This is Your Brain on God :: Biology Essays Research Papers

With all your science can you tellhow it is, and whence it isthat calorie-free comes into the soul? Henry David ThoreauBelief in God has long been held to be a superstition by the scientific community as the creative activity of such a higher power cannot be demonstrated fini dispose objective observation. While science is unable to prove whether or not God is real, the field of neurotheology has instead posed a new headland that we can find answers to is there activity in the encephalon particular to religious experience? Can science in fact shed light on Thoreaus question?Through the use of brain visualize technology, Dr. Andrew Newberg has conducted research in an attempt to find answers to these questions. The participants in his study were Buddhists well-versed in meditation. Newberg used a SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) camera to make an image of the brain of an undivided at the moment he reaches the climax of meditation. Such a picture would enable us to look at the brain as it experiences God.The peak of meditation is clearly a subjective state, with each individual attaining it in different manners and having different time requirements. However, the sensation and nub behind this moment is consistent among all who reach it. At the peak, the subjects testify that they lose their sense of individual existence and feel inextricably butt with the universe. There are no discrete objects or beings, no sense of piazza or the passage of time, no line between the self and the liberalisation of the universe (Newberg 119).As the river flowing east and westMerge in the sea and become one with it,Forgetting that they were ever separate rivers,So do all creatures lose their separatenessWhen they merge at last . . . (Newberg 6-7)Newberg depression took service line images of the brains of the meditators to use as a standard for comparison (Newberg 5). It was meaning(a) that these scans of the brain be taken while the subjects were a t rest so that brain activity while one is simply relaxed could be severalise from brain activity while one is having a spiritual experience. The baseline scans showed an even distribution of activity throughout the brain, characterized by a wide-ranging amount of activity in the posterior, superior parietal lobe and a check amount in the prefrontal cortex (Newberg 4).1The subjects then meditated. When they reached the peak, they pulled on a string attached at one end to their finger and at the other to Dr.