In Canada, a series of controversial experiments to try to discover how the brain generates spiritual experiences.
The experiments are very simple. Individuals are chosen at random as they are generally volunteers. The subject is taken to the laboratory where he is placed in an acoustic chamber. They cover their eyes so that the neurons in charge of monitoring everything around us can join the experiment and increase the sensation that the subject feels when being subjected to the test in question.
The volunteers have no idea of the nature of the experiment. They have just been told to relax and describe what they feel.
Michael persinger is in charge of these experiments. He has designed a method to stimulate the temporal lobe using a helmet with cables that generate a magnetic field that stimulates that part of the brain and the thoughts and sensations produced in it. The helmet has been baptized as the helmet of God.
The experiment generated experiences that seemed out of this world.
Michael Persinger said:
"They were experiences like vibrations, movements, experiences of getting out of the body, moving through tunnels, changing shapes or holes of some kind, bright lights."
However, Persinger can manufacture sensations much more disturbing than simple visual hallucinations.
'When we apply the fields at a specific frequency, we can induce the experience of feeling presences, the volunteers feel that there are some entities close to them. They think there is someone by their side. "
His stimulation experiments have provoked a clearly defined spiritual experience. However, Persinger is fully convinced that he has recreated many of the physical experiences that accompany religious beliefs.
Persinger says:
“Our laboratory is a special context, a safe place, and we know that it is something related to the experiment. Suppose the same sense of presence it happens at 3 in the morning When you're alone in your room
So of course there would be a different explanation. A scientific explanation would not be given and culture would come into play. Most of the time the explanation for the strange phenomena are attributed to the gods.
There is something we know:
experiences with God, mystical experiences originate in the brain and now we know that we can define them in the laboratory, we can understand them better and that they are no longer privileged experiences of a few individuals who are culturally inclined to explain those experiences as religious phenomena.
The temporal lobe is just one part of the brain and as such, some people will have it more developed than others. The important thing is that science now has the technology to discover how these experiences originate. "