53 Sermon Illustrations on Brain

Philosopher-scientists say the mind is an illusion. The brain is a machine. we have no selves, no souls. How do they know? Well, it's just a matter of faith.

For most of us, consciousness defines our specialness; it's what sets us apart from the lower orders. As recently as 20 years ago, the idea of consciousness looked hopelessly old hat, but the advent of new scanning technology, with the promise of “seeing” thoughts in action, has prompted a fresh examination of mind theories. For centuries, the consciousness argument was waged mainly between materialists and dualists. Dualists (Descartes) saw the mind and body as separate entities. Materialists see the mind as only so many interacting neurons. The mind is nothing more than the brain. Materialists are divided over whether consciousness can be fully explained (one day) or whether it will always remain somewhat mysterious.

[see also #2566]

Roger Penrose writes a book in which he argues computers will never be able to duplicate human intelligence and reasoning. He believes the secret to human thinking will be found on the quantum mechanic level, similar to the basis of gravity; both would be asymmetrical.

"The very fact that the mind leads us to truths that are not computable convinces me that a computer can never duplicate the mind."

Why do conscious beings know so little about consciousness?

Possibly the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness seems to be the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say what consciousness is.

So begins the entry on consciousness in “The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy,” by Simon Blackburn (Oxford University Press, 1994). Few would dispute the author’s judgment that the nature of consciousness is a particularly daunting puzzle. It is also, however, a puzzle that a number of thinkers in a variety of disciplines claim to have solved — in principle, at least. There is no scholarly consensus here, and some prominent skeptics — Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn, for example — have suggested that the problem of consciousness is by its very nature unlikely ever to be solved. Still, the problem is attracting an extraordinary amount of attention.

The surge of interest in consciousness has been driven in part by develop- ments in two areas: neuroscience and computational models of the mind. Claims based on advances in these areas tend to set the agenda for consciousness studies — even in the case of thinkers who reject many of those claims (Roger Penrose and John Searle, for example). Two new books suggest the range of current attempts to establish the physical basis for human consciousness and underline the significance of that search.

“Shadows of the Mind” is a sequel to “The Emperor’s New Mind.” In part 1, “Why We Need New Physics to Understand the Mind,” Penrose argues as he did in the first volume that human mathematical understanding is inherently noncomputational, meaning that it could not, in principle, be simulated in its completeness by a computer. In part 2, “What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind,” he speculates about the possibilities for developing a scientific understanding of consciousness, an understanding he argues is impossible in terms of current science.

The entirety of part 1 is really an extended development of a single argu- ment, based on the famous mathematical result known as Godel’s Theorem. Godel’s Theorem asserts that every sufficiently complex, consistent, math- ematical system is “incomplete” in the following sense: There is a true statement (the “Godel sentence”) that cannot be proved within the system, yet the sentence in question can be shown to be true, by the special methods devised by Godel himself.

This shows, according to Penrose, that human mathematical understanding cannot be represented by such a formal system. For the system cannot prove that its own Godel sentence is true, whereas the human mathematician, using mathematical insight, can prove this. Thus the human can do something the system itself is unable to perform. Of course, the point is not that mathematical understanding is unique in being noncomputational; rather, all true understanding is said to be noncomputational, but the rigorous nature of mathematical thought is what makes it possible to prove this conclusively in the area of mathematics.

Is Penrose right about this? I have no doubt that human understanding is noncomputational, but does Penrose succeed in proving it? His argument is complex and deserves a more thorough evaluation than is possible in this review. It seems to me, however, that at best what he has proved is the following: If human mathematical reasoning can be captured in a computational system, then the system is one no human being can grasp. (A human mathematician cannot prove her own Godel sentence.)

This result, if accepted, might be somewhat discouraging to those pursuing the goal of “artificial intelligence.” If they are unable to grasp the “human computational system” in its completeness, they will also be unable to construct an artificial system that possesses all the mathematical capabilities of human beings. It is not clear, however, that those who favor a computational theory of the mind need find the result unacceptable; it follows (if I am right about this) that Penrose has not proved that human consciousness is noncomputational.

In the second part of the book, Penrose takes the reader on an impressive tour of contemporary physics, arriving at the conclusion that no currently known physical theory can account for the noncomputational nature of the mind. Yet he insists that he does want a physical explanation of the basis of consciousness, and so he speculates about where in physics and biology such an explanation might be found.

Perhaps most significant is Penrose’s recognition that, if consciousness is something that in the end has a physical explanation, the physics involved — the account of the nature of what we call “matter” — must be considerably different from physics as we know it at present.

Paul Churchland, professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, agrees with Penrose in seeking the physical basis of human mentality, but in most other respects their books stand in contrast. Penrose argues at length that human consciousness is noncomputational; according to Churchland, on the other hand, it is computational through and through — though admittedly in a different sense of “computational” than Penrose has primarily in mind.

Penrose argues that existing science offers no adequate basis for under- standing the nature of consciousness and proceeds to probe the outer limits and unsolved problems of science in search of such a basis. Churchland, in contrast, seems quite satisfied with current science, so far as foundational understanding is concerned, and invites the reader to share his excitement in exploring the various dimensions of contemporary “cognitive science.”

“How does the brain work? How does it sustain a thinking, feeling, dreaming self? How does it sustain a self-conscious person? New results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks together suggest a unified set of answers to these questions.” The first part of the book, entitled “The Little Computer that Could: The Biological Brain,” aims to “make those scientific developments available, in a lucid and pictorial form, to the general reading public.” The developments are indeed impressive and should prove fascinating to readers irrespective of their previous theoretical orientation.

The substance of the first part of the book lies in information about the brain gleaned from neuroscience and reports on the successes that have been achieved in simulating brain function on artificial “neural networks.” A key idea here is that of parallel distributed processing (pdp), in which one pattern is transformed into another by “passing it through a large configuration of synaptic connections.” This is a different style of computing than the more familiar serial processing found in conventional computers, in which a computer performs specified logical operations one at a time according to a predetermined sequence (the “program”). Neural networks are not “programmed” to perform their tasks; rather, they “learn” to perform them by being “trained” on a set of examples and gradually adjusting the “weights” of the “synaptic connections” between the artificial “neurons” in the computer. An interesting feature of this process is that a neural net can develop impressive abilities (such as the ability to recognize particular faces from a set on which it has been trained) without human beings having any detailed understanding of the processing involved.

Neural nets have been remarkably successful on many tasks, especially the sorts of tasks, such as perceptual recognition, that have proved intractable for traditional computers using linear processing. A neural net designed and trained to translate English-language text into spoken phonemes (thus enabling a computer to “read aloud”) achieved in a fairly brief period a proficiency comparable to that of a commercial “linear” program that took several man-years of programmer time to prepare. Other neural nets have developed proficiency for stereoscopic vision and the recognition of human facial expressions, among many other examples. There is, furthermore, considerable evidence that the methods used by the neural nets approximate those employed by the brain itself in solving similar problems. At a minimum, pdp using neural nets is much more similar to actual brain function than is traditional linear processing.

The second part of Churchland’s book, entitled “Exploring the Consequences: Philosophical, Scientific, Social, and Personal,” is where the controversial issues are fully joined.Perhaps the most important chapter here is chapter 8, “The Puzzle of Consciousness.” Unfortunately, this is also the most disappointing chapter in the book.

A central aim of the chapter is to refute the claim of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, and John Searle that the qualitative nature of conscious experience is something that cannot be explained in terms of physical science. In a famous article, Nagel asks “What is it like to be a bat?” His point is that there must indeed be “something it is like to be” a bat; we don’t seriously doubt that bats do have subjective conscious experiences. But just what it is like to be a bat is quite unknown to humans; we lack a particular sort of sensory experience — the capacity to locate objects in our environment by bouncing sound waves off them — that is crucial for bats. Furthermore — and this is the essential point — no amount of scientific knowledge concerning the structure and function of a bat’s brain can tell us what it is like to be one.

Churchland’s answer to this argument contains serious misstatements about the philosophers he is criticizing. He implies, wrongly, that Nagel and Jackson are Cartesian dualists. And he criticizes Searle, in a thoroughly patronizing way, for adhering to a doctrine Searle himself explicitly repudiates, namely, the “infallibility of introspection … [which] has by now been so thoroughly discredited that it is plain curious to find a philosopher of Searle’s prominence still clinging to it.” Curious indeed — especially since Searle doesn’t!

More important, however, Churchland’s answer to the argument simply misses the point. He agrees that we have a particular way of knowing our own conscious experiences that we do not have in the case of other creatures, such as bats, or even for other human beings.

“Each individual gets information about the moving tapestry of his own sensory activity via a specific set of neuronal pathways that only he has.” But, he says, the fact that one has a way of knowing one’s own conscious states that is unique to oneself in no way shows that what is known in this way is different from what someone else knows by the ordinary methods of third-person observation. After all, each of us has a special way of knowing — through the proprioceptive system — about the positions of our own limbs, but this does not imply that the object of knowledge is different for oneself than it is for others.

This, of course, is true, but it misses the point. Nagel’s point — and Jackson’s, and Searle’s — is that the experiential quality of the conscious experience lies beyond the reach of physical science, something that obviously is not true of the positioning of one’s limbs. It seems to me that Nagel, Jackson, and Searle are just right about this, and this fact, while not necessarily fatal to materialism, is one with which materialistic philosophers like Churchland have to deal. Churchland, however, manages to ignore it.

And in the next chapter, “Could an Electronic Machine Be Conscious?,” he contends that a computer that functions in the same way as a brain could in principle be built using pdp and neural nets, and that such a computer, just because it functions this way, would be a conscious machine. There is no need to go looking, with Penrose, on the murky frontiers of science for the basis of consciousness; all we need is the right combination of copper wires and silicon chips, and your “friendly neighborhood robot” becomes a reality.

