God on the brain

The headline reads “Did St Paul hear God’s voice or was he having a fit?” (The Times, 31^st May, 2016, p11). Tom Whipple, Science Editor of the Times, had picked up on a paper by Arzy & Schurr (a brief communication in Epilepsy & Behaviour 60:7-10) in which they reported on a patient with post-seizure psychosis, who claimed he had been approached by God to bring redemption to Israel. After treatment, they reported that “the psychotic state resolved” (ie the patient no longer felt he had encountered God, or had been tasked by Him). The interest in the paper is that by using brain recordings, Arzy & Schurr were able to localise the brain activity that correlated with the patient’s reported experience. The question posed in the headline is Whipple’s. He puts two and sixteen together to make oranges. The authors of the paper do not.

Sick people often say religious things or have religious experiences. Interestingly, what they say tends to be culturally specific. Thus it’s not unknown for people in the “Christian” west to claim to see Jesus, while those in India claim to see one of the Hindu deities. I have had colleagues in the past who were inclined to infer from this that all religious experience was therefore a manifestation of a sick brain! However, the leap from people with sick brains “hearing God”, to the conclusion that any interaction with the Almighty is due to the abnormal activity of neuronal networks in the left prefrontal cortex, is far too far to be made legitimately.

Let’s take a less controversial analogy. We know that the central processing of visual information begins in the visual cortex, at the back of the brain. This is why bumps to the back of the head cause us to “see stars”. There are less violent ways of experimentally activating the nerve cells in this part of the brain though. Discharging an electric coil very quickly (in a few microseconds) close to the skull, induces a magnetic field, which in turn causes nerve cells to fire in the cortex (a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation). When cells in the visual cortex are stimulated in this way, the activity induced is interpreted as having a visual experience. It’s not that anything is seen in the normal sense, and indeed these induced “phosphenes” are usually vague and incoherent (a bit like the “religious” experience of the patient in the paper). But what we don’t do is infer from this that all our visual experiences are the product of such stimulation; that would be crazy. Most of our visual experiences are obviously caused by us seeing stuff. That’s why our visual system sits at the end of the visual pathway to process what comes out of the back of the eyes in the first place.

Despite my unease at Whipple’s headline, there are parallels with Arzy & Schurr’s patient which are  interesting. There are bits of our brain that when stimulated give rise to experiences which are interpreted as being about god/s. But why are those bits of brain there in the first place? The visual system is there because we see things. The auditory system is there because we hear things. And the “god” system (if that’s what it is)? I’m not suggesting that any of this comes close to proving God’s existence. But nor can it be used to “explains away” religious experience. When I encounter the Almighty (which I do frequently – it turns out it’s not difficult), I’m sure that neurons are activated inside my head, just as when I experience a sunset. Both are caused (usually) by an interaction between me and an exterior reality. Both could be the result of neurons misfiring (for whatever reason), but that’s not usually what happens.

Of course what Whipple’s article also fails to take into account are all the other things we know about Paul. He was a highly educated and motivated member of the Pharisees (a sort of religious elite of the Jewish world); he came from a good background and had made it to the top in Jewish religious circles by around the time Jesus was crucified. It is extremely unlikely that he was (as was Arzy & Schurr’s patient) either epileptic or psychotic. These chronic conditions, while not understood in the ancient world, were known. Had Paul been a sufferer of either, he was more likely to have been an outcast than a well-connected operator in the Jewish religious life of his time.  There are other important differences too between Aarzy & Schurr’s patient and Paul. The patient wasn’t a particularly religious man before the incident reported in the paper. And in the midst of it when questioned, they reported that he had no concrete plans for accomplishing his mission. He seems to have been vague. Paul’s Damascus road experience was very different. As reported by both Luke (a physician) and Paul after the event, he was given concrete instructions during his “episode” that lead directly to a meeting with one of the Christians in Damascus. The rest, as they say, is quite literally history.

The weight of evidence that we do have (as opposed to the evidence that we don’t) is that Paul encountered the risen Jesus and it turned his life upside down. It has happened since to rather large numbers of individuals with healthy brains.