Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
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Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Religion, Religious Identity, Religion and Science
Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195338522.013.010
Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
Kelly Bulkeley
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
Edited by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian
 
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter describes several areas of research in cognitive neuroscience that have potentially
great relevance to the study of religious conversion. These areas include the nature
of human brain development, neuroplasticity, temporal lobe epilepsy, visual processing,
and meditation. The chapter also addresses the conceptual and methodological challenges
facing anyone who tries to identify meaningful connections between brain functioning
and religious conversion. The overall aim is to map out the most likely future
paths that researchers will follow in seeking a better understanding of how changes in
brain/mind functioning correlate with changes in a person’s religious and/or spiritual ori­
entation.
Keywords: brain, conversion, cognitive neuroscience, meditation, epilepsy, neuroplasticity
Introduction
Recent advances in the neuroscientific study of brain/mind functioning have stimulated
fresh thinking and vigorous debate on a wide range of topics, from ethics and gender to
child-rearing and religion.1
Thanks to powerful new technologies and increased funding
from governmental and commercial sources, we now know far more about the workings
of the human brain/mind system than ever before. Much of the research to date has focused
on finding a cure for degenerative brain conditions like Alzheimer’s and
Parkinson’s diseases. Less attention has been given to the neuroscientific dimensions of
psychospiritual phenomena like religion. Unfortunately for the present purposes, we have
no neuroscientific research directly addressing the topic of this handbook, namely, religious
conversion. As a result, this chapter will necessarily adopt a constructive and forward-looking
approach. Rather than analyzing previous studies (which do not exist), I will
survey the current state of cognitive neuroscience for areas of ongoing research that relate
to important aspects of conversion processes. Even though few neuroscientists recognize
it, their work has genuine significance for the study of transformative religious experiences.
This chapter aims to map out the most likely future paths that researchers will
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follow in seeking a better understanding of how changes in brain/mind functioning correlate
with changes in a person’s religious and/or spiritual orientation.
The chapter starts with a section devoted to the philosophical, conceptual, and methodological
issues that confront anyone wanting to explore the relationship between religion
and neuroscience. Leading researchers take varying stances on these issues, and I will
briefly present the main arguments related to each question and highlight their pragmatic
consequences. The second section describes several topics of active (p. 241) neuroscientific
research with relevance to conversion, including recent investigations into brain development,
neuroplasticity, visual processing, and meditation. Although my own views will
become obvious, readers will hopefully find enough information here to pursue their own
exploration of the various topics. The conclusion to the chapter will push the discussion
one step further than is usually taken. After reflecting on the neuroscience of religious
conversion, neuroscience is considered as a tool for converting people to, or away from,
religion.
Principles and Practices
Definitions of Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
Like most of the contributors to this handbook, my understanding of religious conversion
has been guided by the work of Lewis Rambo. While acknowledging earlier researchers
like William James and G. Stanley Hall, who focused on dramatic, singular experiences,
Rambo has argued for more attention to the long-term psychological and sociological
processes at work in both sudden and gradual cases of conversion.2
This chapter follows
Rambo, along with James and Hall, in seeking a theoretical integration of the multiple
factors of brain/mind functioning, personal circumstance, cultural context, and theological
history that come together in any given conversion experience.
“Religion,” as I will use the term, is an imperfect but useful shorthand for an awareness
of powers that transcend human control or understanding and yet have a formative influence
on, and active presence within, human life. Most cultural traditions represent these
trans-human powers in the form of gods, spirits, ancestors, mythic beings, and forces of
nature. Religions tend to venerate certain places, objects, and/or texts because of their
capacity to bring people closer to these powers, and special practices (e.g., pilgrimage,
sacrifice, dance, music, prayer, meditation) are performed to enhance their beneficent influence
on people’s lives. Although human existence may be filled with pain and misfortune,
religions teach various methods for overcoming that suffering, either in this life or
in another one to come, by means of harmonizing one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior
with transcendent forces. One important way that religions achieve this is by creating
and sustaining a personal sense of connection to a community. Religious traditions have
developed a variety of systems to bind (religare) people together over the span of multiple
generations, preserving ancestral wisdom and preparing the group for future challenges
and opportunities. I use the term “spirituality” as a general synonym for religion,
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with the added connotation of emphasizing the personal experiential qualities shared by
religious traditions and nonreligious philosophies of life.