There is much, much more in the book that invites discussion. Churchland rejects — apparently with good reason — Noam Chomsky’s contention that the human brain contains a special “language organ,” hard-wired with the rules of universal grammar. And he criticizes Daniel Dennett’s theory of consciousness, on the grounds that Dennett has not properly appreciated the advantages of pdp over traditional serial processing.

Readers of BOOKS & CULTURE may be especially interested in Churchland’s attitude toward religion. In a word, it is dismissive; the most significant thing he says about religion is that religious ethics, because of its traditionalism, keeps us from learning from our mistakes and making moral progress.Presumably Churchland is delighted that the lessened influence of religion at present has opened the way for a much greater latitude in moral experimentation.

As has been noted, the one thing Penrose and Churchland conspicuously agree on is the need to find the physical basis of human consciousness. This could be a mistake — but then again, perhaps not. There is a large amount of evidence, some of it described by Churchland, that the functioning of the human mind is highly dependent, in very specific ways, on the functioning of the brain and nervous system. Mind-body dualists, who think the mind or soul is not fundamentally dependent on the brain, owe us a plausible account of these functional dependencies — an account that, so far as I know, is not yet forthcoming.

On the other hand, the view that the mind is somehow produced or generated by the brain is not in conflict with any essential Christian doctrine, including the belief in eternal life. It may be that we need to take more seriously than has generally been done the truth that we are created from the dust of the earth.

Beyond this point of agreement, Penrose and Churchland diverge radically. Penrose’s speculations, though in no way conclusive, should on the whole be welcome to Christian thinkers: he recognizes the profoundly mysterious nature of mind and consciousness and eschews simplistic, reductive solutions. Churchland, on the other hand, is reductivist to a degree that even many philosophical naturalists find implausible; he actually thinks we will eventually replace our present ways of talking about the mind, in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, with talk in the language of neuroscience. (This is his “eliminative materialism.”)

At present, leadership in the philosophy of mind is largely, if not exclusively, in the hands of naturalists and materialists. There is need and, I believe, also a genuine opportunity for serious, constructive work by Christian philosophers in this vital field of philosophy. An excellent (and extremely readable) book on the subject written from a Christian standpoint is Charles Taliaferro’s “Consciousness and the Mind of God” (Cambridge University Press, 1994); let us hope it will be followed by many more.

––––––––––-

“Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness.” By Roger Penrose, Oxford University Press 457 pp.; $25 “The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain.” By Paul M. Churchland, MIT Press 329 pp.; $29.95

––––––––––-

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review — bcjan96bccurrmrj6B1020614v

#3903

*

People with obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD) have a section of the brain that fails to “turn off.” Many are treated with drugs but a new therapy focuses on altering their thinking. First they “re-label” their compulsion, second they attribute it to a biochemical imbalance, and third they “refocus” on a constructive activity. “If you develop new patterns of response to OCD you will change the brain circuits that cause it,” says psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz. PET scans bear it out. This is the first study to give persuasive evidence that the mind can change the brain.

Hand-written thank you notes have a powerful and lasting impact on both the sender and the receiver. Dr. Christian Jarrett, in The Science of Us, talked about a brain-scanning study published in NeuroImage, “which brings us a little closer to understanding why these [gratitude] exercises have these effects. The results suggest that even months after a simple, short gratitude writing task, people’s brains are still wired to feel extra thankful. The implication is that gratitude tasks work, at least in part, because they have a self-perpetuating nature: The more you practice gratitude, the more attuned you are to it and the more you can enjoy its psychological benefits.” These psychological benefits include a feeling of wellbeing and reduced depression.

________

Adapted from "Five Reasons To Write Thank-You Notes," by Nancy Olson, Forbes.com, January 22, 2017; .

Scientists at the University of Southern California will soon begin testing an artificial brain prosthesis (a silicon chip that mimics the hippocampus), which, if successful, can help people who cannot store future and recent memories of their experiences. One problem with the project: Subjects might not remember anything about the research or consenting to participate in it. (Another problem: Nearly everyone is glad not to be able to recall some negative experiences.)

____________

New Scientist, 3/12/03

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #15466]

You have immediate access to the most powerful tool in existence. A tool that can create anything you want. A tool that is only limited by your limited use of it. This tool is priceless, not even a billion dollars can purchase you one. However, each of us has one because it came as standard equipment. Oh, there's one catch: It didn't come with an owner's manual; thus, we have to figure out how to use it all on our own. Even if you never figure out how to use it, it is always working. That's right, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of every year. It can work for you or it can work against you, whichever you choose. Unfortunately, most people never figure out how to use it; thus, it usually works against them by default. In fact, at least 97% of our population never seems to come close to figuring out how to use this powerful tool to their advantage, and as a result they usually lead lives of quiet desperation as Henry David Thoreau would say. They always settle for less, and that's exactly what they get. They spent their entire lives suffering and being miserable when all the while they had in their possession a tool that could have granted them anything they desired. What is this tool?

This tool is your Mind. Your mind is the most incredible and powerful tool in the Universe, and yet most people know little or nothing at all about it. It is time for you to learn how this tool works and use it to your advantage.

THE CREATION MODEL:

Everyone seems to want to know the "secret" to success. The problem, however, is that most people are looking for success on the outside when - as you and I know - success starts on the inside. Most people want to change their conditions but they don't want to change themselves. They want to change their circumstances but they don't want to change what got them in those circumstances.

It is of critical importance that we understand that we must change the Cause of our conditions and circumstances in order for them to change. At least, in order for them to change on a long-term basis. And the Cause of all of our circumstances is our thoughts. Once we change our thoughts, we will automatically change our circumstances. The only way to change our thoughts is by reprogramming ourselves. You have been programmed to think the way you think and that programming has gotten you what you now have. Is that good news? If not, then you can now feel excited because you have the power to change it. Day by Day, Drip by Drip, Inch by Inch, you can start flooding your mind with empowering messages that can start you on the life-long process of positive transformation. We will give you an analogy so you will get a better idea of how this works, but for now let's take a general look at what is called the Creation Model...

The Creation Model is simply a more detailed look at how Thoughts become Things or how Causes become Effects. Every effect or result you get in life has a cause. In other words there are no coincidences, there are only cause and effect. Let's take a look at the relationship between cause & effect.

THOUGHTS: Your thoughts are the causes of all your effects. Therefore you can trace all of your results you've gotten in life to a particular thought or set of thoughts you have entertained in your mind for a period of time. When you are born, your brain is similar to that of a blank tape with the record button constantly on. So everything you hear or experience after birth - and many say while still in your mother's womb - is recorded in your brain. We call this recording of information programming. The programming you receive come from many sources: Your parents, parent's friends, the media, church, school, relatives, teachers, and anyone or anything that comes in contact with you. You are constantly being programmed until you learn how to program yourself and even then others are programming you if you allow them to do so. The thing to understand is that most of the programming we receive while growing up is self-limiting and self-defeating. Most of it doesn't even make plain everyday common sense. Some of programming or thoughts that we receive from others become beliefs.

BELIEFS: A belief is nothing more than a batch of similar thoughts. The more of any particular thoughts you have, the stronger the belief will be. A strong belief increases your conviction level regarding the issue pertaining to the belief. The pictorial representational form of a belief is called your self-image. Your attitudes are formed from your beliefs.

ATTITUDES: An attitude is simply a way of leaning towards a particular person, place, thing, issue, idea or concept. If you are leaning towards a particular issue, you are said to have a positive attitude towards that issue. If you are leaning away from an issue you are said to have a negative attitude towards that issue. From our attitudes we develop certain feelings.

FEELINGS: Our feelings are a physiological or an emotional response our body has when any person, place, thing, issue, idea or concept is presented to us. Of course this feeling will be a result of the attitude we have toward whatever we have been presented with. These feelings that we develop will help determine the actions we take.

ACTIONS: Our actions are what we physically do at any given time in any given situation. These actions will mainly be determined by how we feel about what it is we are presented with. The actions we take will determine our results.

RESULTS: We can call the results we get the effect. When we get a result due from a given set of actions we take. It is either the result we want or the result we don't want. If it is the result we want, great, we usually keep doing what we were doing to get that result. If it is a result we don't want most people figure they need to change their actions - which is true. However, this will only result in a short-term change because in order to make change lasting and long term we need to change the cause and now you know that the cause is the thought.

Changing your thought will cause a chain reaction that will enable you to more naturally take the necessary actions to get the results you want out of life. This is so important, yet most people do not understand it. Now hopefully you see why it is necessary for you to reprogram yourself. This is the only way for you to create lasting change with less tension, anxiety, and frustration.

This is not intended to be a full blown detailed course in psychology, but this information is so important to your that we want to give you an analogy to help drive it home.

When you were born imagine your brain being as pure as a clear glass of spring water. Now imagine every time you heard or saw something negative it was equivalent to someone putting a drop of Red Dye in the glass of spring water. Think about that for a moment. Every time you are told "No" or "You can't do that" a Red Drop is going into your glass. Every time you turn on the TV and see an act of violence or crime you are receiving Red Drops. Every time you read the newspaper and find out about the latest catastrophes you are receiving Red Drops. Every time you associate with people who blames and complains you are receiving Red Drops.

Most people have received so many Red Drops over the years that they have developed self-defeating and self-limiting beliefs and attitudes without even realizing it. The secret is in reversing the process. Unfortunately you can't just dump out the glass with all of the Red Dye. Instead you have to dilute it with clear drops of fresh spring water. The key word is drops. In other words you can't just pour a whole gallon of spring water in at one time - you have to place one drop of spring water at a time in an effort to dilute the Red Dye.

