The Wondering Brain

Thinking about Religion With and Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience

Kelly Bulkeley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780415938402
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135949426
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology

The explosion of new research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed fascinating dimensions of the human brain/mind system. But even as it brings us closer to understanding how the mind works, science is producing more, and perhaps even larger questions. What further powers and abilities are latent within us? The Wondering Brain argues that the profound questions raised by cognitive neuroscience may best be answered through a dialogue with religion. Kelly Bulkeley argues that cognitive neuroscience, seen in the light of religion, is a unique source of insight into the natural groundings of faith, morality, love, ecstasy, and revelation. And religion, seen in the light of cognitive neuroscience, is a powerful cultural system whose most valuable function is to stretch and expand our basic cognitive capacities. Kelly Bulkeley's deep engagement with both religious thinking and the workings of cognitive neuroscience makes for a constantly surprising book, full of stories that catch the reader in the unexpected place between two supposedly irreconcilable ways of being in the world.

1

L’Admiration — Wonder

Dreams and Visions

1
Dreams and Visions

I. The Young Man’s Dreams

A young man sits alone in a rented room. The fire blazing in the hearth warms his chamber against the cold, snowy winds outside. He is a gentleman, born of an honorable family, so he lacks no material comforts. To all appearances he is a cultured, well-mannered gentleman of leisure. The young man, however, knows better. He has left that respectable, normal family background behind and chosen to follow a very different path. Now twenty-three years old, he has journeyed far from his home, during a time of bitter warfare, to this innocuous little town where he knows practically no one. His father is angry with him; today was to be the day the young man officially entered the family profession, but instead he is here, without a profession, all by himself in a small, warm room. Thinking.

He is thinking about what to do with his life. He yearns for a cause; he wants to give himself wholly to something real, something he can trust without any doubt or hesitation, something that is worth the complete devotion of his considerable intellectual energies. Yes, the young man can feel those energies rising up within him, and he can feel grand designs and sweeping plans taking shape in his imagination — but to his increasing frustration he has no distinctly formed idea of what exactly he should do with himself. Sitting before the fire, the young man thinks, and thinks, and thinks. In time, a violent agitation rises up and seizes his mind. It feels as if his brain has taken fire, burning like the reddish flames dancing in the hearth, and then he suddenly realizes what it is he is seeking — the truth. Nothing more, nothing less than the truth. Pure and everlasting, stripped clean of all the opinions, biases, and superstitions that befuddle ordinary people’s minds, the ultimate foundations of Creation and thus the divine commands of God Himself. This is what the young man desires.

Now that he has answered with such perfect clarity the question of what he desires, he can concentrate on the practical process of how to achieve it. The quest for truth will henceforth be the supreme, overarching cause of the young man’s life — his own personal “profession.” Exhausted by his long meditations and yet completely filled with enthusiasm by his new discovery, the young man goes to sleep…

His imagination felt itself struck by the representation of some ghosts who presented themselves to him and who so frightened him that, thinking that he was walking down the streets, he had to lean to his left side in order to be able to reach the place where he wanted to go, because he felt a great weakness on his right side so that he could not hold himself upright. Because he was ashamed to walk in this way, he tried to straighten up, but he was buffeted by gusts that carried him off in a sort of a whirlwind that spun him around three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what alarmed him. His difficulty in dragging himself along made him think that he would fall at each step until, noticing a school open along his way, he entered in search of refuge and a remedy for his trouble. He tried to reach the school church, where his first thought was to say his prayers; however, having noticed that he had passed an acquaintance without greeting him, he wanted to retrace his steps to pay his respects but was thrust back by the wind that was blowing against the church. At the same time, he saw another person in the middle of the school courtyard who addressed him by name in kind and polite terms and told him that, if he wanted to go to find Mr. N., he had something to give him. The young man imagined that it was a melon from a foreign land. What surprised him more was to see that those who clustered around that person in order to talk with him were upright and steady on their feet, although he was still bent over and unsteady on the same ground. Having almost knocked him down many times, the wind had greatly abated.

He woke up imagining this and then felt a real pain, which made him fear that it had been the work of some Evil Spirit who had wanted to seduce him. Immediately, he turned over onto his right side, for he had slept and dreamed on his left side. He prayed that God would protect him from the evil effects of his dream and preserve him from all of the miseries that could threaten him as punishment for his sins, which he acknowledged to be great enough to call down upon his head thunderbolts of heaven, although he had led a more or less blameless life in the eyes of men. In this situation, he fell asleep after an interval of almost two hours spent on various thoughts on good and evil in this life.