“Cognitive neuroscience” (hereinafter CN) is a broad term that includes many different
disciplines devoted to the study of the human brain/mind system. The core of CN is the
neural functioning of the brain and its relationship with the conscious (p. 242) experience
of the mind. Technological improvements in imaging tools such as positron emission tomography
(PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and single positron
emission computed tomography (SPECT) have enabled a more precise mapping of the activation
levels of various regions of the brain during many different mental states. The
imaging research has combined with several other methods of investigation, all of which
come under the general heading of cognitive neuroscience: EEG studies of the electrophysiological
features of brain activities;3
chemical analyses of the dozens of neurotransmitters
flowing through the brain and influencing synaptic efficiency;4
anatomical studies
of the cognitive losses resulting from damage or disease to the brain;5
experiments on the
neural systems of other animals;6
genetic inquiry into the heritable features of brain/mind
development;7
and computer-based efforts to create systems of artificial intelligence.8
In
addition to these disciplines, CN also draws upon philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics
insofar as these fields also provide resources for understanding the nature and functioning
of the mind.
Reading the Cognitive Neuroscience Literature
Religious studies scholars who take an interest in CN are immediately confronted by a
vast and constantly expanding technical literature. Although this may seem discouraging,
it actually teaches an important lesson: there is no monolithic consensus among CN researchers
on how the brain/mind system works. Instead, there are many competing theories
trying to account for as much of the increasingly voluminous research data as possible.
The rapid pace of new discoveries has made it difficult if not impossible for any single
model to establish theoretical supremacy. What is taken as an adequate explanation
today will likely be superseded by new evidence and better models tomorrow. For this
reason, those who want to explore the relevance of CN to religious conversion need to remain
open to the continuous unfolding of brain/mind research (rather than fixing on one
theory alone), following the developments in specific areas over time and taking multiple
theoretical perspectives into account. The most successful investigations will be those
that focus on carefully circumscribed phenomena with clear points of convergence with
CN; overly broad approaches are always vulnerable to refutation by more specialized
forms of research. A prior familiarity with major twentieth-century figures in the psychology
of religion (e.g., James, Freud, Jung) will be helpful, since they anticipated many of
the key areas of interest in CN and foresaw many of the possible paths toward integrated
understanding. Religious studies scholars are further advised to read secondary-source
CN summaries with caution, as useful guides to the research literature but not as definitive
statements of a putative CN consensus. When in doubt, go to the primary sources.
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The basic methodological approach I am describing is analogous to learning a new language.
With enough time and effort, a degree of fluency and dialogical competence may
be achieved, giving “outside” researchers the ability to understand and form (p. 243) judgments
about the significance of CN research, at least as it relates to their home fields of
study.
The Mind/Body Problem
Much of the excitement and controversy surrounding CN stems from its relevance to the
mind/body problem in the Western philosophical tradition. As Kandel et al. put it, “We are
dealing here with biology’s deepest riddle: the neural representation of consciousness
and self-awareness.”9
The most extreme arguments present CN as the final solution to
this problem: the mind is nothing but the physical properties of brain functioning.10
Others see the mind and the brain as mutually interdependent in ways that are not adequately
explained by a strictly reductionistic materialism.11
Closely related to this philosophical
debate is the question of determinism vs. free will, with CN evidence used by
some researchers to argue that free will is an illusion and our mental lives are more predetermined
than we consciously realize. Other researchers point to the dynamic complexity
and creative freedom of the human brain/mind system as incompatible with a strongly
deterministic view. Scholars in religious studies (henceforth RS) should be aware of the
extent to which the philosophical convictions of CN researchers shape the significance
they and others draw from their findings. To be clear, this is not a recommendation to
read only those texts that seem “friendly” to one’s personal views or to avoid research
that takes a critical line against religion. Although I favor a more interactive and pluralist
response to these questions, the mind-to-brain reductionist approach has many intelligent
and eloquent advocates, and their research data are almost always valuable, even if one
may question their interpretations of those data. The point here is for readers to recognize
the practical consequences of using different philosophical perspectives to evaluate
the meaning and relevance of CN research and to factor those consequences into the
analysis of past studies and the planning of future investigations.