Understand that your glass will never be as pure and clean as it was when you were first born. The good news, however, is that you can dilute the Red Dye enough to accomplish all the dreams you have and more. The key to this is for you to consciously - from here on - minimize the amount of Red Dye that goes in your glass and maximize the amount of clear drops that goes in. You need to deliberately take full advantage of the resources you have at your disposal.

*

Did God create the heavens and the earth? Or is the universe nothing more than an accident that "just happened?"

In his book THE QUESTION OF GOD, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Armand Nicholi sets up a debate over this question between two deeply influential men: a famous psychiatrist and a famous professor of medieval literature. Their positions were unequivocal -- and mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. Nicholi writes, we need to ask ourselves: How much of their views were based on evidence and how much on emotion that caused them to distort reality?

To the question, "Is there a God?" psychiatrist Sigmund Freud answered "No!" Belief in what he labeled "an idealized Superman" is "patently infantile" and "foreign to reality." Freud "strongly advised us to face the harsh reality that we are alone in the universe," Nicholi writes. "In short, Freud shouted, 'Grow up!'"

Nicholi goes on to say that Oxford professor C. S. Lewis answered the question of God with a resounding "Yes!" Lewis pointed to the fact that the universe is filled with "signposts" like the "starry heavens above and the moral law within," "all pointing with unmistakable clarity to that Intelligence." Lewis shouted, "Wake up!"

Freud attacked the Scriptures as being "full of contradictions, revisions, and falsifications." Religion, Freud wrote, is "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity," and the teachings of Jesus are "psychologically impossible and useless for our lives." Freud was convinced, Nicholi writes, that psychoanalysis "has shown us that a personal god is, psychologically, nothing more than an exalted father," a "projection of powerful wishes and inner needs."

In rebuttal, Lewis offered evidence that God does exist. He wrote, "He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: And all through history there have been people trying ... to obey it."

Nicholi notes also that Lewis countered Freud's wish-fulfillment argument by pointing out that the "biblical worldview involves a great deal of despair and pain and is certainly not anything one would wish for." I have always argued that no one would invent a religion like Christianity with its demands that we help the poor and that we love our enemies.

Neuroscientists have recently found evidence that the brain is genetically programmed for belief. This confirms what Christians have always believed about the imago Dei -- the image of God being implanted in us. And it may explain why Freud was preoccupied with God to the end of his days despite his determination to prove that He doesn't exist. Intriguingly, Freud's arguments against belief exhibit "an intense, emotional, argumentative, and, at times, desperate and pleading tone," writes Nicholi. "Why couldn't he put the question to rest? Perhaps Lewis would say we can never explain away God, nor can we find rest until that deep-seated desire (experienced by both Freud and Lewis) is satisfied."

Both Lewis and Freud still influence millions. Read Nicholi's book THE QUESTION OF GOD, based on the course he taught at Harvard for years, and you will learn more about how two brilliant men resolved questions of faith. Their answers will help any skeptic determine whether belief in God is really "patently infantile" or the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., THE QUESTION OF GOD: C. S. LEWIS AND SIGMUND FREUD DEBATE GOD, LOVE, SEX, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE (Free Press, 2002).

C. S. Lewis, GOD IN THE DOCK (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994) and MERE CHRISTIANITY (Harper, 2001). http://www.parable.com/breakpoint/item_0802808689.htm

David C. Downing, THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: C. S. LEWIS'S JOURNEY TO FAITH (InterVarsity, 2002).

Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., "C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on good and evil," AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, March 2002. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2185/2_13/83520009/print.jhtml

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, "Freud and belief in the Creator," JEWISH WORLD REVIEW, June 29, 2001. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0601/freud.asp

D. Trull, "The God Spot," Parascope.com, 1997. http://www.parascope.com/articles/slips/fs22_3.htm

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

[see also HolwickID #22403 for a related article]

*

Dirty Harry had it right: Brain scans show revenge really might make your day. Planning revenge sparks enough satisfaction to motivate getting even - and the amount of satisfaction actually predicts who will go to greater lengths to do so, report Swiss researchers who monitored people's brain activity during an elaborate game of double-cross.

That may not sound too surprising. Just consider the old saying, “Revenge is sweet.”

The new study chips “yet another sliver from the rational model of economic man,” said Stanford University psychologist Brian Knutson, who reviewed the Swiss research. “Instead of cold, calculated reason, it is passion that may plant the seeds of revenge,” he said.

People often are eager to punish wrongdoers even if the revenge brings them no personal gain or actually costs them something. From a practical standpoint, that may seem irrational.

In research reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, University of Zurich scientists used PET scans to monitor the brain activity of game players to determine what motivates that type of revenge.

Two players could either trust and cooperate with each other so they both earned money. Or one could double-cross the other and keep an unfair share. Sometimes the double-cross was deliberate; other times, rules of the game dictated it. The victim could retaliate by fining the double-crosser different amounts, but sometimes had to spend his own money to impose that fine.

All 14 players chose revenge whenever the double-cross was deliberate and the retaliation free. Only three retaliated when the double-cross wasn't deliberate. Twelve of 14 players punished a deliberate double-cross even if it cost them additional money.

The PET scans showed a brain region known to be important for enjoyment and satisfaction - the dorsal striatum - became active in those players who decided to retaliate. It wasn't an afterglow from revenge, but satisfaction from anticipating it.

When the retaliation cost them money, a second brain region that helps weigh costs and benefits got involved, too, but the striatum remained key. The level of activity actually predicted which players would spend more money to get revenge.

“Their behavior does not reflect blind revenge that follows from overwhelming emotions,” cautioned study co-author Ernst Fehr, director of the University of Zurich's economic research institute. “They reduce punishment if it is costly for them in the same way as they reduce buying goods if the goods become more expensive.”

Moreover, that same satisfaction-causing brain circuitry seems to be involved in the evolution of human cooperation, providing incentive to get along with strangers in setting social norms, the researchers write in Science. Punishing violators of those norms even if you personally don't stand to gain may be the flip side.

The study involved only men, and more work is needed to see if women and people of varying social and income groups react similarly, Stanford's Knutson said.

But the research is important as scientists try to dissect how emotion interacts with analytical decision-making, he stressed.

“For a long time, sociologists and economists have not paid a lot of attention to people's feelings, especially before an event,” Knutson explained. “It's almost like your mind imagines the outcome before it happens. That's a lot of what motivates behavior.”

________

Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

*

Men take pleasure from revenge, while women do not. That's the conclusion of a British study in which researchers used an MRI to examine the brains of men and women as they watched an enemy suffering punishment. In the study, a planted group of “selfish” players cheated the others out of money in a game, and deliberately made themselves seem obnoxious and unlikable.

At the end of the game, the selfish players were subjected to a series of apparent electric shocks, while the study subjects looked on. When a male volunteer saw one of the “bad” players being punished, the primitive reward centers of his brain lit up with pleasure. The scan of his compassion centers, meanwhile, showed no surge of sympathy. When women viewed the villains being shocked, on the other hand, they experienced no pleasure at all. In fact, they felt empathetic.

The results were a surprise for researchers, who expected that women would experience some level of schadenfreude [getting pleasure from the misfortunes of others]. They speculate that there's an evolutionary advantage in men taking pleasure from others' pain; it may have enabled alpha males to subdue rivals and rule-breakers without hesitation or guilt. Researcher Tania Singer tells THE NEW YORK TIMES that the study “would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment.”

A man has been crowned the fastest human calculator after beating the world’s toughest mental arithmetic record.

Alexis Lemaire, a PhD student at Reims University in France, worked out the 13th root of a random 200-digit number in his head in just 70.21 seconds.

His answer of 2407899893032210 was the only accurate solution out of 393 trillion possible combinations.

Alexis performed the calculations at London’s Science Museum. He beat his own previous record of 72.4sec.

According to The Sun, Alexis said: “I’m very proud of my brain. There’s nothing more exciting than being able to function like, or better than, a computer. I live to improve myself.”

________

Ananova http://www.ananova.com

*

[Original illustration at this number was added to HolwickID #22896]

Two recent scientific experiments look like a real pain in the neck for materialists. Both experiments were simple, yet both had some thought-provoking results.

In the first one, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to recall their most intense religious experiences while they were having their brains scanned. The recollection of a religious experience activated over a dozen different regions of the brain, contradicting the popular theory that humans have one so-called “God spot” in the brain that might have just evolved in order to enable us to have spiritual experiences. Second, according to the Guardian newspaper in London, “The scans showed different brain activity from those taken when the nuns were asked to remember intense emotional experiences that involved another person.” So, religion is not just emotion, as skeptics have said, because clearly different brain activity is involved.

The second experiment was done by Bruce Hood, a professor of psychology. What he did was ask the audiences at the British Association Festival of Science if they would be willing to be paid ten pounds to try on a blue sweater. Everybody volunteered. But then Hood told them that the sweater had belonged to a mass murderer, and suddenly, almost no one would put it on, even for money.

Hood concluded that human beings tend to act as if good and evil are something very real and powerful, no matter how often we are told that they are only abstract ideas constructed by our culture. The way that the audience reacted toward a sweater that, in and of itself, was perfectly harmless showed just how deep those beliefs run. Hood says, “Because we operate intuitively, it is pointless to get people to abandon their belief systems because they operate at such a fundamental level that no amount of rational evidence or counter-evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon these ideas.” One might think that knowledge of good and evil was written on the heart. Sound familiar?

