizures. In the beginning, such seizures result in the animal merely freezing, but as time goes by, response to amygdala stimulation becomes more and more severe, culminating in generalized convulsions.
Parallel to this phenomenon, called amygdala kindling, the mouse undergoes dramatic behavioral changes in its interictal life, between one seizure and the next. It becomes hyperactive and aggressive. Anxiety responses are amplified, and male mice tend to eschew receptive females, reminiscently of the ascetic attitude of human Geschwind patients.
Even more fascinatingly, several recent preliminary studies point to the conclusion that religiosity and superstitious beliefs are correlated even in non-psychiatric populations to temporal lobe signs: Recurrent tinnitus and deja vu's, transient amnesia and other subtle memory disturbances, are all sub-clinical indicators of temporal lobe lability sometimes occurring in otherwise perfectly normal people.
Science may have come full-circle in the intellectual emancipation of our species, banishing God from the heavens and trammeling it in our brains. For it is indeed the Christian Bible boldly proclaiming: “The Kingdom of God is within you”.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not reflect the position of The Restriction Digest Editorial staff, The Graduate Student Association at JHMI, or Johns Hopkins Medicine.
this condition can endure for weeks and even devolve into a chronic interictal state, known to the world as Geschwind syndrome. The worst edge gradually wears off, so no overt delusions or hallucinations persist. The person affected isn't manifestly deranged anymore, yet something has changed from her healthy, old self. Her personality has stably acquired new traits, such as grandiosity, emotional intensity, obsessive preoccupation with religious and ethical matters. The condition was first described in a subset (7%) of TLE patients by Norman Geschwind, who also noted a compulsive need to write in these people (“hypergraphia”) and a marked aversion to sex (“hyposexuality”). Barely-literate people start jotting down an unending stream of short stories, and essays, and poems, of invariably religious or moralistic theme.
One patient described by Geschwind in his original paper, quite graciously started issuing devotional prayers for his physicians.
Others have since noted how these patients, far from being humorous chums, soon manifest a rather obnoxious mix of inflexibility and moralism, religious zeal and self-aggrandizement. It's impossible not to draw parallels with historical accounts of certain past religious leaders. If St Paul's flashes of light on the road to Damascus immediately invite the suspicion of simple partial seizures, his copious letters, which make up the bulk of the Christian New Testament, offer further clues. Superbia pauli is the traditional name given to the grandiose attitude transpiring from his letters, and his obsession with sexual mores has left a lasting imprint on Christianity.
Could it be that neurology is, after all, the key to theology, and a couple of our major faiths are the spawn of crackling brain circuits? Such great implications make all the more intriguing the big riddle as to how exactly epilepsy brings about the kind of personality changes seen in Geschwind patients.
The prevailing hypothesis these days is that epileptic discharges in the hippocampus, and anomalous impulses fired by neurons between seizures (inter-ictal spiking) cause a progressive strengthening of neural connections between the temporal cortical areas devoted to object recognition, and limbic structures whose job is to associate subjective meaning to percepts.
Thus, neutral stimuli begin to acquire exaggerated emotional salience, i.e. a numinous quality. Religious preoccupation is assumed by this theory to be a natural reaction by individuals whose daily experience of reality become suffused with meaningfulness as intense as inexplicable.
The “mere content” of the experience cannot be satisfactorily expressed in words because what makes it special, numinous, extraordinary, is precisely just the incongruous valence attributed to it by a dysfunctional corticolimbic network.
Reality cannot live up to the brain's expectations, and ineffability ensues.
This neat little theory has the added virtue of being testable, by imaging, lesion studies, and electrode stimulation studies. To our good fortune, animal models of interictal behavioral syndromes, such as Geschwind, already exist!
If you stably implant an electrode into the amygdala of a mouse, and the mouse survives, you can stimulate it periodically (say, daily). The intensity of the electric jolt you give has one notable consequence: there's a threshold above which a perfectly normal animal has a seizure. If you set the stimulation intensity just below this threshold, initially the rodent is not affected at all. After several days on this protocol, however, the selfsame stimulation intensity starts evoking seizures. In the beginning, such seizures result in the animal merely freezing, but as time goes by, response to amygdala stimulation becomes more and more severe, culminating in generalized convulsions.
Parallel to this phenomenon, called amygdala kindling, the mouse undergoes dramatic behavioral changes in its interictal life, between one seizure and the next. It becomes hyperactive and aggressive. Anxiety responses are amplified, and male mice tend to eschew receptive females, reminiscently of the ascetic attitude of human Geschwind patients.
Even more fascinatingly, several recent preliminary studies point to the conclusion that religiosity and superstitious beliefs are correlated even in non-psychiatric populations to temporal lobe signs: Recurrent tinnitus and deja vu's, transient amnesia and other subtle memory disturbances, are all sub-clinical indicators of temporal lobe lability sometimes occurring in otherwise perfectly normal people.
Science may have come full-circle in the intellectual emancipation of our species, banishing God from the heavens and trammeling it in our brains. For it is indeed the Christian Bible boldly proclaiming: “The Kingdom of God is within you”.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not reflect the position of The Restriction Digest Editorial staff, The Graduate Student Association at JHMI, or Johns Hopkins Medicine.