A Review of "God and the Temporal Lobes of the Brain"   A talk given by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran as part of the program Human Selves and Transcendental Experiences: A Dialogue of Science and Religion Presented at U.C. San Diego, January 31, 1998    Reviewed by Norman Hall February 16, 1998

A neurophysiologist born in India, Ramachandran feels that  many of the findings of modern neurophysiology can be interpreted as helping to teach the ancient Hindu lesson of "maya," or illusion.  That is, he says, what we learn is that while the world itself may be real enough, our own individual sense of being a "self" that is in some way aloof  from that "creation" is an illusion.  Several object lessons  were presented to this effect.

 A certain rare  kind of brain damage can lead to a perceptual anomaly called "Capgras"  syndrome (the spelling here is uncertain).  The victims sound like refugees from the classic '50's science fiction thriller movie, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."  When confronted by a familiar face, they will express confusion, saying "strange, that person looks just like my Mom, but she's not; she's an impostor."  The problem seems to be somewhere in the chain of connections between the various subsections of the brain that deal with recognition of a face.  The pattern recognition itself happens in the temporal lobes, and the limbic system is where some specific significance to the act of recognition is attached.  But the  process is not complete until it has been passed off to the  hypothalamus, where the emotional reaction to the recognition, if any, will be invoked.

In rare cases, damage will be specific enough to allow recognition, while blocking the normal emotional response, leading the victim to report a confused sense of unreality when viewing familiar faces. More objective evidence can be gathered by testing galvanic skin response, which confirms that the emotional response to viewing Mom, or Mom's picture, is much lower than normal, about the same as in viewing the face of a stranger.

Put the two people together on the telephone, however, and it is family reunion time, complete with the full emotional reaction, and a high galvanic skin response. Only when the mode of recognition is based in the interpretation of visual information is there a problem.

Another line of evidence suggesting that "illusion" plays a role in the construction of the "self" comes from the case of phantom limb pain.  People who have for some reason lost a limb may have the sensation that the limb is still there, sometimes taking up, in the patient's own perception, a cramped position and exhibiting chronic pain.  Ramachandran has found some clinical success in treating  such patients by asking them to "exercise" the phantom limb with the  aid of an inexpensive "virtual reality" device, a mirror arranged so that the existing limb is seen as occupying the position of the phantom.  By attempting to voluntarily move both limbs in symmetrical motions, with the visual reinforcement of watching the "phantom" in the mirror, patients can come eventually to perceive that the limb has moved to a more comfortable permanent position, or has disappeared entirely, with, more importantly, a reduction or  elimination of the perceived pain.

Ramachandran also described a couple of perceptual illusions that anyone can try with some friends.  In one, the person who is to experience the illusion is seated with eyes closed or blindfolded in a chair directly behind another seated person.  The "therapist" manipulates the subject's hand so that the subject's forefinger strokes and taps the nose of the person in front.  At the same time, the "therapist" uses the forefinger of his other hand to stroke the subject's own nose using an identical pattern of touches and strokes.  Before long, the subject will report a "Pinocchio" effect, imagining his own nose to be two feet long, or else his arm to be in two places at once.

In what sounds to be a really jolting demonstration, he also described having a seated subject place one hand below a sturdy table.  Then, with one hand the "therapist" strokes and taps the back of the hand under the table, while with the other he again performs the same stimulations, this time to the hard tabletop, just above the subject's hand, while the subject watches.  Soon the subject may report that he feels his hand to be rising through the table, or even becoming part of the table surface.  The real  test comes when the "therapist" quickly grabs a large hammer and pounds the spot on the table that he has been tapping and stroking. Even without seeing the experiment, it is easy to imagine the reaction that Ramachandran reports -- great consternation and shock followed quickly by relief on the part of the subject when he  realizes that his hand is really safe under the table.  (This one is somewhat reminiscent of a scene from the movie of Frank Herbert's Dune, where a young man's powers of self-control are tested by placing his hand in a box that is said to "contain pain".)

Stroke victims sometimes lose the ability to perceive, or even to notice the existence of half of their world.  They will, for instance, only eat the food on the left half of their plate, only brush half of their hair, not be able to find a familiar object that is right in front of them, except that it is a little to one side, their "lost" side.  To these patients, Ramachandran once again brings his mirror. It helped with one kind of problem, maybe once again?

So he places the mirror in front of the patient, a bit to the "good" side, and angled such that the object in question is now visible, in the mirror, on the "good" (say, right) side.  The object is still in reality to the patient's left, but now she will be able to find it, describe it, and talk about it in a seemingly normal fashion.  That is, until she is asked to reach out and touch the item.  Then a hand goes out and hits the mirror.  "Is there a problem?"  "Yes, I can't  get at it, because that mirror is in the way."  The patient is reaching to the right, the "good" side, and still neglecting the left.

