God and Science

Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief
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In a small, dark room at the lab of a large university hospital, a young man named Robert lights candles and a stick of jasmine incense; he then settles to the floor and folds his legs easily into the lotus position. A devout Buddhist and accomplished practitioner of Tibetan meditation, Robert is about to begin another meditative voyage inward. As always, his goal is to quiet the constant chatter of the conscious mind and lose himself in the deeper, simpler reality within. It's a journey he's made a thousand times before, but this time, as he drifts off into that inner spiritual reality--as the material world around him recedes like a fading dream--he remains tethered to the physical here and now by a length of common cotton twine. One end of that twine lies in a loose coil at Robert's side. The other end runs beneath a closed laboratory door and into an adjoining room, where I sit, beside my friend and longtime research partner Dr. Eugene d'Aquili, with the twine wrapped around my finger. Gene and I are waiting for Robert to tug on the twine, which will be our signal that his meditative state is approaching its transcendent peak. It is this peak moment of spiritual intensity that interests us.1 ................ We wait one hour, while Robert meditates. Then I feel a gentle jerk on the twine. This is my cue to inject a radioactive material into a long intravenous line that also runs into Robert's room, and into a vein in his left arm. We wait a few moments more for Robert to end his meditation, then we whisk him off to a room in the hospital's Nuclear Medicine Department, where a massive, state-of-the-art SPECT camera awaits. In moments, Robert is reclining on a metal table, the camera's three large crystal heads orbiting his skull with a precise, robotic whir. The SPECT camera (the acronym stands for single photon emission computed tomography) is a high-tech imaging tool that detects radioactive emissions.7 The SPECT camera scans inside Robert's head by detecting the location of the radioactive tracer we injected when Robert tugged on the string. Because the tracer is carried by blood flow, and because this particular tracer locks almost immediately into brain cells and remains there for hours, the SPECT scans of Robert's head will give us an accurate freeze-frame of blood flow patterns in Robert's brain just moments after injection--at the high point of his meditative climax. Increased blood flow to a given part of the brain correlates with heightened activity in that particular area, and vice versa.8 Since we have a good idea of the specific functions that are performed by various brain regions, we expect the SPECT images to tell us a lot