! Consciousness, Ritual, And Belief - Livingstone From Science Religion and Society-2

8/6/2019 ! Consciousness, Ritual, And Belief - Livingstone From Science Religion and Society-2

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584 CONSCIOUSNESS, MIND, AND THE BRAIN

584

64 Consciousness, Ritual, and Belief

Kenneth R. Livingston

Any religion is a many-faceted thing and cannot be fully understood withoutsome appreciation of all of its varied aspects. All religions prescribe certainactions that a member in good standing should perform, and certain beliefsthat should be held. There is also usually a list of actions that should not betaken, and beliefs considered heretical. There is ordinarily a specialized lan-guage for talking about religious actions and beliefs. Religions often specifymusical forms, particular articles of clothing, and other ritual objects thathelp to indicate when one is involved in a sacred activity. Religions also typi-cally identify some people as unique and important links to the divine orsacred—mystics, priests, rabbis, monks, and so forth.

A great deal is known about the cognitive processes that underwrite many of these facets of religion, but just how they are integrated into whole systemsremains something of a puzzle. But profound religious experience can be seenas the linchpin around which the many facets of a religion are organized. Andthe content of religious belief can be linked to the nature of ritual practice. Thiswill help to explain why some people may play a particularly important role inthe development of religious systems. It will also raise hard questions about thenature of consciousness, that most enigmatic of human endowments.

Understanding Religious Experience

Many kinds of experiences have religious content: prayers, the thoughts peoplehave when reading or hearing about religious texts, and participation in reli-gious rituals are just a few obvious examples. The profound experiences thatanchor religious systems, however, are more dramatic and less common. Al-though they are often described as impossible to capture fully in words, de-scriptions of such experiences share certain themes. The experience is describedas transcending normal time and space, and even the sense of a self or “I” is lost

in some cases. Very frequently there are descriptions of direct encounters withsupernatural beings like angels or demons or gods. Finally, there is typically an



CONSCIOUSNESS, RITUAL, AND BELIEF 585

intense emotional component to such experiences, either of terror and awe, orof ecstasy, bliss, or peace. Profound experiences give those who have them thesense of having made direct contact with an ultimate reality more fundamentaland more important than the day to day reality of ordinary experience.

Such experiences play a special role in religious systems because peopleare tempted to take them as evidence that there really is a supernatural realmthat transcends the world as we know it on a daily basis. Such evidence helpssustain the belief that being a member in good standing of the religious com-munity will give its adherents access to the special powers of that supernatu-ral world. Indeed, until the beginning of the modern era and the rise of science,with its competing view of how knowledge should be gathered and justified,the idea that profound religious experience was a window into ultimate real-ity was rarely questioned. Since the late sixteenth century, however, there

have been several efforts to explain profound religious experience as any-thing but evidence for the supernatural. Karl Marx famously thought that re-ligion in general was a social construction designed to continue an oppressiveclass structure by diverting people’s attention away from their suffering inthis world and onto the promise of a better life in the supernatural world.Sigmund Freud saw religion and religious experience as neurotic manifesta-tions of unresolved Oedipal conflicts. B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists de-nied the utility of talking about experience at all; they explained the tendencyto do so as just one more example of conditioned superstitious behavior.

Marxism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism have all been discredited to

various degrees, and no longer play a major role in the scientific effort toexplain human thought and behavior, including religious thought and behav-ior. However, the idea that religious experience can be explained by reducingit to something more fundamental is alive and well, and flourishing in theneurosciences. The concept of explanatory reduction is far too complex totreat in detail here, but the basic idea is easy enough to grasp from a few cases(see Bickle’s Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave for a thorough discus-sion). The temperature of an object, for example, is nothing more than a mea-sure of the amount of energy in the motion of its molecules. The hardness of a diamond can be fully explained by the structure of the bonds that link itscarbon atoms. The reproduction of life itself reduces to the actions of mol-ecules of DNA and RNA operating in the right chemical environment. In allof these cases, a complex phenomenon at one level of investigation reduces tosimpler processes at a more basic level of explanation. In an analogous way,many neuroscientists argue that religious experience is reducible to anoma-lous patterns of activity in the human nervous system.

The Brain and Religious Experience

Everything that makes a human being a fully functioning person depends onthe activities of the brain. Brain circuitry is assembled from roughly 100 bil-




lion specialized cells called neurons, along with another 1 trillion or so sup-port cells. Neural cells can be stimulated to produce traveling waves of elec-trical activity called action potentials. These signals can trigger the release of specialized chemicals called neurotransmitters across the tiny gaps that sepa-rate cells. At any given moment, the human nervous system is engaged inbillions of these electrochemical processes, which together make it possibleto sense the world, understand language, stand without falling, dream, or per-form any of the thousands of mental and physical activities that make up aday in the life of a person.

It was not until the first half of the twentieth century that this picture of how the brain works began to emerge. The insight that the brain is an electro-chemical device led relatively quickly to the invention of a device, called theelectroenchephalograph (EEG), for measuring some part of that electrical

activity. To make an EEG recording, researchers place metal electrodes onthe scalp to detect the tiny variations in voltage being produced by the brain.These fluctuating voltages, commonly referred to as brain waves, are thenamplified and recorded for later study.

There were several important early discoveries using the EEG, but two areespecially relevant for studies of religious experience. The first finding is thatpatterns of activity in the brain vary with mental state. When we are awakeand active, the brain is producing low-voltage, high-frequency waves, calledbeta waves, fluctuating at the rate of between 12 and 30 times per second, or12 to 30 Hertz (Hz). When we are awake but very relaxed, especially with

eyes closed, the voltages become larger and slower, in the range of 8 to 12 Hz.These are referred to as alpha waves. In that twilight state experienced whenwe drop off to sleep, the waves may slow even more, into the theta range of 3to 7 Hz. Still other patterns are associated with different stages of sleep.

The second important discovery from the early EEG work is that seizuredisorders, like epilepsy, are related to very dramatic departures from any of the normal EEG patterns. There are many different kinds of seizure disorders,and each is related to a different kind of disturbance in the EEG. In all cases,however, one sees sudden, high-voltage spikes in the recording. These spikesreflect a failure of circuits that normally dampen or inhibit brain activity tokeep it coherent and coupled to the events taking place in the world.

The interesting thing about epilepsy for students of religion is that even inancient times, long before it was known that the brain was involved in thedisorder, epilepsy was known as the “sacred disease,” because epilepticsseemed often to describe their experiences in mystical terms. The story hasbecome even more interesting in the wake of the discovery that several of themost common epileptic patterns have their origins in the temporal lobes of the brain. As the name suggests, this part of the brain lies just beneath thetemple region of the skull. Activity in the cortical or outer layers of this part

of the brain is necessary for object recognition, including the recognition of social objects like people. Activity in other regions of the temporal lobes is






Even more interesting are recent studies that reveal just where changes inbrain activity are taking place. The technique used in these studies is knownas single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). The participantin one of these studies is injected with a special radioactive tracer that istaken up by tissues of the brain. The more active a part of the brain is, themore of the radionucleotide it absorbs, and the more radioactive emissionsit produces. These emissions can be recorded, and computer algorithms canreconstruct where in the brain they originated, giving a picture of relativebrain activity in different regions of the brain. These pictures reveal that aperson in the midst of an experience of relaxation and depersonalization isundergoing a relative increase in activity in the frontal lobes, located justbehind the forehead, and a decrease in activity in the parietal lobes (if youput your hands on your head, base of your palms at the tops of your ears and

fingers touching at the top of your head, the area under your fingers is roughlythe parietal region).What makes this pattern so interesting is that the parietal lobes play a unique

role in keeping track of where your body is in space and what is happening toit. In addition, circuits involving both the parietal and frontal lobes play animportant role in human attention, particularly in the process of disengagingattention from the inputs coming from the senses. The experience of losingone’s self, of becoming one with the universe, is quite consistent with ob-served patterns of change in brain activity.

Ritual, Brain, and Experience

The remarkable thing about the two different patterns of brain change justdescribed is how well their associated experiences correspond to basic con-cepts in two different religious traditions. People in traditions that speak of anthropomorphic supernatural agents capable of operating outside of ordi-nary space and time tend to show the temporal lobe pattern and have experi-ences that confirm this picture. People in traditions that speak of suffering asthe consequence of the illusion of the permanent self tend to show the parietallobe pattern in which bliss is achieved as self is lost. How is it that peoplewind up having just the kinds of experiences that confirm the beliefs of thetradition they practice?

One crucial part of the answer to this question is found in a close examina-tion of the ritualized practices of the different traditions. It is no accident thatthere are powerful, polyrhythmic structures in many of the rituals that accom-pany worship or supplication in the temporal lobe religions. From the intensedances of the Sufi to the soulful music of Southern Baptists, we see a set of practices that seem well designed to provoke TLTs, and thus experience of the divine, among those who are prone to them. Very different religious prac-

tices provoke the parietal lobe pattern. Here we find heavy reliance on tech-niques of meditation that shift the focus of attention in exactly the ways




necessary to produce the brain changes associated with a loss of sense of self and feelings of transcending normal existence. In both cases, religious prac-tice, as prescribed by religious tradition, provokes brain changes associatedwith conscious experiences that are taken as evidence in support of core be-liefs in the religious system.

This is not, however, the whole story. The experiences that accompanyritual-induced brain changes are usually very ambiguous. Seeing vaguelyhuman forms or hearing voices could be taken as evidence of many differentreligious beliefs. Whether the entity in a vision is seen as the angel Gabriel,the Hindu god-aspect Vishnu, Satan, or any of hundreds of other supernaturalagents seems to depend on the ideas one already has learned about the super-natural. The same problem extends to experiences of diminished self-aware-ness and a loss of contact with the external world. Does this indicate a merging

back into the one true reality, or a crossing over into paradise? The answer, itappears, depends on what one already believes.A number of empirical studies now suggest that people interpret experi-

ences induced by the same practices in different ways. People who are notreligious, for example, rarely use religious language to interpret altered statesof consciousness, while people who are religious before they have those ex-periences overwhelmingly report them as religious manifestations. If suchexperiences occur in an environment filled with religious symbols or otherreferences, they are much more likely to be interpreted as religious than if there are no environmental cues of a religious nature. To summarize, any

given religious tradition develops ritualized practices that tend to provokealtered brain states associated with anomalous experiences that can then beunderstood using concepts from that same religious tradition.

