Neurotheology

Following my post from yesterday about spiritual emotions, I want to go further on this unintended side track a bit and make a first visit to science.
Neurotheology [1] is a relatively new branch of neurology that concerns itself with the connection between subjective spiritual experiences and activity in the brain.

In a nutshell, neurotheology concerns itself with two things. One is the observation of brain activity during spiritual experiences of a human. The other is to artificially induce spiritual experiences in humans. Both have been done.

The Canadian Dr. Persinger is a pioneer in this field, which started with the research of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). People who suffer from TLE often have spiritual experiences during their seizures. From this idea he started to research if there is a kind of 'God Spot' in the brain; a region with heightened activity during spiritual experiences that may be responsible for the same.
The first connection between the temporal lobe and religious experience was made in a research on TLE. A control group and a group of TLE patients were subjected to sets of words. Some groups of words were sexually oriented, some groups were religious and some neutral. The control group reacted mostly to sexual words, but TLE patients reacted stronger to religious words than to sexual words.

Another experiment by Dr Persinger was with a special helmet which induces a magnetic field on the temporal lobes. With it, he can create spiritual experiences in humans! A sense of 'not being alone' was reported in 80% of Dr Persingers test persons, of which a subset described this sense being a spiritual sensation. Famously, Richard Dawkins did not have any spiritual sensation in the experiment. I have also read about other experiments, which successfully incurred a feeling of 'leaving the body' by magnetically influencing certain brain areas. The test-person felt that she left her body and hovered over it, but once the magnetic field was switched off this condition ended immediately. The person described this as very similar to a near-death experience she had.

This makes one think whether or not some religious persons in history also had TLE, and religious experiences of for example Moses and Mohamed might have been seizures? It is impossible to prove without examining their brain structure, which is obviously not an option. But there is the case of a woman Called Ellen White, who started having seizures due to TLE after she was hit on the head by a stone. During these seizures she had spiritual experiences, following which she founded the Seventh Day Adventist Movement. Of course the movement itself resolutely denies Ellen White's experience to be based on epilepsy, because where would they stand if they didn't deny this?
Another experiment by Dr Newberg of the university of Pennsylvania, proves that people who are in a state of prayer or deep meditation, have certain very specific (measurable!) brain activities going on, which also suggests that spiritual feelings are somehow a creation of the brain. Whether these brain activities are created by the prayer or are a sign of God is a question, whose answer depends on whether you believe there is a God that could do such a thing.

There is actually a lot more to this subject, and I invite anyone who is interested to visit the following links for further reading. Link nr. 2 is a transcript from a BBC radio program about the subject, while link 3 is an article about the same subject by "Religion and Ethics weekly", a strongly religious tinted TV-programme. Just so you can't say I'm giving one-sided links ;)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology
2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbraintrans.shtml
3: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week510/cover.html