Immediately, a new dream came to him in which he thought that he heard a sudden, loud noise, which he took for thunder. Terrified, he awoke at once. Having opened his eyes, he noticed many sparks of fire scattered around the room. He had experienced this phenomenon on many other occasions, and it did not seem too strange to him, when he awoke in the middle of the night, that his eyes sparkled enough that he could make out the objects closest to him, but this time he wanted to find a reason for it, and he was able to reassure himself about his mind/ spirit. After having opened and closed his eyes in turn and observed what was represented to him, he saw that his terrors faded away, and he fell asleep again quite calmly.

A moment afterward he had a third dream, unlike the first two, about which there was nothing frightful. In this last dream, he found a book on his table without having any idea who had put it there. He opened it and saw that it was a dictionary, which delighted him, because he hoped that it might be very useful to him. At the same moment, he noticed that another book came to hand which was no less new to him. He did not know from whence it had come. He discovered that it was a collection of poems by different authors, entitled Corpus Poetarum. He was curious to read some of it, and, opening the book, he chanced upon this verse:

What way in life shall I follow?

Just then he noticed a man whom he did not know. This unknown man gave him a piece of poetry that began with these words:

Yes and No.

The man recommended it to him as an excellent piece. The young man told him that he knew this verse: It was one of the Idylls of Ausonius included in the big anthology of poetry on the table. He wanted to show it to this man and began to leaf through the book, the order and scheme of which he boasted of knowing perfectly. While he searched for the passage, the man asked him where he had gotten this book, and the young man answered that he could not say how he happened to have it, but that a moment before he had leafed through still another book that had just disappeared, although he did not know either who had brought it to him or who had taken it away again. He had not finished when he saw the other book reappear at the other end of the table, but he saw that this dictionary was no longer as complete as the one he had seen the first time.

Nevertheless, he came to the poems of Ausonius in the anthology through which he paged, and, although he could not find the poem beginning with the words “Yes and No,” he told this man that he knew another one by the same poet that was still finer. It began with the words “What way in life shall I follow?” The person begged him to show it to him, and the young man set himself the task of trying to find it. Then he happened upon several little portraits engraved by copperplate, which led him to remark that this was a very handsome book but that it was not the same edition as the one that he knew.

It was at this point that the books and the man disappeared. They vanished from the young man’s imagination, although they did not awaken him.

It is a most remarkable thing that, wondering whether what he had seen was a dream or a vision, he not only decided that it was a dream while he was still asleep but also interpreted it before he was fully awake.¹

Not, perhaps, the clearest message in the history of divine revelations; still, these three dreams had the tangible effect on the young man of stimulating a powerful sense of wonder. All the qualities discussed in the Introduction appear here in vivid form: the surprise, the strong physiological impact, the memorable encounter with deep truths and realities, the decentering of one’s ordinary sense of selfhood, the quickening curiosity, and the impulse to new exploration. In the young man’s case, the experience of wonder via dreaming stands in surprising contrast to his waking thoughts of the previous days. Coming the night immediately following his exultant discovery of the new supreme purpose of his life, his dreams are remarkable for their absence of just those qualities he is seeking in his waking life — clarity, simplicity, and unity of purpose. The dreams shuttle him around to various locations where things appear and disappear at random, where people behave in unexpected ways, and where ordinary volitional control of his body has been inexplicably disrupted. The bizarrely disjointed nature of the experience naturally raises the skeptical question: As wonderful as these dreams may appear, could they in fact be essentially meaningless? If so, is there any point or purpose to trying to understand them?

Later in the chapter we will hear what the young man himself made of his decidedly messy and complex dreams and how he interpreted them both during and after their occurrence. Right now, I would like to focus on what the young man said about the origins of the dreams. After he wrote out the text of the dreams and their interpretations in a special journal, he went on to explain that the Spirit who had aroused in him the enthusiasm with which he had felt his “brain on fire” for the past several days had predicted these dreams before he had gone to bed. He furthermore insisted that his “human mind had nothing to do with them.”

The story of this young man represents an especially dramatic illustration of something that is in fact a widespread phenomenon in human history: experiences of wonder generated in and through extraordinary dreams. Research in the comparative study of religion has made abundantly clear the historical and cross-cultural frequency of intensely memorable dreams that strike people with awe and amazement.² What makes this young man’s case so interesting is that he guides our attention straight to the vivid paradox that lies at the core of these highly unusual experiences. On the one hand, the young man’s dreams are thoroughly embodied; he says his “brain is on fire,” he feels his body being spun around, he experiences a variety of physical sensations and emotional reactions, he speaks with other people, and he touches various material objects. His physical self is completely immersed in the experience. On the other hand, the young man insists that his “human mind had nothing to do” with the dreams — they happen to him, independently of his will. Struggling quite literally to keep his balance, the young man does his best during the dreams to make sense of the strange forces and inexplicable happenings he encounters. When he awakens, he feels an immediate certainty that the dreams are genuine revelations, and he attributes their ultimate cause to Divine powers transcending his embodied self.