Conceptual Polarities and Methodological Challenges in Cognitive
Neuroscience
In studying the neuroscientific dimensions of conversion, readers should also strive to
clarify where CN researchers stand on some important conceptual and methodological
questions. The choices they make about how to answer these questions directly influence
the production of their research findings and their subsequent theoretical extrapolations
from those data. Below is a brief list of some of the issues that RS readers should keep in
mind as they explore the CN literature.
Modularity or holism. Is the mind best characterized as a “Swiss army knife” of specialized
cognitive tools? A great deal of scientific progress has been made using the modular
approach.12
However, some researchers see this perspective as too limited in (p. 244) its
explanations of the psychological complexity of conscious life.13
The question then be­
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comes: if not a modular approach, then what is a better way to account for the global,
synthetic, whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts functioning of the brain?
The limits of brain imaging. Since imaging technologies can only be applied to a fairly
narrow range of human activities (typically those that can be performed while sitting still
in a controlled laboratory context), how far can we generalize from the findings in this
area of research? Future technological advances will surely expand the list of what can be
studied via brain scans, but questions will still remain concerning which kinds of human
experiences cannot be replicated in a lab setting and what limitations are consequently
imposed on general psychological theories based only or primarily on brain scans.
The value of introspection. Is it legitimate to use first-person reports of inner psychological
experience as CN evidence? Some researchers say no, rejecting introspection as inherently
unreliable and unverifiable. Other researchers take the opposite stance and argue
that it is not scientifically legitimate to ignore first-person reports when trying to understand
the nature of the mind.14
A pragmatic compromise is to acknowledge the innate
subjectivity of introspection and yet still generate valid empirical insights by using systematic
methods of identifying the consistent themes and recurrent patterns across numerous
reports from multiple research participants.
Newtonian or quantum physics. Can brain/mind processes be comprehensively explained
in terms of Newtonian physics, or do the insights of quantum physics need to be included?
One line of CN thought says that whatever subatomic phenomena may be at work in
the brain, they are washed out by its ordinary Newtonian physical functioning, with no
significant impact on the macro-processes of the mind. An alternative approach insists
that quantum phenomena and other probabilistic, nonlinear processes do indeed influence
neural activities, which means that CN cannot explain the workings of the brain
with Newtonian concepts alone.15
Most CN research today proceeds in general disregard
of this question, but that is likely to change with future discoveries in the still-young science
of quantum physics.
Conceptual Polarities and Methodological Challenges in Religious
Studies
A growing number of researchers in RS have used recent findings in brain/mind science
to study various aspects of religious belief and practice. Like their CN counterparts, these
RS researchers have also made choices about their conceptual frameworks and methods
of inquiry that impact their findings. For someone wanting to study religious conversion,
just as much critical scrutiny should be given to the RS sources as to the CN literature.
Here are a few of the issues to keep in mind:
(p. 245) Sui generis or ascriptive models of religion. Is there anything irreducibly distinctive
about religious life, or can all its features and qualities be explained in terms of other
causal factors (e.g., psychological, sociological, historical)? Mircea Eliade is regularly taken
as the strongest representative of the former approach, while Karl Marx and Émile
Durkheim were early practitioners of the latter. Many RS scholars today reject the mysti­
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fying effects of sui generis models and argue that the best connections to CN depend on
using an “ascriptive” approach by which religious concepts are explained in relation to
ordinary cognitive processes.16
Others in the RS field question the sufficiency of ascriptive
explanations that fail to account for the dynamic and creative qualities of religious
phenomena like mysticism, prophecy, and other altered states of consciousness.17
This is
a major divide in the discipline, which is best summed up as a battle of prepositions: the
ascriptive model seeks to be a scientific study of religion, while the latter-day sui generis
advocates want to study science and religion.
