The Bliss Machine (Science Saturday February 28, 1998) by David O'Reilly

'The love of God, unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way light rushes into a transparent object.'..Dante

'Total deafferentation of the left posterior superior parietal lobe results in the obliteration of the self-other dichotomy at almost the same moment that the deafferentation of the right posterior superior parietal lobe generates a sense of absolute transcendent wholeness.' ..Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg

Right posterior what? Deafferentation who? Is it any wonder that religion feels more at home with poetry than science?

In his poem about enlightenment, the Zen poet Kukai speaks of the 'singing image of fire.' The Christian mystic Angelus Silesius writes of the 'pure nothing, concealed in now and here.' Now, brain research suggests such beatific visions can be described neurologically in terms of eruptive overflows, 'reverberating circuits,' and blood flows and blockages involving the pre-frontal cortex and various lobes of the brain.

Dante it's not. But Eugene d'Aquili, professor of psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Newberg, a fellow at the hospital's nuclear medicine program, scan brains, not verse. In a recent talk on 'Science and the Soul,' Newberg described how the researchers' two-year study of the brains of people engaged in Buddhist meditation provides 'mounting evidence' that sensations of calm, unity and transcendence correspond to increased activity in the brain's frontal lobes (behind the forehead) and decreased activity in the parietal lobes at the top rear of the head.

'We can't say we can see God with these imaging studies,' Newberg, 31, said with a laugh recently. 'What we can say is: When somebody has religious experiences, this is what it's doing to them.' Religion 'offers the reassurance that there is purpose and causal effect in this pretty scary world,' Newberg said. Thus, 'religious and spiritual experiences are right in line with what the brain is trying to do for us' by helping us to function and make sense of life.

D'Aquili is a veteran anthropologist of religion and busy clinical therapist. Newberg specializes in brain scans, using radioactive dyes to study which parts of the brain are engaged in the performance of different mental or physical tasks. The team has measured brain function and cerebral blood flow during Tibetan Buddhist meditation in eight subjects during the last two years. 'It's pretty exciting,' said Newberg.

Particulars of their meditation scan study will be published this summer in Zygon, a professional journal devoted to the study of science and religion. But Newberg said that the research supports their earlier work in the neurology of mental states induced by religious ritual and meditation. They propose that the brain's amygdala, which translates sensory impressions into emotions, 'generates a sense of religious awe attached to behaviorally `marked' ritual gestures such as bows or signs of the cross.'

This, they say, builds on research tying hallucinations, out-of-body sensations and deja vu to activity, or suppression of activity, in parts of the brain. What intrigues d'Aquili and Newberg is how religious rituals and practices stimulate the two major subsystems of the autonomic systems.

One of these subsystems, the ergotropic system, is the body's fight-or-flight nervous system. in moments of stress, it raises the heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, and hastens endocrine to the muscles, among other activities. The other system, the trophotropic, can be understood as the system of calm. It reduces the heart rate, slows respiration, and regulates cell growth, digestion, relaxation and sleep.

D'Aquili and Newberg propose that certain religious practices can so stimulate the body's calm system or its flight system that activity in the related brain circuit starts to 'reverberate,' while simultaneously shutting down ever more of the other system. Depending on whether the ritual is fast (as in the spinning dance of Sufi whirling dervishes) or slow, as in Zen meditation, different parts of the brain are activated, perceived by the mind as a higher state of consciousness.

In states of very high activity around one circuit, they say, there can be a 'spillover,' such that the dormant system activates and goes 'on line' simultaneously with the other. Although rare, this dual state can lead to a sense of 'tremendous release of energy' that may feel like 'oceanic bliss' or absorption into the object of contemplation. And extreme cases of both systems being activated can induce brain activities perceived by the mind as the 'Absolute Unity of Being,' or AUB.

They even propose that a mystic in the AUB state will experience either a divine being, such as God, or the cosmic void of nirvana, depending on whether there has been a predominantly ergotropic or trophotropic involvement. Perhaps science will someday discover what Emily Dickinson asserted more than a century ago: 'The Brain is just the weight of God.'


Research guide:
Internet:

Institute for the Scientific Study of Meditation (http://members.aol.com/InstSSM/Index.html)

American Association for the Advancement of Science: Program on Dialogue Between Science and Religion (http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/ddbsr/DBSR.htm)

Zygon, journal of religion and science
(http://www.templeton.org/Zygon.htm)

Books:

'Psychology of Religion' by David Wulff(John Wiley)
'The Human Side of Prayer' by Laurence Binet Brown (Religious Education Press)