(MACKENZIE - 2002)RELIGION AND THE BRAINIn the new

(MACKENZIE - 2002)

RELIGION AND THE BRAIN

In the new field of "Neurotheology", scientists seek the biological basis of spirituality, is God our heads?

BY SHARON BEGLEY

 

One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he ___(I)____ away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The American neurologist - ___(II)____ was spending a sabbatical year in England -saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He ___(III)____, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then, Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished."

Rather than interpret his instant of grace as proof of a reality beyond the comprehension of our senses, Austin took it as "proof of the existence of the brain." As a neurologist, he accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is mediated or created by the brain. Austin's moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness ___(IV)____, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. Which ones? Activity in the amygdala, ___(V)____ monitors the environment for threats and registers fear, must be damped. Parietal-lobe circuits, which orient you in space and mark the sharp distinction between self and world, must go quiet. Frontal and temporal-lobe circuits, ___(VI)____ mark time and generate self-awareness, must disengage.

More and more scientists ___(VII)____ to "neurotheology," the study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality. What all the new research shares is a passion for uncovering the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences--for discovering, in short, what happens in our brains ___(VIII)____ we sense that we " ___(IX)____ a reality different from--and, in some crucial sense, higher than - the reality of every - day experience," as psychologist David Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it. In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and which turn off, during experiences that seem to ex- ist outside time and space.  Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says Wulff, that it "suggests a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain."

In "Why God Won't Go Away," published in April, Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania and his late collaborator, Eugene d'Aquili, use brain-imaging technology to identify what seems to be the brain's spirituality circuit.

(Adapted from Newsweek)

 

As lacunas I, III e VII devem ser preenchidas respectiva e corretamente por: