Neural correlates of a mystical experience
So my PubMed sugar mama has gotten me access to full-text of the Beauregard study in Neuroscience Letters. It’s a five page article, and relatively accessible–until they get into discussion of the various lobes of the brain. This is the point at which my visual learning style screams out for a diagram. Below, I’ll make a few remarks on the study and excerpt a few pieces for those of you who may be interested. This first post will focus on the background assumed by the authors. Later I’ll try to disentangle the neurological web they weave.
Background
The authors (Beauregard/Paquette) note that there’s a new area of neuroscience making its way into the scientific domain, dubbed “spiritual neuroscience.” Their summary of this subfield is worth quoting:
The main objective of this novel domain of research is to explore the neural underpinnings of religious/spiritual/mystical experiences (RSMEs)…One of the basic assumptions of spiritual neuroscience is that RSMEs are brain-mediated, as are all other aspects of human experience.
The first thing I would nitpick in this statement is the conglomeration of RSMEs. I’ll go along with the authors in assuming that if it’s a part of human experience, it’s brain-mediated. Even if god spoke to Moses (which I personally doubt), my hunch is that god used the man’s brain as a means of communication. That’s just how we’re built. However, the terms “religious”, “spiritual” and “mystical” are wide-ranging.
Are we considering the experiences of a Christian evangelical in corporate worship, in individual prayer, and listening to a sermon, as the same kind of experience as a Buddhist monk meditating? If so, why? What is there about this experience that makes it something different to study than my experience watching the Superbowl or participating in a classroom discussion about god?
(By the way, I’m not denying that there may be something very different in those experiences. I understand, too that studying the religious experiences may lead us to change our categorizations.)
The authors characterize mystical experience as
…characterized by a sense of union with God. It can also include a number of other elements, such as the sense of having touched the ultimate ground of reality, the experience of timelessness and spacelessness, the sense of union with humankind and the universe, as well as feelings of positive affect, peace, joy and unconditional love.
Their source is W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, Macmillan, New York, 1960. I have to admit that I haven’t heard of this book–which is due to my ignorance, since it is cited by all of these scholars. (Including the book by Proudfoot which was excerpted in an article that I covered earlier, “Religious Experience.”)
Going to my trusty resource, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online (which has a slick new look), I found a discussion of Stace.
Apparently my hunch–the grouping of RSMEs together as one is a contentious step–is justified. The approach Stace (and others) take, perennialism, is not unanimous among religious scholars. Stace believes that all cultures have two major kinds of mystical experience: extrovertive and introvertive. He’s been criticized on the grounds that he has subsumed theistic experience (which is of a god separate from the worshiper) into introvertive experience unfairly. Stace argues (this is all from the SEP) that the experience of the Christian is the same as others having an introvertive RSME; the interpretation, however, is different.
Too, the discussion of RSME is only one aspect of the study of religion. A colleague of mine remarked that these kinds of studies don’t get us too far. After all, most religious practicioners don’t have these kinds of experience. As I alluded to above, for most people, life as a religious person involves experiences within community (guided worship or meditation), in individual practice (prayer or meditation) which doesn’t usually reach the peaks of the saints or bodhisattvas. Too, much of being religious is interpreting the world through a certain set of concepts. This is a kind of experience–experiencing the hand of god in your life, for Christian theists–but hardly ‘mystical.’
I’m intrigued by these studies and I don’t want to dismiss them outright. Yet even if we could conclusively tie together RSMEs under a grouping of brain states, this does not explain the drastically different conceptual contents to those experiences. It does not answer where “out there” or “in here” these experiences arise.
Those questions are still within the realm of philosophy, in my humble opinion. And as the SEP article intimates, a set of philosophical assumptions about RSMEs drives the frameworks of these studies. We’re still bringing metaphysics into our evidence, just through the back door and quietly.