Recovering Evangelicals #43 – Neurobiology of spiritual experience – part 1
At this point in our mini-series looking at spiritual/religious experiences, we thought it would be good to understand how we perceive the rest of the world around us, including our relationships with other people, or our pets. This is still one of the biggest questions in science: one that is still entirely unresolved. And it gets even harder to understand when claims are made that we can have a relationship with God.
Think about it: how do we finite, physical, biological beings interact with an infinite, non-physical, non-biological Being?
We do know a little bit about what’s involved when we relate to other people. For example, everyone knows that it includes taking in sensory information from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin; they may not realize that we also have all kinds of sense organs in our ears, muscles, and bones which encode information about the relative positions of limbs and body in space.
In addition to this external information, we’ve got all kinds of information already present inside our brains: our emotional state; memories; personal values and beliefs; societal norms and laws; data re. our loved ones (facial features; the way they walk and talk; personality profiles), and so much more.
But somehow, something in some place(s) of our brain and through some process puts all this information together into a detailed moment-by-moment experience of our reality. Is it being projected onto a movie screen in our head so that a little being can watch? (I know … infinite regress). We’ve already explored this in detail in Season 1, episode #10 (“a possible scientific explanation for the human soul”).
So, we talked to Dr. Erin Smith (PhD in Psychology, and a Christian) about how our brains process information inside and outside of our heads in order to create a model of reality. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could apply what we talked about to the question at hand: the neurobiology behind spiritual experiences and the human-Divine relationship. We’ve saved that for next week’s episode. But first, you need this foundation.
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