Universalism or pluralism. Is there a core truth or set of truths held by every religion?
Phrased in more individual terms, does every religious experience point to the same
perennial truth? Or are different religious traditions and experiences genuinely different,
leading humans in a variety of developmentally and spiritually unique directions? A
person’s answer to these questions very likely goes to the heart of his or her ultimate
worldview and should be respected as such. But in terms of practical scholarly consequences,
a provisional pluralism seems to be the wisest course to follow, since it avoids
explanatory overreach and promotes an open view to the appearance of new data.
Insider or outsider perspectives. Can a person who does not have personal familiarity
with a religious tradition ever be able to give an accurate description of its essential nature?
Alternatively, can a religious insider ever take a truly objective perspective on his or
her faith tradition? Both sides of this methodological polarity have strong arguments. In
practical research terms, however, there must be at least some acknowledgment of the
validity of outsider, third-person perspectives if CN is to have a viable role in religious
studies.
Ordinary or extraordinary experiences. Should the study of religion focus on the ordinary
features of daily human existence, or should special attention be given to extraordinary
experiences that occur relatively rarely but have a significant impact on people’s religious
lives? Pascal Boyer has argued for the “ordinary” approach, as did Sigmund Freud
many years ago in Civilization and its Discontents.18
William James’s The Varieties of Religious
Experience is the best example of the “extraordinary” approach. In principle, there
is no reason to exclude either method. Nevertheless, a tendency toward the former in RS
is a natural consequence of the fact that more CN research is available on the analysis of
“ordinary” brain/mind functioning. Much less data is available on the kinds of extraordinary
religious experiences studied by James and others, though that will probably change
as new research technologies become more widely used.
(p. 246) Topics of Ongoing Research
Introduction and Limitations
In this section, the CN literature will be surveyed through the specific and admittedly
narrow lens of the study of religious conversion. This will not be a survey of brain/mind
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science in general; good sources for that purpose are listed in the bibliography. Rather, I
will concentrate on those areas of current CN research that relate most closely to the
psychospiritual dynamics of religious conversion. These topics offer some excellent opportunities
for interdisciplinary research between RS and CN. Whatever answers you
gave to the philosophical and methodological questions in the preceding section, you will
likely find a great deal of highly relevant data in these brain/mind research areas. The
space limitations of this chapter mean the descriptions will try to convey as much information
as possible in quite brief terms, so readers are encouraged to investigate the
sources listed below for more detailed accounts.
Brain Development
The past several decades of research on brain development has shown very clearly the
evolutionary roots of human consciousness in the mammalian central nervous system.
The human species occupies a “cognitive niche” in the global environment in that our unusually
large and densely interconnected cerebral cortexes have given us an advantage
over other species by expanding our capacities for memory, learning, forethought, and social
communication. Through a process called neurogenesis, the brain of a human fetus
grows a total of approximately 200 billion neurons while still in the womb. These neurons
are then “pruned” back by spontaneous bursts of internal brain activation so that about
half the original number forms the synaptic circuits the child has at birth, while the other
100 billion or so neurons are not used and simply die off.
The significance of this line of research for conversion appears when CN looks for evidence
of neurogenesis occurring after birth. It turns out there is another major burst of
new neural growth in adolescence, an especially common time of life for religious conversion,
as RS researchers from G. Stanley Hall onward have shown.19
According to
Schwartz and Begley, “the teen brain, it seems, reprises one of the most momentous acts
of infancy, the overproduction and then pruning of neuronal branches.”20
Even more intriguingly,
the surge in neurogenesis during adolescence seems to take place with special
intensity in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain. The frontal lobe is generally associated
with the “executive functions” of the mind, including self-control, judgment, and
emotional regulation, while the parietal lobe is involved in the coordination of different
streams of perceptual information. These are relatively “high-level” cognitive (p. 247)
processes whose emergence in the adolescent brain goes a long way toward shaping the
mature mental life of the individual. The pruning and reorganization of these new neural
outgrowths is different from what occurs during pre-natal development, since the fetus
receives very limited stimulation from outside the womb. Adolescents, by contrast, are
typically immersed in complex social worlds where they are continually influenced by external
factors such as families, friends, neighbors, cultural symbols, and religious traditions.