These studies don’t prove the existence of God or moral absolutes. No scientific study can do that, because materialists are correct: The purpose of science is to study nature, and God is outside of nature. But the studies do something pretty important: They suggest, from scientific evidence, that God may play a role — that is, there is a cause beyond nature. Materialists’ entire view of the universe, and the philosophy that comes out of that, depends upon the notion that nature is all there is. Let science point to even the smallest suggestion of something more, and their worldview falls apart. That’s why materialists fight intelligent design so hard, because that is a case where the scientific study of nature points to a cause beyond nature.

In short, as the Guardian summed up Hood’s viewpoint, “The battle by scientists against [so-called] ‘irrational’ beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile.” This kind of thinking sends famous Darwinists like Oxford professor Richard Dawkins and the late Carl Sagan into fits. To them, the whole future of mankind depends on being able to coax people away from their so-called “irrational” beliefs and to establish that there are no explanations of human nature that go beyond nature. But there are, and for those of us who believe, it’s just one more sign that if anybody is being irrational here, it’s not us.

________

Ker Than, “No ‘God Spot’ in the Human Brain,” Live Science, 29 August 2006.

Ian Sample, “‘God Spot’ Researchers See the Light in MRI Study,” Guardian (London), 30 August 2006.

“Born with a Superstitious Brain,” University of Bristol press release, 7 September 2006.

James Randerson, “Humans ‘Hardwired for Religion’,” Guardian (London), 4 September 2006.

Steve Connor, “‘God Spot’ Is Found in Brain,” Los Angeles Times, 29 October 1997. (This article, from 1997, announces the birth of the now discredited “God spot” theory.)

BreakPoint Commentary No. 021018, “Grow Up or Wake Up: The Question of God.”

J. Budziszewski, WRITTEN ON THE HEART (InterVarsity, 1997).

________

Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

You’ve heard the old saw before: Science is one thing, religion another — that on one hand, science deals with hard facts, while religion deals with unverifiable beliefs and inflexible dogmas. In fact, these days we are hearing an awful lot from fanatical atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of THE GOD DELUSION, who say that Christianity is actually a threat to science: that religion and science are fundamentally at odds.

So I always find it amusing when areas of scientific inquiry confirm fundamental truths, so basic to the Christian faith. And that’s exactly what we see in the emerging scientific field of inquiry called social neuroscience. This is the study of the brain in the interpersonal world. In a new book called SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE, author Daniel Goleman explores the fascinating “neural ballet” that connects humans brain-to-brain. And guess what? Goleman concludes that we are hard-wired to connect. According to the author, “Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person.”

What’s more, the impulse to imitate is undeniably imprinted in our biology. As Goleman explains, “A different variety of brain cells, mirror neurons, sense both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously prepare us to imitate that movement and feel with them.”

It is easiest to notice this mimetic impulse with babies, but it applies well into our adulthood. For example, social neuroscientists have discovered that when we see others scratch an itch, our brains are actually firing in a similar neural pathway to theirs. Goleman also says that in one sense, we can catch another person’s emotions much like we catch a cold: “neural Wi-Fi,” if you will.

So what does this have to do with a biblical worldview? A lot. Scriptures tell us that the Godhead is essentially interpersonal: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — three in one, the Trinity. While each maintains essence, each is intimately intertwined with the other — just the way the brain is wired. Likewise, when God made Adam, He said that it was not good for man to be alone. At the end of each day of creation, God said, “It is good,” but when God created man, He in effect paused, saying something’s missing. What was missing was relationship. So God created Eve. Made in the image of an interpersonal God, humans are inherently sociable creatures, craving relationships, both with God and with one another.

And these mirror neurons I talked about earlier point to another fundamental aspect of creation. All humans are created in the IMAGO DEI, the image of God. But theologians have also long talked about the IMATATIO DEI or IMATATIO CRISTI. We are made to imitate God, to imitate Christ. In fact, Scriptures teach us that we achieve our most fundamental purpose — holiness — when we become more like Christ. We are designed to imitate or be little mimics of Christ throughout the earth. This is God’s plan. Ephesians 5:1 tells us, “Be imitators of Christ, therefore, as dearly loved children.”

Neuroscience is revealing not only are we made, like God, to be relational, we are also made to be creatures who imitate: the very thing God has commanded us to do. So what do we learn from science? It teaches us that we are biologically wired for the very thing God created us for — no coincidence.

________

Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Charles Darwin’s cousin, hypothesized that monarchs should live longer than other people. Not because they were somehow superior to their subjects, but because millions of their subjects prayed for their health.

Well, it turns out that Galton was, empirically speaking, wrong about the monarch’s life. (Or, perhaps, more people were praying for their monarch’s demise!) But the fact that one of the 19th century’s leading scientific minds — a Darwinian no less — came up with such a hypothesis testifies to our instinctive belief in the connection between faith and health.

This connection was the subject of a recent Time magazine article entitled “The Biology of Belief.” Some of the material will be familiar to long-time BreakPoint listeners and those familiar with the work of the late David Larson.

As Time puts it, “a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health.” Just for example, people who regularly attend church are less likely to die in a given year than those who don’t. And people who believe in a loving God have a better chance of recovering from a serious illness than those who don’t.

There are even studies that suggest, as Galton intuited, that being prayed for, whether you know it or not, makes a difference.

But as mathematicians constantly remind us, the fact that two things, like church attendance and good health, are statistically associated doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other. It could be a coincidence or, in this case, it could be what you might think — regular churchgoers are less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors than non-churchgoers.

Or it could be that correlation is causation. The evidence continues to mount that that is the case.

In other words, despite the mounting evidence that faith does improve health, some people still say there is nothing supernatural about it. So, Time tells us, many researchers and scientists resist the clinical implications of these studies.

For example, they point to studies that show how parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree during prayer and meditation. We believers believe that it’s God who designed the brain that way, but they say it is nothing more than evolutionary biology and neuro-chemistry. They try to explain away the sense of peace we experience in prayer or worship in purely material terms. So, they reason, why compromise the practice of medicine with so-called “metaphysical mumbo-jumbo”?

Paradoxically, this skepticism helps us to understand what faith truly is. As I wrote in my book The Faith, faith is a complete view of the world and humankind’s place in it. It’s a way of knowing. It is not a feeling. Christians should and do pray even if their brains don’t light up. We entrust our lives to God even if it makes no difference in medical outcomes.

Why? Because of what we know about God — that He Is and that He loves us and rewards those who seek Him.

Likewise, for those who proceed from the assumption that everything in the universe can and must be explained in purely material terms, when it comes to faith and medicine, no amount of “scientific evidence” — powerful though it is — will suffice.

They just can’t get their brains around it.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

We’ve all heard the stories about near-death experiences: the tunnel, the white light, the encounter with long-dead relatives now looking very much alive.

Scientists have cast a skeptical eye on these accounts. They say that these feelings and visions are simply the result of a brain shutting down.

But now some researchers are giving a closer neurological look at near-death experiences and asking: Can your mind operate when your brain has stopped?

‘I POPPED UP OUT THE TOP OF MY HEAD’

I met Pam Reynolds in her tour bus. She’s a big deal in the music world — her company, Southern Tracks, has recorded music by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Pearl Jam to REM. But you’ve probably never heard her favorite song. It’s the one Reynolds wrote about the time she traveled to death’s door and back. The experience has made her something of a rock star in the near-death world. Believers say she is proof positive that the mind can operate when the brain is stilled. Nonbelievers say she’s nothing of the sort.

Reynolds’ journey began one hot August day in 1991.

“I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with my husband,” she recalls. “We were promoting a new record. And I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I’ve got a big mouth. I never forget how to talk.”

An MRI revealed an aneurysm on her brain stem. It was already leaking, a ticking time bomb. Her doctor in Atlanta said her best hope was a young brain surgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona named Robert Spetzler.

“The aneurysm was very large, which meant the risk of rupture was also very large,” Spetzler says. “And it was in a location where the only way to really give her the very best odds of fixing it required what we call ‘cardiac standstill.’”

It was a daring operation: Chilling her body, draining the blood out of her head like oil from a car engine, snipping the aneurysm and then bringing her back from the edge of death.

“She is as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive,” Spetzler observes.

When the operation began, the surgeons taped shut Reynolds’ eyes and put molded speakers in her ears. The ear speakers, which made clicking sounds as loud as a jet plane taking off, allowed the surgeons to measure her brain stem activity and let them know when they could drain her blood.

“I was lying there on the gurney minding my own business, seriously unconscious, when I started to hear a noise,” Reynolds recalls. “It was a natural D, and as the sound continued — I don’t know how to explain this, other than to go ahead and say it — I popped up out the top of my head.”

A TUNNEL AND BRIGHT LIGHT

She says she found herself looking down at the operating table. She says she could see 20 people around the table and hear what sounded like a dentist’s drill. She looked at the instrument in the surgeon’s hand.

“It was an odd-looking thing,” she says. “It looked like the handle on my electric toothbrush.”

Reynolds observed the Midas Rex bone saw the surgeons used to cut open her head, the drill bits, and the case, which looked like the one where her father kept his socket wrenches. Then she noticed a surgeon at her left groin.

“I heard a female voice say, ‘Her arteries are too small.’ And Dr. Spetzler — I think it was him — said, ‘Use the other side,’” Reynolds says.

Soon after, the surgeons began to lower her body temperature to 60 degrees. It was about that time that Reynolds believes she noticed a tunnel and bright light. She eventually flat-lined completely, and the surgeons drained the blood out of her head.

During her near-death experience, she says she chatted with her dead grandmother and uncle, who escorted her back to the operating room. She says as they looked down on her body, she could hear the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” playing in the operating room as the doctors restarted her heart. She says her body looked like a train wreck, and she said she didn’t want to return.

“My uncle pushed me,” she says, laughing. “And when I hit the body, the line in the song was, ‘You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.’ And I opened my eyes and I said, ‘You know, that is really insensitive!’”

