Feeling the presence of God

Just watched BBC2 Horizon program "God on the Brain".  First half was all about how temporal lobe epilepsy can lead to religious visions & experiences. They had the eminent (but hard to spell) neuropsychologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran descirbing how it is notable that various religious figures had symptoms and revelations similar to those epilepsy, but diplomatically letting us draw our own conclusions.

The second half featured Michael Persinger, another neuroscientist, who mimics this excess electrical activity with electro-magnets, giving ordinary people these same ineffable feelings of spiritual visitation. They tried it on Richard Dawkins but failed to 'haunt' him.

Also, told the story of an electro-exorcism Persinger had performed on a young girl who suffered very vivid hauntings as she tried to sleep. With nothing more than an induction loop, a laptop computer and a few fast fourier transforms they were able to discover the strong source of EMF's coming from her clock radio; removing it removed the ghosts.

All very interesting but only half as weird as the prurient detail they missed out. A little further research reveals the BBC to have been a little bit Reithian and puritanical in their Bowdlerisation of the story. Here's the abstract to Prof. Persinger's write up..

Experiences of spiritual visitation and impregnation: potential induction by frequency-modulated transients from an adjacent clock.
Persinger MA, Koren SA.
Department of Psychology, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada.


found here

My conclusions:

• Neuroscience is the new Religion.
  
• The Atheist Pope can not be brainwashed.
  
• Some Catholics have more guilt than others (through no fault of their own)
  
• Keep your radio alarm clock in a Faraday cage & don't sleep with your mobile under your pillow.
  
• Don't tell Nokia or they might figure out a way to program us into thinking Jorma Ollila is the new Jesus.