Although there is no research directly on this point, a plausible and empirically
testable hypothesis would be that religious traditions provide cognitive templates for reorganizing
the mind during adolescent neurogenesis. The religious teachings that become
the governing principles of a new convert’s life focus on the regulation of precisely
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those psychological functions of self-control and information management that CN has associated
with the frontal and parietal lobes. Conversion, in this view, would be an especially
dramatic pruning of adolescent neurogenesis into a framework provided by the
newly adopted religion.
Another important factor in brain development, plasticity, has direct relevance for conversion
studies. Genetic programming plays a big role in the cerebral localization of many
important neural systems, but genes do not specify the exact wiring of every neural circuit.
Much of the brain’s actual growth and functioning depend on its always unpredictable
interactions with the environment (both social and natural), and for that reason
the brain of a newborn human retains a tremendous capacity for structural change and
flexible adaptation. For example, children who are born with severe deficiencies in the
left hemisphere of their brains, where language abilities are usually centered, are somehow
able to shift the neural underpinnings of their language abilities to their brains’ right
hemispheres. This kind of radical plasticity was once thought to be limited to early childhood,
with neural circuits fixed immutably in place once adulthood was reached. Recent
research has shown, however, that a considerable degree of plasticity is also evident in
the adult brain. Azari and Seitz looked at stroke patients who had suffered damage to
their primary motor cortex, with severe paralysis to one hand.21
Four weeks after the
stroke, they had recovered most of their hand functioning, and PET scans showed that
their brains had developed a compensatory neural pathway from “higher” centers of the
brain to the spinal cord, allowing for the reestablishment of volitional control of the hand.
No one yet knows how far the brain’s plasticity extends, but Azari and Seitz also found
that in other stroke cases the individual’s brains engaged in “cross-modal” plasticity, in
which neural resources from one system (e.g., visual) were recruited to compensate for
damage in an entirely different system (e.g., motor).
The general import of this research is to underscore the dynamic malleability of the
brain, a point that provides a new opportunity for the study of religious conversion. The
phenomenon of conversion is predicated on the capacity of humans to change the way
they perceive and experience the world. According to CN research on neuroplasticity, a
fundamental capacity for change remains with us throughout our lives and extends across
many areas of brain/mind functioning.
Not all brains develop and grow in a healthy fashion, however. One particular type of
brain dysfunction, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), bears an intriguing connection to
(p. 248) religious experience. Indeed, TLE has long been of interest to those seeking a
brain-based theory of religion.22
Epilepsy involves varying degrees of neural hyperactivation
and physical seizure, sometimes only affecting small cortical regions and other times
sweeping across the whole brain. In a surprising number of TLE cases, the affected individuals
describe the seizures as profound spiritual experiences and direct communions
with the divine. According to Ramachandran and Blakeslee,
These brief temporal lobe storms can sometimes permanently alter the patient’s
personality so that even between seizures he is different from other people. No
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one knows why this happens, but it’s as though the repeated electrical bursts inside
the patient’s brain (the frequent passage of massive volleys of nerve impulses
within the limbic system) permanently ‘facilitate’ certain pathways or may even
open new channels, much as water from a storm might pour downhill, opening
new rivulets, furrows and passages along the hillside. This process, called kindling,
might permanently alter—and sometimes enrich—the patient’s inner emotional
life.23
RS scholars who study conversion are well advised to become familiar with the CN literature
on epilepsy and follow its future course as new investigations are pursued and new
empirical data generated. How one interprets the phenomenon of epileptic spirituality,
whether as proof of the brain-based pathology of religion or as evidence of the mind’s capacity
for higher consciousness, depends once again on one’s philosophical and methodological
assumptions. Although a rare disorder like temporal lobe epilepsy should not be
taken as a general model for religion, it does provide a valuable window into the neurological
dimensions of intense religious experiences, including sudden conversions to a
new faith.