Again, a skeptical question immediately presents itself: Could this paradox simply be a meaningless self-contradiction, the inconsequential product of the young man’s confused and agitated mental condition? It would be easy to answer “yes” to that question, just as it is always easy to dismiss the significance of anything that does not comfortably fit into our common assumptions about what constitutes the normal range of human experience. But this is exactly what moments of wonder do to us — they forcibly propel us outside that normal range of experience, shattering our preconceptions, disclosing new possibilities, and revealing previously unknown dimensions of reality. To understand the meaningfulness of the young man’s dreams and, indeed, to understand any experience of wonder, this first step must be taken: admitting that ordinary modes of analysis and explanation will not be sufficient, precisely because wonder is that which transcends the ordinary. To gain deeper knowledge in this realm of extraordinary experience, we must be open to the surprising and the unexpected, we must resist the skeptic’s temptation to reduce and dismiss, and above all we must be patient with the creative labor of integrating widely divergent points of view.

II. “Brain on Fire”: A First Look at Cognitive Neuroscience

Let us take as an initial point of departure the young man’s comment that he felt his “brain was on fire.” Whatever else we may want to say about his experience, its powerful impact on him derived in no small measure from the intense physiological activation of his embodied self, particularly the neural operations of his brain. The nature and functioning of the brain is, of course, the primary concern of cognitive neuroscience (CN), and this is a good time to lay out some basic findings of current research in the field. The brain lies at the terminal end of the central nervous system (CNS) (Figure 1.1), which functions as an information conduit receiving data from the sense organs and transmitting commands to all parts of the body.

Figure 1.1 Cross-section of the human brain.

The basic anatomical plan of the CNS first emerged in evolution among ocean dwellers such as the jellyfish and sea anemone, creatures that developed networks of nerve cells that increased their ability for coordinated movement and adaptive response to different environmental conditions. In species appearing later in evolution, such as the earthworm, the nerve cells came to be organized in tubular networks culminating in a relatively large bulbous structure in the head that connects and coordinates the various nerve cells running through the organism’s body. This neural structure is the anatomical foundation for the human brain.

In humans the central nervous system is commonly divided into seven main parts: the spinal cord, medulla oblongata, pons, cerebellum, midbrain, diencephalon, and the cerebral hemispheres. Compared to other mammalian species, the human brain is distinguished by a vastly expanded cerebral cortex (the Latin word for “bark”), the heavily wrinkled outer layer. Although humans do not have the largest brains in absolute terms, we do possess the greatest brain size relative to body size, and much of that can be attributed to the unusually large development of our cerebral cortex. Also known as the neocortex, this is the newest part of the brain in evolutionary terms, and its surprisingly fast emergence has puzzled CN researchers. Richard Thompson comments, “The remarkable and still mysterious explosion in brain size of the developing humans took place within the past 3 million years or so, beginning with Homo erectus…. As yet we have no very clear understanding of why this happened. The massive change in the human brain over the short span of 3 million years is unprecedented in the evolution of other species.”³

The cerebral cortex is conventionally divided into four lobes: occipital, parietal, frontal, and temporal. Enough evidence has accumulated from the three main sources of CN research data (lesion studies, animal experiments, and neuroimaging) to provide several insights into the anatomical localization of certain behavioral and psychological functions. Readers who know something of the history of psychology have likely noticed striking similarities between CN and the now disreputable practice of phrenology, a quasi-scientific discipline founded by Franz Josef Gall in Europe in the late 1700s which flourished for several decades and attracted the enthusiastic interest of a broad public audience. Phrenologists boldly claimed they could identify precise correlations between external features of the skull and internal processes in the brain, thus giving them penetrating insights into an individual’s personality and moral character. The contemporary echoes of phrenology are real, as CN research does indeed follow the same intellectual program of examining minute physiological details of the cerebrum as a means of gaining new knowledge of human psychological functioning. Not everyone, however, hears these echoes in the same way. Antonio Damasio, whose work we will consider in more detail later in the chapter, rejects any such comparisons between phrenology and CN. Damasio argues that contemporary CN researchers are going far beyond facile anatomical localizations to identify complex neural systems of many functionally integrated brain regions:

We can now say with confidence that there are no single “centers” for vision, or language, or for that matter, reason or social behavior. There are “systems” made up of several interconnected brain units…. This is most important: What determines the contribution o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Dreams and Visions
• 2: Sexual Desire
• 3: Creative Madness
• 4: Contemplative Practice
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography