Part of the Human Experience
Spirituality has always been a central part of the human
experience. The vast centuries of human explorations have
always contained basic questions: Why am I here? Who am I?
What is real? Where is true meaning? Why am I suffering and
in pain? Where is there hope?
As long as human beings have existed, these basic yearnings
have been pursued as part of the human endeavor.
In fact, there may be dedicated neural machinery in the brain
concerned with spirituality. Neurobiologists Persinger (Persinger,
M., 1987) and Ramachandran (Ramachandran,
V.S., 1998) have identified an area of the temporal lobes
that can be called the "God spot" or the "God
module." They conclude that the God spot plays
an essential biological role in spiritual experience.
Other
researchers have come to similar conclusions.
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This section: ~20 min.
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Humans have always asked these
basic spiritual questions.
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| Persinger and Ramachandran do not say that the God
spot proves the existence of God or that spiritual experiences
are beyond the level of the brain. They do maintain,
however, that the temporal lobe is part of the brain
that experiences spiritual phenomena. |
| Persinger, M. (1987). Neuropsychological
Bases of God Beliefs. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. |
| Ramachandran, V.S., Blakesless, S.
(1998). Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries
of the Human Mind. New York, NY: Quill William Morrow. |
| "The phenomenon of religious belief may be "hard-wired"
into the brain." Zohar, D. & Marshall, I. (2000).
Spiritual Intelligence: The Ultimate Intelligence. New
York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 91.
A leading research physician notes: "Belief
in God is, indeed, natural to humanity, as natural
as are our instincts to flee or fight…..human
beings are wired for God; we are custom-made to engage
in and exercise beliefs, and spiritual beliefs are
the most powerful of that sort…." Benson,
H. (1996). Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology
of Belief. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster Adult
Publishing Group.
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