In the late 17th century, the idea took hold that that the body was a machine. However, the most radical of medical philosophers and anatomists were guarded when it came to the matter of the mind. The mind, it seemed, existed out of the realm and laws of the body. The body may be governed by hydraulics and physics but the mind and an immaterial “soul” didn’t subscribe to worldly laws. It was because the mind was thought to exist distinctly from the body that it was malleable.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes even argued that the point where the mind and body ‘connected’ was the pineal gland — a small structure ensconced in the centre of the brain and which regulates sleep patterns. While this view of the pineal gland has long been consigned to the realm of wacko science theories, contemporary science hasn’t quite shaken off the notion that certain parts of the brain, when probed and poked, may trigger ‘spiritual experiences’.
Researchers at Yale University and the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University interviewed 27 young adults to gather information about past stressful and relaxing experiences as well as spiritual experiences. The subjects then underwent fMRI scans (a technique where changes in blood flow in the brain are tracked to gauge brain activity) while listening for the first time to recordings based on their personalised experiences. While individual spiritual experiences differed, researchers noted similar patterns of activity in the parietal cortex as the subjects imagined experiencing the events in the recordings. Marc N. Potenza, an author of the study, stressed that other brain areas are also probably involved in the formation of spiritual experiences. The method can help future researchers study “spiritual experiences” and their impact on mental health, he said. The study, “Neural Correlates of Personalised Spiritual Experiences”, was published in Celebral Cortex .
Earlier, scientists had shown that small, calibrated shocks to the temporal lobes can induce out-of-body experiences. Parietal cortex and temporal lobes seem like the pineal glands of yore because many scientists haven’t quite abandoned the idea of mysterious forces being at work in the brain. Much like the ‘divine inspirations’ in religious texts, there is a category of experience that can supposedly only be understood using concepts such as ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’. Metaphysics has a long life before physics dispels it.
