Neurotheology

Neurotheology, also known as biotheology, is the study of the neural basis of spirituality. Neurotheology deals with the neurological and evolutionary basis for subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual.

Terminology
Aldous Huxley used the term neurotheology for the first time in the utopian novel Island. The discipline studies the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality. The term is also sometimes used in a less scientific context or a philosophical context. Some of these uses, according to the mainstream scientific community, qualify as pseudoscience. Huxley used it mainly in a philosophical context.

The use of the term neurotheology in published scientific work is currently uncommon. A search on the citation indexing service provided by Institute for Scientific Information returns five articles. Three of these are published in the journal Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, while two are published in American Behavioral Scientist. Work on the neural basis of spirituality has, however, occurred sporadically throughout the 20th century. Keywords for such work include 'deity', 'neurophysiological bases', 'spirituality' and 'mysticism'.

In an attempt to focus and clarify what was a growing interest in this field, in 1994 educator Laurence O. McKinney published the first book on the subject, titled "Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century", written for a popular audience but also promoted in the theological journal Zygon. Neurotheology, properly understood, sources the basis of religious inquiry in relatively recent developmental neurophysiology. Pre-frontal development, in humans, creates an illusion of chronological time as a fundamental part of normal adult cognition past the age of three. The inability of the adult brain to retrieve earlier images experienced by an infantile brain creates questions such as "where did I come from" and "where does it all go", which, the author illustrates, probably led to the creation of various religious explanations. The experience of death as a peaceful regression into timelessness as the brain dies won praise from readers as varied as author Arthur C. Clarke, eminient theologian Harvey Cox, and the Dalai Lama and sparked a new interest in the field.

Defining and measuring spirituality
Neurotheology attempts to explain the actual neurological basis for those experiences, often subjective to the extreme,which have been popularly called "spiritual", "out of body" or other terms for forms of abnormal cognition such as:


 * The perception that time, fear or self-consciousness have dissolved
 * Spiritual awe
 * Oneness with the universe
 * Ecstatic trance
 * Sudden enlightenment
 * Altered states of consciousness
 * Increase of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland or epiphysis.

These subjective experiences are seen as the basis for many religious beliefs and behaviors.

Methodology
Early studies in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to use EEGs to study brain wave patterns correlated with "spiritual" states. During the 1980s Dr. Michael Persinger stimulated the temporal lobes of human subjects with a weak magnetic field. His subjects claimed to have a sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room". This work gained publicity at the time, although it was unresolved as to the mechanism that may have elicited this response.

Some current studies use neuroimaging to localize brain regions active, or differentially active, during experiences that subjects associate with "spiritual" feelings or images. David Wulf, a psychologist at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, suggests that current brain imaging studies, along with the consistency of spiritual experiences across cultures, history, and religions, "suggest a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain", echoing McKinney's primary thesis that feelings associated with religious experience are normal aspects of brain function under extreme circumstances rather than communication from God.

Criticism
An attempt to marry a materialistic approach like neuroscience to spirituality naturally attracts much criticism. Some of the criticism is philosophical, dealing with the (perceived) irreconcilability between science and spirituality, while some is more methodological, dealing with the issues of studying an experience as subjective as spirituality.

Philosophical criticism
Critics of this approach, like philosopher Ken Wilber and religious scholar Huston Smith, see the more materialistic formulations of the approach as examples of reductionism and scientism that are only looking at the empirical aspects of the phenomena, and not including the possible validity of spiritual experience with all of its subjectivity.

Scientific criticism
In 2005, Pehr Granqvist, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, questioned Dr. Michael Persinger's findings in a paper published in Neuroscience Letters. Granqvist claimed that Persinger's work was not "double blind," in that those conducting Persinger's trials, who were often graduate students, knew what sort of results to expect, with the risk that the knowledge would be transmitted to experimental subjects by unconscious cues. The experimenters also were frequently given an idea of what was happening, according to Granqvist, by being asked to fill in questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences before the trials were conducted. Granqvist set about conducting similar experiments double blinded, and published finding implying that the presence or absence of the field had no relationship with any religious or spiritual experience reported by the participants.

Persinger stood by his findings, arguing that several of his previous experiments have explicitly used double-blind protocols, and that Granqvist failed to fully replicate Persinger's experimental conditions by, for example, miscalibrating the software, and using a magnetic field exposure time too brief to induce the hypothesized effect.