A VISION THAT MATCHES THE RECORD

Afterwards, Reynolds assumed she had been hallucinating. But a year later, she mentioned the details to her neurosurgeon. Spetzler says her account matched his memory.

“From a scientific perspective,” he says, “I have absolutely no explanation about how it could have happened.”

Spetzler did not check out all the details, but Michael Sabom did. Sabom is a cardiologist in Atlanta who was researching near-death experiences.

“With Pam’s permission, they sent me her records from the surgery,” he says. “And long story short, what she said happened to her is actually what Spetzler did with her out in Arizona.”

According to the records, there were 20 doctors in the room. There was a conversation about the veins in her left leg. She was defibrillated. They were playing “Hotel California.” How about that bone saw? Sabom got a photo from the manufacturer — and it does look like an electric toothbrush.

How, Sabom wonders, could she know these things?

“She could not have heard [it], because of what they did to her ears,” he says. “In addition, both of her eyes were taped shut, so she couldn’t open her eyes and see what was going on. So her physical sensory perception was off the table.”

AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION?

That’s preposterous, says anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee.

“This report provides absolutely no evidence for survival of any sort of consciousness outside the body during near-death experiences or any other such experiences,” he says.

Woerlee, an Australian researcher and near-death experience debunker who has investigated Reynolds’ case, says what happened to her is easy to explain. He says when they cut into her head, she was jolted into consciousness. At that point, they had not yet drained blood from her brain. He believes she could hear — despite the clicking earplugs.

“There are various explanations,” Woerlee says. “One: that the earphones or plugs were not that tightly fitting. Two: It could have been that it was due to sound transmission through the operating table itself.”

So Reynolds could have heard conversations. As for seeing the Midas Rex bone saw, he says, she recognized a sound from her childhood.

“She made a picture in her mind of a machine or a device which was very similar to what she was familiar with — a dental drill,” Woerlee says.

Woerlee says Reynolds experienced anesthesia awareness, in which a person is conscious but can’t move. He figures back in 1991, that happened in 1 out of every 2,000 operations.

That doesn’t convince cardiologist Sabom or neurosurgeon Spetzler. They believe the combination of anesthesia and the sluggish brain activity caused by hypothermia meant that Reynolds could not form or retain memories for a significant part of the operation. At the very least, Sabom says, Reynolds’ story raises the possibility that consciousness can function even when the brain is offline.

“Is there some type of awareness that occurs from a nonfunctional, physical brain?” Sabom asks. “And if there is, does that mean that there’s a soul or spirit?”

RE-CREATING NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

In the end, Reynolds’ story is just an anecdote. And in fact, that’s the problem with all the studies of near-death experiences. After all, you can’t do clinical trials where you kill Mrs. Smith and tag along as she passes through the tunnel to the light, just to verify her story.

Except in Hollywood, of course. In the 1990 movie FLATLINERS (starring Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland), five medical students try to peer into the next world by stopping their hearts and returning to tell the tale.

The movie inspired Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal. What if he could do the next best thing? Since stopping people’s hearts is a research no-no, he is asking people who have had near-death experiences to relive them while he looks to see what’s happening in their head.

“And it seems that these people have a different sort of brain,” Beauregard says in his soft French accent. “It’s like there’s a shift in their brain, and this shift will allow these people to stay in touch with the spiritual world more easily, on a daily basis.”

Beauregard recruited 15 people who had a near-death experience. One of those was Gilles Bedard. In 1973, Bedard’s heart stopped, and in the moments before he was resuscitated, he was greeted by what he describes as 12 beings of light.

“And I felt it was like the breath of the universe. Because it was like...” he says as he blows out his breath, slowly, like a low wind, “very, very peaceful.”

Since then, Bedard has meditated every day, and he says he often reconnects with the light. The research question is, how will his brain respond when he does?

A PERMANENT CHANGE IN BRAIN ACTIVITY?

For the experiment, Bedard is shut into an isolation chamber at Beauregard’s Montreal lab. Bedard’s head sprouts 32 electrodes, which will record his brain wave activity. He’s told to relax for a few moments. Then he’ll be instructed to imagine his near-death experience.

A few minutes later, Beauregard and his research assistant are peering at a computer screen recording Bedard’s brain waves. They cluck happily at the slow, large-amplitude Delta waves undulating across the screen — typical of a person in deep meditation or deep sleep.

Afterward, the researcher asks Bedard if he was able to connect with the light.

“Yeah, it was coming from within,” he says. “It was loving, intelligent ... very powerful.”

It would take Beauregard a year to complete his research on near-death experiences. A few weeks ago, I called to ask him what he had found.

“It’s like the near-death experience triggered something at a neural level in the brain,” he said. “And perhaps this change, in terms of brain activity, is sort of permanent.”

Beauregard says it’s as if touching death jump-started the spiritual lives of these people. Their brains in the spiritual state look a lot like those of Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks who have spent tens of thousands of hours in prayer and meditation. Both groups showed extremely slow brain wave activity.

The researchers also saw significant changes in brain regions associated with positive emotions, attention and personal boundaries, as subjects who had had near-death experiences lost their sense of their physical bodies and merged with God or the “light.”

BRAIN CHEMISTRY OR A TRIP TO HEAVEN?

Skeptic Woerlee says there’s nothing remarkable — and certainly nothing spiritual — about these findings.

“The brain function of many of these people who have undergone a near-death experience is altered,” Woerlee says. “That’s correct. It is altered. Extreme oxygen starvation does change brain function — because it causes brain damage to the larger cells in the brain.”

It’s brain chemistry, he says, not a trip to heaven.

In other words, Woerlee and Beauregard looked at the same images and came to opposite conclusions.

I found that dichotomy everywhere as I interviewed experts about the emerging science of spirituality. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test: Some researchers look at the data and say spiritual experience is only an electrical storm in the temporal lobe, or a brain gasping for oxygen — all fully explainable by science. Others say our brains are reflecting an encounter with the divine.

And almost invariably, where a scientist stands on that issue has little to do with the clinical findings of any study. It has almost everything to do with the scientist’s personal beliefs.

People have trouble acting in their own best interests. It’s a brain thing.

Dan Ariely, a professor at M.T.T., has studied the ways people make financial decisions that are often harmful to them. To take advantage of a free shipping offer, we will spend $15 to save $3.99. Ariely writes, “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless -- they are systematic. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as error.

Psychologists have examined how people deal with uncertainty. They find that our minds tend to take certain shortcuts. For example, we tend to make inferences from our own experiences, so if we have recently seen a traffic accident we will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash. Some of our “shortcuts” are downright wacky. For instance, researchers asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the Untied Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects’ responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled. This is known as the “anchoring effect.”

There is also an “endowment effect.” To probe this effect, researchers exploited Duke University’s passion for basketball. Fans who had just won tickets to a big game through a lottery were asked the minimum amount that they would accept in exchange for them. Fans who had failed to win tickets through the same lottery were asked the maximum amount that thye would be will to offer for them. You would expect ticket holders and non-ticket holders to think of the game in the same way, so that some of the lucky and some of the unlucky would strike deals and tickets would change hands. But whether or not a lottery participant had been “endowed” with a ticket turned out to powerfully affect his or her sense of its value. On average, the amount that winners were willing to accept for their tickets was $2,400. On average, the amount that losers were willing to offer was only $175. Out of a hundred fans, not a single ticket holder would sell for a price that a non-ticket holder would pay.

Ariely has even experimented on Halloween trick-or-treaters. He laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers -- regular two-ounce bards and one-ounce miniatures. When the first children came to his door, he handed each of them three Kisses, then offered to make a deal. If they wanted to, the kids could trade one Kiss for a mini-Snickers or two Kisses for a full-sized bar. Almost all of them took the deal, and, proving their skills as sugar maximizers, opted for the two-Kiss trade. At some point, Ariely shifts the terms: kids could now trade one of their three Kisses for the larger bar or get a mini-Snickers without giving up anything. In terms of sheer chocolatiness, the trade for the larger bar was still by far the better deal. But, faced with the prospect of getting a mini-Snickers for nothing, the trick-or-treaters could no longer reckon properly. Most of them took the free bar and refused the more-profitable trade, even though it cost them candy. Perhaps it is because “free” presents itself as no possibility of loss. Tellingly, when Ariely performed a similar experiment on adults, they made the same mistake.

In his 1996 essay entitled “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” the late essayist Tom Wolfe predicted that new technologies (such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI) would soon render our traditional ideas about the “soul,” the “mind,” the “self,” and “free will” obsolete. In their place would be a “brilliant dawn” of “Ultimate Skepticism.” Today, to paraphrase another literary giant, it seems that Wolfe’s reports of the soul’s immanent death were greatly exaggerated.

An fMRI is an instrument that measures brain activity by tracking blood flow. As with other parts of the body, “when an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases.” Neuroscientists attach a good deal of significance to this increased blood flow.

For example, in one study, participants were insulted and then asked to ruminate over the insults while an fMRI measured the blood flow in their brains. Researchers concluded that while anger over being insulted spurred activity in one part of the brain (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), “ruminating” or pondering the insults stimulated activity in a different part of the brain (the medial prefrontal cortex). Studies like this, say those Wolfe called the “ultimate skeptics,” demonstrate that things like the “soul” or the “self” are, in reality, merely brain activity.

This leap in reasoning is an example of the hammer seeing everything as a nail. Just because certain parts of the brain are associated with specific tasks or emotions in no way proves that the soul or the self are illusions. And, since “fMRIs don’t actually measure brain activity directly (but) blood flow to regions of the brain,” we cannot be certain which region of the brain is actually active during a given task.