The troubling thing about this is that this is an intelligent person, familiar with the object, and also familiar with mirrors.  Place the mirror face-on, and ask the patient to touch her own face, and the hand will go to the face as expected (the right side only, of course).  No reaching out to the mirror, no complaints about a piece of glass in the way.  But for objects in the area of neglect, even the known physics of a mirror can't bring that area back into the patient's world of reality.  If the object exists, it must be somewhere in the "real" world to the right.

Ramachandran then poses a troubling question.  What if a neurophysiologist, who had studied this syndrome for many years, and was very familiar with it were to have a stroke that produced the same brain damage.  Would he be able to "understand" the problem enough to overcome it, in some way, through sheer force of intellect? Would he be able to, perhaps, use a mirror to investigate the "lost" world on the neglected side?  Or would it still be, even to the neurophysiologist, an insuperable barrier?

And then the real hair-raising question:  "How do I know I am not now such a neurophysiologist?"

The final piece of the physiology of the self exhibited by Ramachandran was one that he had to preface with a disavowal of the headline given it by press reports.  It cannot (he says) be called "The God Module."  It is not the final reduction of God to mere neurophysiology; but he does admit that the finding provides strength to the suspicion that belief in god is "largely protoplasmic."

Certain kinds of epilepsy have long been noted to be associated with a heightened sense of religiosity.  After having one of their brain electrical storms, patients may actually speak of having had a "religious experience," or say that they now "know why there is a cosmos."  Other symptoms of some temporal lobe epileptics can be hypergraphia (writing large, complicated tomes, often of mystical or personally religious significance) and frequent conversions  (to several different religions in sequence).  A known feature of epilepsy is what is known as "kindling," the strengthening of neurophysiological connections, often involving the limbic system.

Ramachandran now reports three patients in which he claims that a kindling of connections (to the amygdala, I believe he said)  is associated with a specific and selective heightening of response, as measured by galvanic skin response, to religious words and icons.  He believes that this can be interpreted as a change in part of the brain leading to either a heightening of religious emotion, or alternatively, perhaps to an enhancement of other emotions or perceptions which lead, incidentally, to to a heightened religious belief (everything feels weird, so the individual "wants to believe in something" to provide an explanatory context for the weirdness).

Ramachandran is undoubtedly correct to caution against taking observations involving only three patients to be indicative of finding the physiology of the long-hypothesized "God-shaped hole in the human psyche."  But those who are committed to the scientific enterprise, and believe in exhausting all possible material explanations for "transcendence" before considering any "other worldly" possibilities, will find no surprise in the suggestion that brain neurophysiology can alter perceptions, both of the physical world and of the "transcendent."  On the other hand, those who place the importance of belief higher than that of physical understanding of a material world may be taken aback for a moment; (but only for a moment).

Ramachandran, putting a Hindu "spin" on the situation, concludes that none of this should really bother us.  He sees this as just another in the chain of findings from cosmology to evolution that have served to disabuse humanity from the folly of taking themselves too seriously. All the "great discoveries," Freud concluded, were of this kind, in some way "debasing or humiliating humanity", removing them from yet another supposed position of privilege in the cosmos.  For some reason, Freud said, we seem to like to do that to ourselves.

Finding that our perceptions of God are neuro-physiological may mean that God doesn't really exist.  It may also mean that our left arm that was amputated in a streetcar accident, but still hurts, doesn't exist either.  Maybe the left side of our dinner plate doesn't exist.  Or maybe it does.  The point is, we can't really know for sure.

The reason this shouldn't bother us is that we haven't really lost any privileges.  We never had such a privileged position in the first place.  The Earth has always gone around the sun, our bodies always have been an evolutionary derivation from something like an ancestral bonobo, and our ideas of God are and always have been an emotional reaction to life in an uncertain, but socially significant world.  And our best bet for an honest understanding of the real world has always been through the cooperative social enterprise of science, rather than in the cosmic meanings suggested by the psychic (or psychotic) subjective experiences of some isolated  individual human brains, and the credulous reactions to them encouraged by religious faith.  As Bronowski said, "Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible."

None of that stops Ramachandran from seeing it all as the eternal dance of Shiva, the creator and the destroyer.  If you never were really a "self," separated from the unfolding drama of the universe, then there is nothing really to mourn when death pulls us back into that drama which continues to unfold.

But there is nothing here, either, to prevent the Christian, contra Ramachandran, to conclude that all of this neurophysiology is just a material reflection of God's true plan for our lives and the mode of interaction of our immaterial souls with the mere matter of this material existence.  If you really want to believe in a spiritual reality, no amount of demonstrations of material-world, neurophysiological, genetic, or cosmological facts, however probable and compelling, will ever swamp such a belief.

That's the trouble with most dialogue between science and religion --  it turns out to be monologue rather than dialogue, in the course of which the findings of science are swallowed whole by theology, while the ethical core of science goes begging.