Vision and Meditation
The brain/mind processes involved in sensory perception have received extensive attention
from CN researchers in recent years. A remarkable amount is now known about visual
perception in particular,24
and we may identify at least two possible implications for the
study of religious conversion.
First, the numerous unconscious inferences the brain/mind system makes in transforming
sensory input into conscious experience has the unfortunate consequence of producing a
species-wide vulnerability to visual illusions and misapprehensions.25
As magicians and
conjurors have long known, we are easily deceived by our automatic assumptions about
the reality of things we seem to be seeing. In cases of conversion, where a person’s motivation
derives to some degree from “visions” of miraculous events or divine beings, CN
findings can legitimately be brought to bear to analyze the neural substrate of such unusual
and perhaps faulty visual perceptions.
Second, seeing (along with all other forms of perception) turns out to be a constructive
process rather than a passive reproduction of external reality. What people see depends
fundamentally on what their minds are interested in seeing and what their (p. 249) brains
are capable of representing. In this regard, CN finds an unexpected harmony with postmodern
philosophy from Nietzsche onward—reality is not a given but is actively created
by the human psyche. This insight can and should be investigated further in relation to
religious conversions where people undergo a basic reordering of the assumptions and
expectations that frame their perceptions of the world. Indeed, in cases where a conversion
prompts a dramatic and lasting improvement in mood, energy, and motivation, CN
researchers may find new evidence regarding the latent potentials of future brain/mind
development.
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Furthermore, CN can illuminate the effectiveness of religious practices that either stimulate
the visual processing system or try to shut it down. This leads to the topic of meditation,
which several CN researchers have investigated.26
The felicitous fact that meditators
and people in prayer are usually sitting still for long periods of time makes them ideal
subjects for current-generation brain-scanning technologies. Practitioners of Buddhist,
Hindu, and Christian contemplative traditions have participated in these studies, which
typically involve the individual meditating in a hospital or university setting while attached
to neuroimaging machines and under the supervision of the laboratory staff. Although
artificial and questionably relevant to other forms of religious experience, this research
paradigm has produced important results that all RS scholars, not just those
studying conversion, should take into account.
CN has found that meditation and other contemplative practices alter the brain’s functioning
in measurable, material, and predictable ways. According to CN, meditation
works. Several implications flow from that basic finding. One is that at least some aspects
of religion are not generated by pathological brain functioning. Current CN research refutes
the idea that religion qua religion stems from faulty brain/mind processes. The best
available scientific evidence indicates that people who engage in religiously motivated
contemplative practices have normal, healthy brains. Perhaps other forms of religion can
be more directly tied to neuropathology, but in the case of meditation and prayer the CN
literature supports a pragmatic appreciation of the effectiveness of religious practices in
shaping the healthy interaction of brain and mind.
Another important implication regards the variety of changes that meditation and prayer
have been shown to make on the brain/mind system. Best known, perhaps, are the findings
of Newberg and D’Aquili showing that Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns in
prayer both showed more activation in the prefrontal cortex, seat of the “executive
functions” (responsible for focused attention and protection against distraction, mentioned
above) and less activation in the brain regions responsible for sensory perception
and bodily orientation (prompting feelings of selflessness and fusion with all of reality).
However, that is not the only brain pattern associated with meditation. A different set of
findings comes from Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET scans to study yoga teachers
performing the relaxation technique known as yoga nidra. They found increased activation
in precisely those brain regions one would predict would be stimulated by this multifaceted
type of meditation: the visual cortex in the posterior part of the brain was activated
during a period of intense visualization; the brain regions devoted to bodily awareness
and control were more active during a reflection on the weight of the (p. 250) limbs;
and the prefrontal cortex showed a markedly decreased activation as the “executive” control
of the mind yielded to the flow of bodily sensations.
Despite the lack of space to go into these or any other CN studies in more detail, an important
point may still be made: different contemplative practices produce different patterns
of brain activation. A type of meditation that concentrates on stripping the mind of
all external awareness can successfully alter the brain’s neural functioning in the bodily
orientation area, while a type of meditation that centers on a particular visionary image,
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symbol, or icon can “light up” the visual processing system in another part of the brain.
