C) Human beings often readily identify spirituality as part of their conscious experience. Is this experience made of the same or different stuff as we use in every day perception?
A science of spirituality?
In his very helpful discussion of brain, mind and consciousness, Peter describes how the brain’s remarkable ability to process vast amounts of information allows us to adapt with agility to our surroundings ensuring our survival and success in evolution. He rightly stresses that a scientific understanding of how the brain works, the field of neuroscience, will not provide answers to fundamental questions about spirituality and consciousness as these are personal subjective phenomena that cannot be measured, quantified and tested experimentally. So, what can neuroscience contribute to theological discussions? I would like to explore Peter’s proposal that “the highly integrated information which mind processes is what we experience in awareness as consciousness” by highlighting some of the insights gained from recent studies of spirituality.
As there is no other good definition of consciousness to base investigations on, I would like to start with the medical understanding of consciousness as “everything a person experiences”– ie. the degree to which a person responds to their surroundings. A person without consciousness is in a coma and reduced levels of consciousness, as in delirium or inebriation can be measured on scales such as the well-known Glasgow Coma Scale, according to how the person responds to painful stimuli etc. Consciousness becomes unconstrained during sleep especially when dreaming, is abolished by anaesthetic drugs, is altered when people take psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin and is disturbed during periods of psychosis associated with mental illnesses. A range of methodologies and technologies are available to study aspects of consciousness including brain imaging techniques, electromagnetic recordings from surface and implanted electrodes and the pharmacology of drugs used as treatments. Clinical assessments of patients with brain injuries and at the population level, methods employed by behavioural geneticists, provide further information about spirituality at the individual and population levels.
So what do we know about consciousness defined in this way? There is no generally accepted scientific “theory of consciousness” and some neuroscientists conclude consciousness is an illusion (but without defining what an illusion is). Perhaps the definition is too broad and we can get more insights by breaking down the question and looking at aspects of consciousness such as spirituality a topic that researchers have tended to side step for being difficult and intractable, but I would like to highlight two quite different promising approaches where science contributes to our understanding of brain, mind and spirituality.
1: We are born believers.
A group in Virginia carried out a survey of 2600 adult twins collecting detailed information on health and religiosity over several years. They used a 78 item questionnaire asking about religious beliefs and practices. They measured social religion (how often do you go to church? Do your friends mostly go to church?), Spirituality (How important is God in your life?. How often do you pray? Read the Bible? Religious experiences eg voices? Sense of God’s presence), Attitudes (thankfulness, gratitude. religious conservatism: voting intentions, views on immigration and death penalty etc).
Twin studies are designed to separate the effects on behaviour of genetics and the environment and the results were clear: the authors found a substantial genetic contribution to religiosity supporting the view that humans are born believers. Twin studies, such as this one, only identify the size of the genetic contribution to a trait and highlight the need for further studies to identify the genes and biological processes underlying the trait. There is no ongoing research doing that yet. (T Vance et al. Genetic and Environmental Influences on Multiple Dimensions of Religiosity: A Twin Study. J Nerv Ment Dis 2010; 198 p755-761).
2: Towards a science of spiritual experience
Psychedelic drugs extracted from plants have long been used during religious rituals to elicit mystical experiences. Recently research into this field has been strongly encouraged by the discovery that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, might be an effective treatment for people with severe depression so there is increased interest in finding out what these drugs do. Healthy volunteers given a dose of psilocybin often report intense meaningful mystical experiences described as “God encounter experiences” and are left with vivid, sometimes life changing memories. Strikingly the experiences induced by psilocybin are remarkably similar to naturally occurring mystical experiences unrelated to the drug. (Griffiths RR et al . Survey of subjective “God encounter experiences”. Plos One, vol 14 no 4, 2019). The action of psilocybin in the brain, its pharmacology and sites of action gives clues about the chemistry that underpins these experiences and in fact a lot is already known about serotonin and related neurotransmitters, with which psilocybin interacts to produce its effects on mood and perceptions.
These two examples support the view that mind and body are intimately linked and spiritual experience is emergent from the chemistry of the body. But these science experiments have nothing to say about the meaning and truth of the personal spiritual experiences that a Christian understands to be the outcome of evolution and the work of God actively present in the world, and that an atheist sees, only in physical terms, as random and purposeless.
In this post, Ian Morrison provides a perspective from neuroscience for thinking about the relationship between human minds and God. In the article that follows, Peter Bowes argues that the mechanisms might eventually be understood by neuroscience.Ed
In the discussion thus far, we’ve considered the definition of ‘consciousness’. Neuroscience tends to equate consciousness with sentience but the philosophical and theological approach is very different. Animals are clearly sentient and appear to have emotional responses, but don’t have the equivalent of human consciousness. Using “emotions” or “feelings” therefore is unhelpful in defining consciousness.
However, one of the significant differences between humans and animals is the use of learning. Learning, at a simple level, is a developed response to a previously experienced stimulus. There is evidence, even amongst simple organisms, of learned responses to their environment (usually threats). Learning is therefore beneficial for survival.
Although human learning clearly has survival benefits, some learning/reasoning (particularly abstract thought in the field of philosophy) exists out-with this realm and does not appear present in non-human organisms. This can also extend to the concept of religion more widely.