Even worse for those who saw conclusive evidence for their skepticism, Duke University researchers found inconsistencies in the blood flow measurements on which these conclusions were based. Re-examining 56 published papers of fMRI data, they discovered when individuals took the same tests weeks or months apart, there were “wildly varying results.” As lead researcher Ahmad Harriri, put it, “The correlation between one scan and a second is not even fair, it’s poor.”

In fact, inconsistencies of neuroscience testing over time seems to be a consistent feature of the field. The “Human Connectome Project,” which is widely regarded as the “bible” of neuroscience, also yielded inconsistent results: “For six out of seven measures of brain function, the correlation between tests taken about four months apart with the same person was weak.”

In other words, Wolfe’s prediction of a “brilliant dawn” was based on studies that don’t actually measure brain activity, but instead measure blood flow as a proxy for brain activity, measurements we now known to be basically useless.

As website Fast Company put it, the results of Harriri and company’s study are “rocking the field of fMRI research. In Harriri’s words, “This whole sub-branch of fMRI could go extinct if we can’t address this critical limitation.”

“Critical limitation” is an understatement. As the folks at Duke have demonstrated, we really don’t know what we’re looking at when we try to measure brain activity. How can anyone in the field, then, presume to talk with any level of predictive certainty about the soul, the mind, or the self?

Wolfe’s brand of “ultimate skepticism” began with the most basic assumptions inherent to a naturalist worldview: Everything that exists is physical. Nothing is metaphysical. Only that which can be physically measured can be known, and our ability to measure and know will eventually explain everything that is. Naturalists are therefore committed to believing, before any evidence takes them there, that the soul and the self are illusions with biological explanations. Wolfe seized on fMRIs as “proof” of what he already assumed.

As the old saying goes, “science” is often used in the same way a drunk man uses a lamppost: for support, not for light. People of all worldviews do it, but especially those certain that religious beliefs are illusions. In this case, that certainty is what turned out to be the illusion.

________

Resources:

"The Angry Brain: Neural Correlates of Anger, Angry Rumination, and Aggressive Personality," by Thomas F. Denson, National Library of Medicine, April 21, 2009.

"Studies of Brain Activity Aren’t as Useful as Scientist Thought," by Karl Leif Bates, GCB, June 5, 2020.

"Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong," by Arianne Cohen, Fast Company, June 25, 2020 .

________

Copyright (c) 2020 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

One of the most repeated themes of science fiction movies is humans merging with or being replaced by machines. Entire movie franchises are built around these ideas, such as “The Matrix” and “The Terminator.” One of “Star Trek’s” most iconic antagonists were the “Borg,” a blend of biological and technological elements that were pretty-near invincible. They told every species they encountered that “resistance is futile.”

In movies, the merger of man and machine is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse. In real life, however, there’s an entire movement committed to seeing this synthesis all the way to its logical and biological end, which — they promise — will be terrific. It’s called Transhumanism.

Transhumanism is the subject of the most recent, must-read two-part series by Dr. Glenn Sunshine at BreakPoint.org. There’s a lot more in his articles than I can cover here, so I’ll limit my discussion today to the Transhumanist dream, or as I’d call it, “nightmare,” of merging humans and computers.

Popularized by the 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that advances in computing will eventually allow machines to match and then exceed the ability of the human brain to process information.

In a parallel development, technologies such as PET scans and MRIs will enable us to “reverse-engineer” the human brain. While this may sound like science fiction, Kurzweil insists that it’s inevitably “science fact.” After all, as he put it, our brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, “but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

As our computational power increases, the “reverse-engineering” of the human brain will supposedly make it possible to “upload” a human brain into a computer. To oversimplify what is a very complicated prediction, “uploading” our brains will result in neural implants that will “augment” our natural abilities. Over time, this “augmentation” will blur the line between the natural and the synthetic until any distinction is meaningless.

Of course, trusting in Kurzweil’s scenario (especially that, even if it is possible, it will also be good) is every bit an act of faith as believing in the Second Coming, only without a Resurrection.

Underlying the Transhumanist faith is a purely materialistic worldview. As Glenn Sunshine writes, materialism “assumes that matter and energy are all that exist. Our minds are thus a product of our brains, which are nothing more than highly complex computers.” In such a world, it only makes sense that we could eventually create machines that can do everything human brains can do, and maybe even more.

And if, as materialism suggests and Kurzweil predicts, there is no “essential difference between our brains and computers ... we should be able to create interfaces between our brain and the super-intelligent computer network, allowing us immediate access to all the information on whatever replaces the internet.”

Still, as Glenn reminds us, this is quite an assumption. Not to mention is such a worldview forced to regard human consciousness — the awareness of ourselves and the world around us — as an illusion of sorts because, as physicist Adam Frank has written, it can’t explain consciousness or even the nature of the “matter” in “materialism.”

To put it in computer terms, for the materialist, there is no software. There’s only hardware. It’s like answering the question “What’s a MacBook?” by listing components such as processor and storage drive, but completely ignoring its operating system.

Go ahead, by the way. Delete the operating system from your computer and see how well it works. (Hint: it won’t...)

Though Transhumanism should remain the stuff of science fiction, a lot of money is being invested in order to make it science fact. Just this week, for instance, Microsoft invested about a billion bucks in one of Elon Musk’s Transhumanist projects.

Which is just another reason for all of us to understand the worldview behind Transhumanism — before resistance becomes futile.

________

Resources:

“Transhumanism’s Assumptions and their Implications: Emerging Worldviews 12,” by Glenn Sunshine, BreakPoint.org, July 22, 2019

“The Rise of Transhumanism: Emerging Worldviews 11,” by Glenn Sunshine, BreakPoint.org, July 09, 2019

________

Copyright (c) 2019 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Can science explain heaven? Scientists try to explain near-death experiences.

________

There are those who believe that science will eventually explain everything — including our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It’s something that happens in your brain as you die.

I first encountered this idea as I was researching my new book, HEAVEN: OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE AFTERLIFE. I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Christopher Dickey, who told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a fantasy of heaven in which all of his closest friends were sitting around a swimming pool, chatting. “There was nothing special about the pool itself,” wrote Chris in SUMMER OF DELIVERANCE: A MEMOIR OF FATHER AND SON. “Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were ... But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview of heaven. He called that place ‘The Happy Swimming Pool.’” Chris believes that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the moments before death. After that, there’s nothing.

Science cannot definitively proof or disprove Chris’s theory, but some scientists are willing to take guesses. And these guesses are based, in part, on a growing body of research around Near-Death Experience (NDE). According to a 2000 article in THE LANCET, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had such an experience. And surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details. People who have had NDEs describe — like some religious visionaries — a tunnel, a light, a gate, or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed.

Andrew Newberg is an associate professor in the radiology department at the University of Pennsylvania who has made his reputation studying the brain scans of religious people (nuns and monks) who have ecstatic experiences as they meditate. He believes the “tunnel” and “light” phenomena can be explained easily. As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first, he hypothesizes. “That’s why you’d have a tunnel sensation.” If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down last.

Newberg puts forward the following scenario, which, he emphasizes, is guesswork. When people die, two parts of the brain, which usually work in opposition to each other, act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous system — a web of nerves and neurons running through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the body — is responsible for arousal and excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic system — with which the sympathetic system is entwined — calms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system prompts the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you’re falling asleep. But in the brains of people reporting mystical experiences — and, perhaps, in death — both systems are fully “on,” giving a person the sensation both of slowing down, being “out of body,” and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. Does Newberg believe, then, that visions of heaven are merely chemical-neurological events? He laughs nervously. “I don’t know.” He laughs again. “It’s, um ... I don’t think we have enough evidence to say.”

Since at least the 1980s, scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism. In order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE — a sense of moving through a tunnel, and “out of body” feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories — can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilizer frequently used as a party drug. In 2000, a psychiatrist named Karl Jansen wrote a book, KETAMINE: DREAMS AND REALITIES, in which he interviewed a number of recreational users. One of them, who called himself K.U., describes one of his drug trips this way: “I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God.” Dante said it better, but the vision is astonishingly the same.

________

Adapted from the forthcoming book HEAVEN: OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE AFTERLIFE by Lisa Miller. Copyright ©2010 by Lisa Miller.

Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Charles Darwin’s cousin, hypothesized that monarchs should live longer than other people. Not because they were somehow superior to their subjects, but because millions of their subjects prayed for their health.

Well, it turns out that Galton was, empirically speaking, wrong about the monarch’s life. (Or, perhaps, more people were praying for their monarch’s demise!) But the fact that one of the 19th century’s leading scientific minds — a Darwinian no less — came up with such a hypothesis testifies to our instinctive belief in the connection between faith and health.

This connection was the subject of a recent Time magazine article entitled “The Biology of Belief.” Some of the material will be familiar to long-time BreakPoint listeners and those familiar with the work of the late David Larson.

As Time puts it, “a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health.” Just for example, people who regularly attend church are less likely to die in a given year than those who don’t. And people who believe in a loving God have a better chance of recovering from a serious illness than those who don’t.

There are even studies that suggest, as Galton intuited, that being prayed for, whether you know it or not, makes a difference.

But as mathematicians constantly remind us, the fact that two things, like church attendance and good health, are statistically associated doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other. It could be a coincidence or, in this case, it could be what you might think — regular churchgoers are less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors than non-churchgoers.

Or it could be that correlation is causation. The evidence continues to mount that that is the case.

In other words, despite the mounting evidence that faith does improve health, some people still say there is nothing supernatural about it. So, Time tells us, many researchers and scientists resist the clinical implications of these studies.

For example, they point to studies that show how parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree during prayer and meditation. We believers believe that it’s God who designed the brain that way, but they say it is nothing more than evolutionary biology and neuro-chemistry. They try to explain away the sense of peace we experience in prayer or worship in purely material terms. So, they reason, why compromise the practice of medicine with so-called “metaphysical mumbo-jumbo”?