This may seem obvious, but it runs counter to the universalist claim of Newberg and
D’Aquili that CN research is proving that all religious experiences can be explained as approximations
on the path toward “absolute unitary being.” Some traditions may seek that
as their spiritual goal, but others clearly do not, and Newberg and D’Aquili’s sweeping
conclusions do not square with the multiplicity of CN data (nor with the RS literature on
comparative religions). As noted above, a provisional pluralism seems at present to be a
better approach for understanding the varieties of contemplative practices.
In light of this, RS scholars studying conversion should be heartened by the prospect of
growing CN knowledge about religion’s capacity to change the brain/mind system. At the
same time, a healthy skepticism is warranted toward overly ambitious, prematurely universalistic
theories of how the brain gives rise to religion. As new studies are performed
with better technologies on a wider variety of religious and spiritual practitioners, the inadequacy
of one-size-fits-all explanatory frameworks will become increasingly apparent.
Conclusion
This chapter has surveyed only a few of the areas where CN research offers useful resources
for the study of religious conversion. Many other lines of inquiry and potential
connection with CN can and should be considered by RS scholars, including the topics of
memory,27
addiction, social intelligence,28
empathy, the placebo effect,29
music,30
trauma,
brainwashing, perceptual binding,31
wonder,32
and dreaming.33
The same conceptual and
methodological issues raised in the first section of this chapter apply to these topics as
well.
A final word may be said about the contemporary use of CN to convert people to or away
from religion. As an example of the former, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of
Tibetan Buddhism, has shown great enthusiasm for the work of Western neuroscientists,
whose results he takes as proof of the effectiveness of core Buddhist teachings.34
The
Dalai Lama clearly regards CN as a valuable ally in persuading people of the truth of his
faith, and the growth of Buddhism in North America and Europe testifies to his success.
At the same time, several Christian theologians have drawn upon CN to highlight what
they believe are the central insights of their faith.35
In their view, CN (p. 251) provides additional
evidence in favor of Christianity’s basic understanding of human nature, with
helpful implications for pastoral ministry.
On the other end of the spectrum, rationalist scourges of religion like Richard Dawkins
use the findings of brain/mind science not simply to explain people’s religious faith but to
eliminate it, replacing it with a sober trust in science.36
These “ultra-Darwinian” skeptics
employ CN as one of their weapons against religious moral codes and explanations of natural
phenomena. Dawkins makes clear his deconversion goal in the preface to The God
Delusion, where he says, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will
be atheists when they put it down.”37
To judge by the popular reception of Dawkins’s
Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
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writings and those of his comrades-in-arms, the deconverting effect of this approach may
be considerable.
So, does CN support religion or refute it? The answer is both and neither. The vast research
literature in CN provides data that seem very favorable to religion, along with data
that seem very dismissive of religion. If we take into account all the available evidence,
we must conclude that neither explanatory approach is adequate. Herein lies the greatest
challenge for the future study of religious conversion and brain/mind science: to develop
an interdisciplinary, self-reflexive method of integrating multiple sources of CN evidence
without being limited by the ideological presuppositions of those who are either “for” or
“against” religion.
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Notes:
(1) . Michael S., Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004); Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessel, eds., Principles
of Neural Science, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); Richard F. Thompson, The
Brain: A Neuroscience Primer (New York: Worth, 2000).
(2) . Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993).
(3) . James F. Pagel, The Limits of Dream: A Scientific Exploration of the Mind/Brain Interface
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008).
(4) . Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin,
2003).
Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
Page 16 of 18
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Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: Masaryk University; date: 20 September 2019
(5) . Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales
(New York: Touchstone, 1998); Mark Solms, The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A ClinicoAnatomical
Study (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997).
(6) . Jeffrey M. Schwartz, and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and
the Power of Mental Force (New York: ReganBooks, 2002).
(7) . Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel, Principles of Neural Science.
(8) . Mark Graves, Mind, Brain and the Elusive Soul (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2008).
(9) . Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel, Principles of Neural Science, 16.
(10) . Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York:
Viking, 2006).
