Christianity Requires Belief in the Resurrection Rather Than Neuroscience Rome, August 26, 2014 (Zenit.org) Father Dwight Longenecker | 665 hits

In the early 1980s I visited the town of Medjugorje where a group of young people reported that they were experiencing visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The scientists wired the children up to machines to record their physiological responses during the apparitions. The scientists wanted to study what was going on in their brains as they saw the Blessed Virgin.

Religious experiences of the mystical kind occur throughout human experience and in most every kind of religion. But what is happening when visionaries see the Blessed Virgin, Hindu holy men go into a trance or charismatics speak in tongues?

Are they experiencing something real or is it just their imagination?

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studies how the brain responds to religion. In this fascinating article his work is explained and explored by an atheist journalist named Julia Llewellyn Smith. She submitted to some experiments with Newberg to see if a religious-type experience could be artificially activated in his brain. It didnt work.

Llewellyn Smith explains:

Newberg is director of research at the Jefferson Myrna Brind Centre of Integrative Medicine, in Philadelphia, and co-author of, among other books, The Metaphysical Mind: Probing the Biology of Philosophical Thought. He is a leading neurotheologist, pioneering a new and highly controversial science that investigates whether as many sceptics have long suspected God didnt create us, but we created God.

During brain scans of those involved in various types of meditation and prayer, Newberg noticed increased activity in the limbic system, which regulates emotion. He also noted decreased activity in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for orienting oneself in space and time.

When this happens, you lose your sense of self, he says. You have a notion of a great interconnectedness of things. It could be a sense where the self dissolves into nothingness, or dissolves into God or the universe.

Newberg has discovered that the human brain has what might be called a capacity for prayer and this is universal. We are able to get outside ourselves and experience what we feel is contact with a high power.

The rest is here:
Is Religion Only in Your Head?