Paradoxically, this skepticism helps us to understand what faith truly is. As I wrote in my book The Faith, faith is a complete view of the world and humankind’s place in it. It’s a way of knowing. It is not a feeling. Christians should and do pray even if their brains don’t light up. We entrust our lives to God even if it makes no difference in medical outcomes.

Why? Because of what we know about God — that He Is and that He loves us and rewards those who seek Him.

Likewise, for those who proceed from the assumption that everything in the universe can and must be explained in purely material terms, when it comes to faith and medicine, no amount of “scientific evidence” — powerful though it is — will suffice.

They just can’t get their brains around it.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Did God create the heavens and the earth? Or is the universe nothing more than an accident that "just happened?"

In his book THE QUESTION OF GOD, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Armand Nicholi sets up a debate over this question between two deeply influential men: a famous psychiatrist and a famous professor of medieval literature. Their positions were unequivocal -- and mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. Nicholi writes, we need to ask ourselves: How much of their views were based on evidence and how much on emotion that caused them to distort reality?

To the question, "Is there a God?" psychiatrist Sigmund Freud answered "No!" Belief in what he labeled "an idealized Superman" is "patently infantile" and "foreign to reality." Freud "strongly advised us to face the harsh reality that we are alone in the universe," Nicholi writes. "In short, Freud shouted, 'Grow up!'"

Nicholi goes on to say that Oxford professor C. S. Lewis answered the question of God with a resounding "Yes!" Lewis pointed to the fact that the universe is filled with "signposts" like the "starry heavens above and the moral law within," "all pointing with unmistakable clarity to that Intelligence." Lewis shouted, "Wake up!"

Freud attacked the Scriptures as being "full of contradictions, revisions, and falsifications." Religion, Freud wrote, is "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity," and the teachings of Jesus are "psychologically impossible and useless for our lives." Freud was convinced, Nicholi writes, that psychoanalysis "has shown us that a personal god is, psychologically, nothing more than an exalted father," a "projection of powerful wishes and inner needs."

In rebuttal, Lewis offered evidence that God does exist. He wrote, "He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: And all through history there have been people trying ... to obey it."

Nicholi notes also that Lewis countered Freud's wish-fulfillment argument by pointing out that the "biblical worldview involves a great deal of despair and pain and is certainly not anything one would wish for." I have always argued that no one would invent a religion like Christianity with its demands that we help the poor and that we love our enemies.

Neuroscientists have recently found evidence that the brain is genetically programmed for belief. This confirms what Christians have always believed about the imago Dei -- the image of God being implanted in us. And it may explain why Freud was preoccupied with God to the end of his days despite his determination to prove that He doesn't exist. Intriguingly, Freud's arguments against belief exhibit "an intense, emotional, argumentative, and, at times, desperate and pleading tone," writes Nicholi. "Why couldn't he put the question to rest? Perhaps Lewis would say we can never explain away God, nor can we find rest until that deep-seated desire (experienced by both Freud and Lewis) is satisfied."

Both Lewis and Freud still influence millions. Read Nicholi's book THE QUESTION OF GOD, based on the course he taught at Harvard for years, and you will learn more about how two brilliant men resolved questions of faith. Their answers will help any skeptic determine whether belief in God is really "patently infantile" or the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., THE QUESTION OF GOD: C. S. LEWIS AND SIGMUND FREUD DEBATE GOD, LOVE, SEX, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE (Free Press, 2002).

C. S. Lewis, GOD IN THE DOCK (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994) and MERE CHRISTIANITY (Harper, 2001). http://www.parable.com/breakpoint/item_0802808689.htm

David C. Downing, THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: C. S. LEWIS'S JOURNEY TO FAITH (InterVarsity, 2002).

Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., "C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on good and evil," AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, March 2002. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2185/2_13/83520009/print.jhtml

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, "Freud and belief in the Creator," JEWISH WORLD REVIEW, June 29, 2001. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0601/freud.asp

D. Trull, "The God Spot," Parascope.com, 1997. http://www.parascope.com/articles/slips/fs22_3.htm

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

[see also HolwickID #22403 for a related article]

*

Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Charles Darwin’s cousin, hypothesized that monarchs should live longer than other people. Not because they were somehow superior to their subjects, but because millions of their subjects prayed for their health.

Well, it turns out that Galton was, empirically speaking, wrong about the monarch’s life. (Or, perhaps, more people were praying for their monarch’s demise!) But the fact that one of the 19th century’s leading scientific minds — a Darwinian no less — came up with such a hypothesis testifies to our instinctive belief in the connection between faith and health.

This connection was the subject of a recent Time magazine article entitled “The Biology of Belief.” Some of the material will be familiar to long-time BreakPoint listeners and those familiar with the work of the late David Larson.

As Time puts it, “a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health.” Just for example, people who regularly attend church are less likely to die in a given year than those who don’t. And people who believe in a loving God have a better chance of recovering from a serious illness than those who don’t.

There are even studies that suggest, as Galton intuited, that being prayed for, whether you know it or not, makes a difference.

But as mathematicians constantly remind us, the fact that two things, like church attendance and good health, are statistically associated doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other. It could be a coincidence or, in this case, it could be what you might think — regular churchgoers are less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors than non-churchgoers.

Or it could be that correlation is causation. The evidence continues to mount that that is the case.

In other words, despite the mounting evidence that faith does improve health, some people still say there is nothing supernatural about it. So, Time tells us, many researchers and scientists resist the clinical implications of these studies.

For example, they point to studies that show how parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree during prayer and meditation. We believers believe that it’s God who designed the brain that way, but they say it is nothing more than evolutionary biology and neuro-chemistry. They try to explain away the sense of peace we experience in prayer or worship in purely material terms. So, they reason, why compromise the practice of medicine with so-called “metaphysical mumbo-jumbo”?

Paradoxically, this skepticism helps us to understand what faith truly is. As I wrote in my book The Faith, faith is a complete view of the world and humankind’s place in it. It’s a way of knowing. It is not a feeling. Christians should and do pray even if their brains don’t light up. We entrust our lives to God even if it makes no difference in medical outcomes.

Why? Because of what we know about God — that He Is and that He loves us and rewards those who seek Him.

Likewise, for those who proceed from the assumption that everything in the universe can and must be explained in purely material terms, when it comes to faith and medicine, no amount of “scientific evidence” — powerful though it is — will suffice.

They just can’t get their brains around it.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Can science explain heaven? Scientists try to explain near-death experiences.

________

There are those who believe that science will eventually explain everything — including our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It’s something that happens in your brain as you die.

I first encountered this idea as I was researching my new book, HEAVEN: OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE AFTERLIFE. I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Christopher Dickey, who told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a fantasy of heaven in which all of his closest friends were sitting around a swimming pool, chatting. “There was nothing special about the pool itself,” wrote Chris in SUMMER OF DELIVERANCE: A MEMOIR OF FATHER AND SON. “Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were ... But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview of heaven. He called that place ‘The Happy Swimming Pool.’” Chris believes that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the moments before death. After that, there’s nothing.

Science cannot definitively proof or disprove Chris’s theory, but some scientists are willing to take guesses. And these guesses are based, in part, on a growing body of research around Near-Death Experience (NDE). According to a 2000 article in THE LANCET, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had such an experience. And surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details. People who have had NDEs describe — like some religious visionaries — a tunnel, a light, a gate, or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed.

Andrew Newberg is an associate professor in the radiology department at the University of Pennsylvania who has made his reputation studying the brain scans of religious people (nuns and monks) who have ecstatic experiences as they meditate. He believes the “tunnel” and “light” phenomena can be explained easily. As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first, he hypothesizes. “That’s why you’d have a tunnel sensation.” If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down last.

Newberg puts forward the following scenario, which, he emphasizes, is guesswork. When people die, two parts of the brain, which usually work in opposition to each other, act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous system — a web of nerves and neurons running through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the body — is responsible for arousal and excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic system — with which the sympathetic system is entwined — calms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system prompts the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you’re falling asleep. But in the brains of people reporting mystical experiences — and, perhaps, in death — both systems are fully “on,” giving a person the sensation both of slowing down, being “out of body,” and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. Does Newberg believe, then, that visions of heaven are merely chemical-neurological events? He laughs nervously. “I don’t know.” He laughs again. “It’s, um ... I don’t think we have enough evidence to say.”

Since at least the 1980s, scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism. In order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE — a sense of moving through a tunnel, and “out of body” feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories — can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilizer frequently used as a party drug. In 2000, a psychiatrist named Karl Jansen wrote a book, KETAMINE: DREAMS AND REALITIES, in which he interviewed a number of recreational users. One of them, who called himself K.U., describes one of his drug trips this way: “I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God.” Dante said it better, but the vision is astonishingly the same.

________

Adapted from the forthcoming book HEAVEN: OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE AFTERLIFE by Lisa Miller. Copyright ©2010 by Lisa Miller.

Men take pleasure from revenge, while women do not. That's the conclusion of a British study in which researchers used an MRI to examine the brains of men and women as they watched an enemy suffering punishment. In the study, a planted group of “selfish” players cheated the others out of money in a game, and deliberately made themselves seem obnoxious and unlikable.

At the end of the game, the selfish players were subjected to a series of apparent electric shocks, while the study subjects looked on. When a male volunteer saw one of the “bad” players being punished, the primitive reward centers of his brain lit up with pleasure. The scan of his compassion centers, meanwhile, showed no surge of sympathy. When women viewed the villains being shocked, on the other hand, they experienced no pleasure at all. In fact, they felt empathetic.

The results were a surprise for researchers, who expected that women would experience some level of schadenfreude [getting pleasure from the misfortunes of others]. They speculate that there's an evolutionary advantage in men taking pleasure from others' pain; it may have enabled alpha males to subdue rivals and rule-breakers without hesitation or guilt. Researcher Tania Singer tells THE NEW YORK TIMES that the study “would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment.”

We’ve all heard the stories about near-death experiences: the tunnel, the white light, the encounter with long-dead relatives now looking very much alive.

Scientists have cast a skeptical eye on these accounts. They say that these feelings and visions are simply the result of a brain shutting down.

But now some researchers are giving a closer neurological look at near-death experiences and asking: Can your mind operate when your brain has stopped?

‘I POPPED UP OUT THE TOP OF MY HEAD’

I met Pam Reynolds in her tour bus. She’s a big deal in the music world — her company, Southern Tracks, has recorded music by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Pearl Jam to REM. But you’ve probably never heard her favorite song. It’s the one Reynolds wrote about the time she traveled to death’s door and back. The experience has made her something of a rock star in the near-death world. Believers say she is proof positive that the mind can operate when the brain is stilled. Nonbelievers say she’s nothing of the sort.

Reynolds’ journey began one hot August day in 1991.

“I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with my husband,” she recalls. “We were promoting a new record. And I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I’ve got a big mouth. I never forget how to talk.”

An MRI revealed an aneurysm on her brain stem. It was already leaking, a ticking time bomb. Her doctor in Atlanta said her best hope was a young brain surgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona named Robert Spetzler.

“The aneurysm was very large, which meant the risk of rupture was also very large,” Spetzler says. “And it was in a location where the only way to really give her the very best odds of fixing it required what we call ‘cardiac standstill.’”

It was a daring operation: Chilling her body, draining the blood out of her head like oil from a car engine, snipping the aneurysm and then bringing her back from the edge of death.

“She is as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive,” Spetzler observes.

When the operation began, the surgeons taped shut Reynolds’ eyes and put molded speakers in her ears. The ear speakers, which made clicking sounds as loud as a jet plane taking off, allowed the surgeons to measure her brain stem activity and let them know when they could drain her blood.

“I was lying there on the gurney minding my own business, seriously unconscious, when I started to hear a noise,” Reynolds recalls. “It was a natural D, and as the sound continued — I don’t know how to explain this, other than to go ahead and say it — I popped up out the top of my head.”

A TUNNEL AND BRIGHT LIGHT

She says she found herself looking down at the operating table. She says she could see 20 people around the table and hear what sounded like a dentist’s drill. She looked at the instrument in the surgeon’s hand.

“It was an odd-looking thing,” she says. “It looked like the handle on my electric toothbrush.”

Reynolds observed the Midas Rex bone saw the surgeons used to cut open her head, the drill bits, and the case, which looked like the one where her father kept his socket wrenches. Then she noticed a surgeon at her left groin.

“I heard a female voice say, ‘Her arteries are too small.’ And Dr. Spetzler — I think it was him — said, ‘Use the other side,’” Reynolds says.

Soon after, the surgeons began to lower her body temperature to 60 degrees. It was about that time that Reynolds believes she noticed a tunnel and bright light. She eventually flat-lined completely, and the surgeons drained the blood out of her head.

During her near-death experience, she says she chatted with her dead grandmother and uncle, who escorted her back to the operating room. She says as they looked down on her body, she could hear the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” playing in the operating room as the doctors restarted her heart. She says her body looked like a train wreck, and she said she didn’t want to return.

“My uncle pushed me,” she says, laughing. “And when I hit the body, the line in the song was, ‘You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.’ And I opened my eyes and I said, ‘You know, that is really insensitive!’”

A VISION THAT MATCHES THE RECORD

Afterwards, Reynolds assumed she had been hallucinating. But a year later, she mentioned the details to her neurosurgeon. Spetzler says her account matched his memory.

“From a scientific perspective,” he says, “I have absolutely no explanation about how it could have happened.”

Spetzler did not check out all the details, but Michael Sabom did. Sabom is a cardiologist in Atlanta who was researching near-death experiences.

“With Pam’s permission, they sent me her records from the surgery,” he says. “And long story short, what she said happened to her is actually what Spetzler did with her out in Arizona.”

According to the records, there were 20 doctors in the room. There was a conversation about the veins in her left leg. She was defibrillated. They were playing “Hotel California.” How about that bone saw? Sabom got a photo from the manufacturer — and it does look like an electric toothbrush.

How, Sabom wonders, could she know these things?

“She could not have heard [it], because of what they did to her ears,” he says. “In addition, both of her eyes were taped shut, so she couldn’t open her eyes and see what was going on. So her physical sensory perception was off the table.”

AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION?

That’s preposterous, says anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee.

“This report provides absolutely no evidence for survival of any sort of consciousness outside the body during near-death experiences or any other such experiences,” he says.

Woerlee, an Australian researcher and near-death experience debunker who has investigated Reynolds’ case, says what happened to her is easy to explain. He says when they cut into her head, she was jolted into consciousness. At that point, they had not yet drained blood from her brain. He believes she could hear — despite the clicking earplugs.

“There are various explanations,” Woerlee says. “One: that the earphones or plugs were not that tightly fitting. Two: It could have been that it was due to sound transmission through the operating table itself.”

So Reynolds could have heard conversations. As for seeing the Midas Rex bone saw, he says, she recognized a sound from her childhood.

“She made a picture in her mind of a machine or a device which was very similar to what she was familiar with — a dental drill,” Woerlee says.

Woerlee says Reynolds experienced anesthesia awareness, in which a person is conscious but can’t move. He figures back in 1991, that happened in 1 out of every 2,000 operations.

That doesn’t convince cardiologist Sabom or neurosurgeon Spetzler. They believe the combination of anesthesia and the sluggish brain activity caused by hypothermia meant that Reynolds could not form or retain memories for a significant part of the operation. At the very least, Sabom says, Reynolds’ story raises the possibility that consciousness can function even when the brain is offline.

“Is there some type of awareness that occurs from a nonfunctional, physical brain?” Sabom asks. “And if there is, does that mean that there’s a soul or spirit?”

RE-CREATING NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

In the end, Reynolds’ story is just an anecdote. And in fact, that’s the problem with all the studies of near-death experiences. After all, you can’t do clinical trials where you kill Mrs. Smith and tag along as she passes through the tunnel to the light, just to verify her story.

Except in Hollywood, of course. In the 1990 movie FLATLINERS (starring Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland), five medical students try to peer into the next world by stopping their hearts and returning to tell the tale.

The movie inspired Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal. What if he could do the next best thing? Since stopping people’s hearts is a research no-no, he is asking people who have had near-death experiences to relive them while he looks to see what’s happening in their head.

“And it seems that these people have a different sort of brain,” Beauregard says in his soft French accent. “It’s like there’s a shift in their brain, and this shift will allow these people to stay in touch with the spiritual world more easily, on a daily basis.”

Beauregard recruited 15 people who had a near-death experience. One of those was Gilles Bedard. In 1973, Bedard’s heart stopped, and in the moments before he was resuscitated, he was greeted by what he describes as 12 beings of light.

“And I felt it was like the breath of the universe. Because it was like...” he says as he blows out his breath, slowly, like a low wind, “very, very peaceful.”

Since then, Bedard has meditated every day, and he says he often reconnects with the light. The research question is, how will his brain respond when he does?

A PERMANENT CHANGE IN BRAIN ACTIVITY?

For the experiment, Bedard is shut into an isolation chamber at Beauregard’s Montreal lab. Bedard’s head sprouts 32 electrodes, which will record his brain wave activity. He’s told to relax for a few moments. Then he’ll be instructed to imagine his near-death experience.

A few minutes later, Beauregard and his research assistant are peering at a computer screen recording Bedard’s brain waves. They cluck happily at the slow, large-amplitude Delta waves undulating across the screen — typical of a person in deep meditation or deep sleep.

Afterward, the researcher asks Bedard if he was able to connect with the light.

“Yeah, it was coming from within,” he says. “It was loving, intelligent ... very powerful.”

It would take Beauregard a year to complete his research on near-death experiences. A few weeks ago, I called to ask him what he had found.

“It’s like the near-death experience triggered something at a neural level in the brain,” he said. “And perhaps this change, in terms of brain activity, is sort of permanent.”

Beauregard says it’s as if touching death jump-started the spiritual lives of these people. Their brains in the spiritual state look a lot like those of Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks who have spent tens of thousands of hours in prayer and meditation. Both groups showed extremely slow brain wave activity.

The researchers also saw significant changes in brain regions associated with positive emotions, attention and personal boundaries, as subjects who had had near-death experiences lost their sense of their physical bodies and merged with God or the “light.”

BRAIN CHEMISTRY OR A TRIP TO HEAVEN?

Skeptic Woerlee says there’s nothing remarkable — and certainly nothing spiritual — about these findings.

“The brain function of many of these people who have undergone a near-death experience is altered,” Woerlee says. “That’s correct. It is altered. Extreme oxygen starvation does change brain function — because it causes brain damage to the larger cells in the brain.”

It’s brain chemistry, he says, not a trip to heaven.

In other words, Woerlee and Beauregard looked at the same images and came to opposite conclusions.

I found that dichotomy everywhere as I interviewed experts about the emerging science of spirituality. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test: Some researchers look at the data and say spiritual experience is only an electrical storm in the temporal lobe, or a brain gasping for oxygen — all fully explainable by science. Others say our brains are reflecting an encounter with the divine.

And almost invariably, where a scientist stands on that issue has little to do with the clinical findings of any study. It has almost everything to do with the scientist’s personal beliefs.