(11) . James W. Jones, “Brain, Mind, and Spirit: A Clinician’s Perspective, or Why I Am Not
Afraid of Dualism,” in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and
Brain-Mind Science, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); V. S. Ramachandran
and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the
Mind (New York: Quill, 1998); Edward F. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology
for the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
(12) . J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology
and the Evolution of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Minsky,
Marvin, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Kandel, Schwartz,
and Jessel, Principles of Neural Science.
(13) . Pagel, The Limits of Dream; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Mind;
Schwartz and Begley, The Mind and the Brain; Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind.
(14) . Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
(15) . D. Kahn, “From Chaos to Self-Organization: The Brain, Dreaming, and Religious Experience,”
in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-mind
Science, ed. K. Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 138–158; Walter J. Freeman,
How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
Schwartz and Begley, The Mind and the Brain; Anne L. C. Runehov, Sacred or Neural? The
Potential of Neuroscience to Explain Religious Experience (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2007).
(16) . Ann Taves, “Ascription, Attribution, and Cognition in the Study of Experiences
Deemed Religious,” Religion 20 (2008): 1–16; Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary
Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Ilkka Pyysiainen,
How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
Page 17 of 18
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Subscriber: Masaryk University; date: 20 September 2019
(17) . William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic
Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jeffrey J. Kripal, The
Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007); G. William Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the
Philosophy of Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
(18) . Boyer, Religion Explained.
(19) . David Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (New York: John Wiley
& Sons, 1997).
(20) . Schwartz and Begley, The Mind and the Brain, 129.
(21) . Nina P. Azari and Rudiger J. Seitz, “Brain Plasticity and Recovery from Stroke,”
American Scientist 88 (2000): 426–431.
(22) . Wilder Penfield and Theodore Rasmussen, The Cerebral Cortex of Man: A Clinical
Study of Localization of Function (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Michael Persinger, Neuropsychological
Bases of God Beliefs (New York: Praeger, 1987).
(23) . Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain, 180.
(24) . Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
(Englewood, CO: Roberts and Company, 2004).
(25) . Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
(26) . Hans C. Lou et al., “A 15O-H20 PET Study of Meditation and the Resting State of
Normal Consciousness,” Human Brain Mapping 7 (1999): 98–105; Sara W. Lazar et al.,
“Functional Brain Mapping of the Relaxation Response and Meditation,” NeuroReport 11,
no. 7 (2000): 1581–1585; Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God
Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001);
Richard J. Davidson et al., “Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness
Meditation,” Psychosomatic Medicine 65 (2003): 564–570; James H. Austin, Zen
and the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Herbert Benson and Marg Stark, Timeless
Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (New York: Fireside, 1996); Jonathan Shear,
“Experimental Studies of Meditation and Consciousness,” in Religion and Psychology:
Mapping the Terrain, ed. Diane Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons (London: Routledge,
2001), 280–294; Nina Azari et al., “Neural Correlates of Religious Experience,” European
Journal of Neuroscience 13 (2001):1649–1652.
(27) . Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission
(Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004).
(28) . Boyer, Religion Explained.
Religious Conversion and Cognitive Neuroscience
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Subscriber: Masaryk University; date: 20 September 2019
(29) . Carol Hart, “The Mysterious Placebo Effect,” Modern Drug Discovery 2, no. 4
(1999): 30–40; Anne Harrington, The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
(30) . Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, eds., Music and Emotion: Theory and Research
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
(31) . Koch, The Quest for Consciousness.
(32) . Kelly Bulkeley, The Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion with and beyond Cognitive
Neuroscience (New York: Routledge, 2005); Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion
to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
(33) . Kelly Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (New
York: New York University Press, 2008); Davis, this volume.
(34) . The Dalai Lama, Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying (Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1997).
(35) . James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright, The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion
and Neuroscience Meet (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997); David Hogue, Remembering
the Future, Imagining the Past: Story, Ritual, and the Human Brain (Cleveland,
OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003); Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Fraser Watts, Theology and Psychology
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
(36) . Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006).
(37) . Dawkins, The God Delusion, 5.
Kelly Bulkeley
Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in
Berkeley, California.