Human consciousness may therefore be defined by non-survival learning and the ability to consider abstract, transcendent or philosophical concepts (e.g. God). It is this ability that sets us apart from animals and may be a useful starting point when considering the relationship between human consciousness and God."
The Issue is : Human beings often readily identify spirituality as part of their conscious experience. Is this experience made of the same or different stuff as we use in everyday perception?
There is a universality of spirituality encountered as a subjective dimension of the experience of being human. There must have been a phase in evolution in which raw primary affective experiences which drove our evolution unconsciously became personally owned within the human brain as consciousness. Spirituality is everywhere and now for all time, experienced as ‘inner’, ‘personal’ and ‘immanent’ yet also as a relationship with that which is ‘other’, transcendent and somehow ‘beyond’ oneself.
This is an experience in consciousness of what the ‘self’ ‘knows’. We all need language with which to name that which ‘knows’ and for the act of knowing. That self-perception is known as soul, atman, spirit, anima and many other names in different cultures and religions. Science’s faith, reductionism, has led to a widespread appreciation that we are all made up of the same matter – particles with mass and charge which were there in the beginning. It does seem to be something of an insult to the astonishing nature of the human who experiences spirituality, that the understanding of soul, atman and more, is made the responsibility of an external and ‘other’ dimension.
The remarkable capacity of human beings to have an experience of immanence and transcendence is surely itself then to be observed with awe and wonder. A definition of the Hindu atman requires that the understanding of spirituality includes the assertion that our spirituality includes part of the Brahman, which comes from outside the human being. But in this modern age, we now look more to the human organism itself to grasp at understanding the otherness of our experience we label as spiritual, and are doing so through attempts to understand how the particles of which we are made might give rise to consciousness that has awareness of spirituality. Some particles, it is suggested then, are invested with a form of proto-consciousness that emerges to awareness in our maturing. Such a claim is properly logical scientific reductionism and it must mean that the particles of matter with which evolution began, were invested or created with that proto-consciousness. We are of an age when even that conclusion is found unsatisfactory if only because we chide ourselves for having reached that decision too soon. There must be another explanation before today’s scientists conclude there is a Creator.
Claxton [1] offers core features of that which we label as spirituality, as a degree of aliveness and intensity, a sense of belonging and connectedness, a sense of caring and compassion towards other people, a feeling of depth or calm connectedness and open involvement with mystery, a feeling of ease and lightness, of peace, acceptance and harmony. But others add an encounter with the Other which is mystical to these characteristics. Whatever is being described, it is felt more real than dreaming and we appear to be able to observe these different levels of consciousness. But these descriptors include evidently because they are also felt, aspects of Panksepp’s [2] discovery of core or primary affects with which we are born, and which drive our growth from the moment of fertilisation to produce the zygote from which our development begins. SEEKING, regarded as the most significant of these primary affects includes everything that we may imagine drives that powerful evolutionary reaching out. If not that then what? And, the reason for the descriptions of emotional experience is that the interaction with the world into which we emerge is felt viscerally. Psychoanalytical theory today can be said to focus on the discomfort of primal affects that are not satisfied, SEEKING and LUST for example. [3] Once ‘satisfied’ the organism is at rest so to speak. The absence of such affect is the goal of psychotherapy. It is perhaps more widely acknowledged today that when say, a positive emotion such as wonder, joy, happiness, awe is experienced intensely, the individual is more open to what is described as transcendence and to a more vital perception of the interaction of self, others and the world. McGilchrist’s [4] research provides another insight through his exploration of the right and left hemisphere’s operation. He offers the concept of each half observing the other and thus our awareness of that operation, the left brain’s logical eye on the more esoteric (and perhaps ‘spiritual’) realms of the right for example. Those words alone recall the idea of ‘the other’.
It does appear difficult then to speak of the experience of spirituality without encountering faith in the existence of an external God, the ultimate Other as that to which we respond beyond ourselves. But my interest in a psychology of spirituality, leads me to want to explore human experience within that discipline for as long as is possible and while it is honouring to the Creator God to be origin of what we call spirituality, it also feels to be unnecessary. It seems to me to be turning too soon from honouring what the Creator has made as that which informs us about the Creator. I find that our reducing the Creator to anthropomorphic language often ridiculously facile. The appropriate response to that we discern as spiritual, is surely awe at least and hushed silence. The incarnation is such a loving response to the limitations of the creation to be able to know the mind of God. It should be no surprise as I have said elsewhere in this forum, that Paul could write of our creation in Christ having himself encountered Christ in the transformed nature of those who had met with Christ. For this we were made. No, the spirituality of which we may all speak, is congruent with every detail of our biological nature. Spirituality is not yet to be understood as something added but as a feature of our neuropsychobiological being.
1 Claxton, G., Science and Spirituality: ‘Effing the Ineffable’. RSA blogs, 10 February. Available at www.rsablogs.org.uk/2014/socialbrain-touched-moved-spirituality-essentially-embodied/.
2 Panksepp, J., and Biven, L.’, The Archaeology of Mind, Norton, New York, 2012
3 More fully named as a ‘primary unconscious emotional motor system’.
4 McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary; The divided brain the making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009