There are, however, two important caveats to this. First, not everyone willhave such experiences, so there must be other reasons to join a religious com-munity. Second, at least occasionally people will interpret their anomalousexperiences in ways that challenge rather than support established doctrine.Martin Luther, who launched the Protestant revolution in Christian Europe, isone prominent example. Others, less well known, did not survive the chal-lenge, having been branded heretics and executed. Established religions mustcarefully balance the power of such experiences to support the tradition againstthe power of such experiences to undermine it.

Evaluating the Evidence from Religious Experience

There is no denying that people have profound experiences that depart indramatic ways from the mundane. The available research suggests that eachreligious tradition tends to develop practices designed to provoke the kinds of experiences that can be interpreted as providing evidence in support of ideas

that are central to the tradition. These experiences are most likely to be inter-preted as evidence in this way by people who already understand those core




ideas of the tradition. If this analysis is correct, what kind of evidence is theevidence from profound religious experience?

There are two different answers to this question in the literature. Amongsome philosophers and many theologians, the answer is that profound religiousexperience is evidence for the existence of the supernatural. The fact that suchexperiences are associated with changes in brain activity simply reflects thefact that the gods make contact with us, or we with them, by way of the onlyinstrument available to us. The fact that such experiences are interpreted differ-ently simply reflects the imperfect nature of human understanding. For otherphilosophers and most scientists who study such phenomena, the association of such experiences with disordered, atypical brain activity, and the variations ininterpretation, suggests that any religious meaning is entirely the constructionof the believer. In this view, anomalous experiences are fully understood as

departures from normal brain activity, and have no intrinsic meaning.Of course, the details of both answers are far more complex than this brief summary suggests, and it simply is not possible to address them fully in soshort a space. There are, however, things we have come to understand aboutthe nature of consciousness, and about the uniquely human cognitive pro-cesses that it supports, that must be taken into account by parties on bothsides of this conceptual divide.

The ordinary, commonsense view of consciousness is that it is diapha-nous . A diaphanous object is one that is so insubstantial as to be essentiallytransparent, having no effect on things that would pass through it. That is how

people ordinarily think the mind works, including when it is having unusual,mystical experiences. If I am experiencing a powerful presence, it can’t bebecause my consciousness is acting up, because my consciousness has nonature of its own. It is merely a kind of empty receptacle or stage for things asthey are. Therefore, my experience must be the result of something external,and if I can’t locate a cause in the natural world, then the cause must lie in thesupernatural world.

But contemporary cognitive science makes it clear that this is a mistakenview. It ignores the fact that the mind is a complicated network of physicallybased causes and effects, and these determine the form that any experiencewill take. When regulated by input from the world, the forms taken reflectthat world. That’s how we manage, most of the time, to respond adaptively tothe world as it really is. But failure of that regulation doesn’t result in form-lessness; the brain is still operating according to its own nature, and it pro-duces experiences that reflect prior learning (see Kelley’s The Evidence of theSenses for a more complete discussion). Thus, to claim a supernatural causefor altered states of consciousness, one must first show that perfectly naturalprocesses of brain-based consciousness can’t explain the phenomenon.

In spite of the force of this argument, it hardly settles the matter, for the

simple reason that scientists still cannot tell a complete causal story aboutconsciousness. Just why, and how, we feel and think remains unclear. This




leaves an explanatory gap into which mystical, supernatural ideas, groundedin reports of powerful experiences, can fit, which is one of the major reasonsthat people who have such experiences play such important roles in anchor-ing systems of religious belief and practice. On the other hand, one of theserious difficulties for those who endorse supernatural gap-filling is just howmany different ideas there are about how to do it. These differences are codi-fied in a remarkable variety of systems of religious belief and practice, andthose systems tend to develop in ways that are self-confirming. Furthermore,each of these systems makes a more or less emphatic claim to have the oneand only true explanation of how to fill the gap, and there are no agreed uponprocedures for settling the matter.

Science, on the other hand, has a robust and well-established method forsettling even hard philosophical disputes, given time and energy enough. And

the amount of research on the nature of religious thought and behavior isincreasing quite dramatically. For the time being, however, we lack a com-plete scientific account of conscious religious experience. Meanwhile, thediversity of religious systems, with their powerful mechanisms for confirm-ing prior beliefs about such experiences, virtually guarantees that profoundreligious experience will continue to play a dynamic role in modern cultureand politics in general, as well as in religion in particular.

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! Consciousness, Ritual, And Belief - Livingstone From Science Religion and Society-2