Saturday 1 September 2007

Pic of the day: Dark, cold, all colors muted, life wilting. Not my normal day, I'm happy to say. Thank God, or the brain, or some combination of the two...

The God organ and I

I seem to have become more tolerant of fat again. Or perhaps I just have become better at knowing where the limit is, and staying just under it.

If I cross that line, I experience a strange mixture of symptoms that I have not found described anywhere else. Poetically I call it a "Darkening" because that's how I remember it: The light seems dimmer at the height of the illness. But it is pretty much the same as I used to call panic attacks before, although I have had a few panic attacks which did not include those symptoms. (I can also panic due to respiratory problems, but that is kind of reasonable, since I had life-threatening asthma when I was a toddler and for a few years after that.)

In a Darkening, I usually start by feeling cold and queasy. Either one of them can appear first, but the other will show up shortly. I think the cold is the most frequent starting symptom. I start to shiver and then shake with uncontrollable frost. If I find a good heat source at this point, such as direct sunshine through a glass window, or a space heater, I may halt the attack, or shorten it, or at least make it milder. It depends on how severe it is, I guess. This again seems to depend on the amount of fat I have eaten more than my body can handle. After the two initial symptoms come two more, fear and intestinal spasms. Again, the sequence will vary, though they rarely precede both of the first two. The next duo is reduced intelligence and a feeling of perdition, or the absence of God. The final symptom comes when the others abate, and is extreme drowsiness and deep involuntary sleep. Once I wake up from that (which I have done so far every time, but it never feels certain at the time) I am mostly back to normal. I will likely still have problems with my digestion for a day or so, as if after eating something that did not agree with me, but that's it.

The keen observer will have noticed that one of these symptoms is different: The presence of God is not a documented part of lipid metabolism in humans. Why do I drag in a religious concept? Well, because that's how it feels. It may simply be fear compounded ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"), a well known phenomenon in panic attacks. The patient starts worrying about his worry, and is unable to break out of this spiral. The fear causes symptoms that cause the patient to become more afraid because the body responds in unfamiliar ways and cannot be controlled. Yes, I am somewhat familiar with this as well. But I still maintain that on a few occasions there has been a sensation of utter aloneness, a separate experience. Most notably, the presence of humans does not dispel the aloneness. When I seek human company in this situation, I do not look for people who are strangers to God: Their presence would be worse than nothing. I look for people who can talk to God for me, or none at all.

***

Some years ago, scientists claimed to have found "the God organ in the brain". By stimulating a small part of the brain, pioneer Michael Persinger caused many of his test subjects to experience the presence of a mysterious "other" in the room. Religious folks would identify the presence with an angle or the Virgin Mary for instance, while secular people were more likely to compare it to an alien. Despite this, media latched on and the excellent science-fiction writer Robert J Sawyer established the moniker "the God organ", which played an increasingly important role in his Neanderthal trilogy. In it, the Neanderthals survive in a parallel timeline, and because they don't have the God organ they develop a higher culture than ours and become superior in every way: Morally, intellectually and physically. The contrast between their world and ours is the meat of the series.

Other atheists around the world also rejoiced that God was finally caught and confined in the brain. If only it were that well! Because if we really have a brain structure to sense God, it would be a pretty good indirect proof that God is objectively real. After all, the fact that we have eyes is never taken as proof that the visual world exists only in our head; rather it obviously proves that light exists and that we are able to use it to more accurately perceive the world. The same goes for the ear and other sense organs. If there really was a "God organ" in the brain, it would fall neatly into this category, although probably along with the less accurate senses like temperature sense… at least in most people. It would at the very least strongly suggest that at some point in our prehistory, being able to sense God was essential to our survival and/or reproduction. Even the appendix was, after all, useful to our ancestors until fairly recently.

If a "God organ" exists in the brain, is it useful to people today? I would certainly say yes, if my experiences really were a dampening of the output from the God organ. Which it well could be, since the other symptoms in the same phase seem like dampening of brain activity: A sense of reduced brightness in the room, difficulties with reading and writing and logical thinking, followed by drowsiness. If there is a biological basis for perceiving God, this would be a likely opportunity to notice. But in that case, the God organ is still a good thing. Because the perceived absence of God is horrifying, like having a vital organ ripped out of the body. It seems in itself - apart from the other symptoms - to be enough to cause death in a matter of hours at most. Luckily I have never been able to test this, nor would I want to. (The account of some saints, including the late Mother Theresa, seems to indicate that you can in fact live for years or decades without sensing the presence of God. It remains horrible though.)

Why then aren't atheists collectively living in despair and misery, unable to function in society and shrouded in a deep pain of loneliness and loss of meaning? Well, some of them are. Much poetry comes from this, it seems. But overall, I think the "God organ" may be functioning fine without people ever identifying God as a person. In fact, I think many scientists identify God as Science or The Universe. The awe and admiration they express for Nature or some part of it certainly seem numinous, though they may not be aware of it. Or they are, and reasonably assume that it is the religious types who have it backward, admiring some imaginary Creator instead of the manifest and magnificent world itself.

Also, the normal condition of the "God organ" would likely be always on but in a kind of standby mode. Most people probably don't have any neurological conditions that causes it to shut off, so they would simply experience security and meaning in their life as the normal mode of living. Unless some event specifically caused them to look more deeply into it, they would enjoy their life and go on living it in whatever way they saw fit. If something made them feel bad, they would be more likely to avoid it in the future, even if they could not say exactly why. In this way, "God" could subtly influence their lives without being noticed.

But it seems to me that the average human could do with a little more activity in their God organ. I can't help but notice that common people are very lonely. Some of them cannot spend a day alone without starting to feel miserable. Solitary confinement is defined as torture, even when all your other needs are met. And not just having people around, there is usually also a need for someone special, someone you can be very close to, share your life with, and share your thoughts and feelings with, someone who gets "under your skin". Isn't this why people fall in love? It is not merely for sexual gratification, for clearly we can have that without love. It may not be as good as when you are in love, but then again nothing is as good as when you are in love. Or so I'm told. I don't fall in love.

Of course you can turn the tables on this and say that my "God organ" is too active, and this causes me to fail an important part of life: Seeking out a soulmate. Since being social (and especially seeking this closeness) is conductive to reproduction, people who are happy alone fail at life. They are weeded out by evolution. Remember, evolution does not care about your happiness as long as you stay alive and reproduce. If you are too unhappy and you kill yourself (or at least don't care about staying alive) then your genes go extinct along with you. But if you are too happy and live your life without feeling the need to share beds and tables, your genes are also likely to go extinct, just a few decades later. So moderately restless people are evolution's favorites. And there sure are a lot of them.

Incidentally, the temporal lobes probed by Persinger didn't actually cause a God experience, just an experience of a powerful invisible presence. It rarely converted atheists to theism, and even religious people tended to describe it as a kind of mediator rather than God himself. There is also the small detail that when a later experiment installed a computer between the switch and the helmet, the test subject would sometimes have the extrasensory experience even if the helmet did not activate (the computer blocked it randomly) as long as the researcher thought that it was activated. This implies that the test subject may have sensed the emanations from the other human subject rather than anything divine. So the hunt for God in the brain is still on. Arf arf! Follow the trail, before it gets cold, into the nameless depths…