Twenty-five years ago, back when I still went to church, I fell in with a group of Catholic charismatics. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing; I was raised in a strictly traditional Catholic family and the idea of Wednesday night prayer meeting was itself faintly exotic to me. So you can imagine how I felt when I encountered the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, which people in this prayer meeting did regularly. (Oddly, though, the charismatics and my parents shared a strong social conservatism, despite their liturgical differences.)
I never knew what to make of glossolalia. I can picture my now ex-husband and I sitting beside each other on folding chairs in the church hall, exchanging furtive glances of astonishment and mild dismay the first time people burst into tuneful and lilting nonsense syllables. (What is the etiquette in such a situation, we wondered to each other later.) Most of the emotions people claimed to be feeling in the prayer group (a sense of divine love, a feeling of peace) frequently eluded me and in the end I think I figured that the whole thing was a mystery that I was never going to penetrate.
But that was before I gained my scientific sense of curiosity about what it was all about. Today it’s different, so I was interested in a recent story about glossolalia. Neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania have scanned the brains of people who were speaking in tongues to see which areas of the brain show increases or decreases in blood flow. Activity in the frontal lobes dropped compared to when the subjects were singing gospel songs, which indicates that the subjects had relinquished conscious control in some way, just as they felt they had. (I’m really curious, however, about how they were able to speak in tongues when they needed to.) A materialist like me would say that control has been passed to a different part of the brain, rather than to God. This press release talks about future work that will follow up on this research in an attempt to “demystify this fascinating religious phenomenon”. Which all makes perfect sense to me.
However, this excellent article in Slate quotes a New York Times article as saying that people who speak in tongues now have neuroscientific evidence for their claim that God is speaking through them. Seems like a huge leap to me. The Slate article talks about what it means when we find that our brain activity matches our first-person reports of what is happening to us—for example, when we feel we’re not in full intentional control and our brain activity reveals that indeed we are not, or when we report that we enjoy the taste of ice cream and brain scans reveal that by George, the pleasure centers are lighting up.
I’m interested in the neural correlates of emotional states because I want to know how the brain works and how it got to be that way. I don’t think we’re going to find evidence for God in there. Or rather, I think we’re going to find the mechanisms that produce our thoughts and feelings about God and reveal that we’re creating the whole thing inside our heads. This article is interesting because the author (who says he used to scan brains for a living) says that what would be compelling from a religious point of view is if our brains didn’t reflect the experiences we say we’re having (so we would have to wonder where our feelings of religious rapture came from). Until that happens (and I would be very surprised if it did), there’s really no particular surprise that what’s happening on the inside matches what we report on the outside. It’s just cool to figure out how it all works.
