That Neuroscience Guy - The God Spot

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

You may have heard of a unique phenomenon where some people have intense religious experiences following a seizure. In some cases, these people may even believe they are God. In today's episode, I discuss the neuroscience behind the "God Spot", a proposed brain area for religious experience. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. There's a small group of people in the world who have seizures and experience God, or at least religious sensation. I'm being quite serious. These people typically have left temporal lobe epilepsy, and post-seizure, they have heightened emotional responses to religious images and artifacts,

and in some cases, they even think that they're God. Today, we're going to talk about the neuroscience of left temporal lobe epilepsy and the God spot. Let's start by talking about epilepsy. People have been having epileptic seizures throughout recorded history, but what causes them? Basically, a general definition of the word seizure means that there is a period of abnormal synchronous firing of neurons. So there's a period of time when there's just this large neural storm. Neurons are firing a lot more than they're supposed to. Typically, seizures brought on by this neural storm last for seconds or minutes, but sometimes they can be quite prolonged. Importantly, I have to note that the clinical aspect of this varies quite a bit,

and some seizures don't involve muscular contractions, although that's the stereotype, the person whose body is literally seizing. It's also important to note that just because you have a seizure, it doesn't mean that you have epilepsy. So what causes seizures? One principle that's being debated quite a bit is that seizures arise when there's a disruption of the mechanisms that create a balance between neural excitation and neural inhibition. So when the brain is working normally, some neurons enter an excited state when they fire. We need that to process sensory information or pretty much for any kind of neural function. And at the same time, there's also neurons that play an inhibitory role.

And that translates to what you think it might. There's neurons whose whole purpose is to stop you from responding in a certain way, or at a lower level, to stop a neuron from firing. So excitatory neural firing makes sense for a lot of people. For instance, if you want a muscle to contract, you fire neurons that allow the muscle to contract. But inhibitory control is equally important. If you just take something simple like walking, when you contract the muscles that move the leg one way, you actually want to inhibit the muscles that move the leg the other way. That allows the leg to swing freely.

The same is true in terms of thought processes. For instance, if you see something and you want to activate a particular memory, the brain also wants to inhibit things that would conflict with this. So this excitation and inhibition is a part of normal neural firing. Now, normally there are controls that keep neurons from firing too much. They prevent excessive neural firing. And there are controls that also prevent excessive inhibition to balance the system out. prevent excessive inhibition to balance the system out. So a working theory of epilepsy is that if you disrupt the neurons that have an inhibitory role, or you promote neurons that have a facilitary role, this can lead to seizure.

So in other words, there is too much excitation, or there is too little inhibition, and that leads to the neural storm that I mentioned, where there are neurons firing more than is normal, and that literally causes the seizure. Now, it's important to realize it is not just this excess of firing that causes the seizure. You actually need a whole range of networks of neurons within the brain to be synchronized in the sense that all of the neurons need to fire at the same time. So it's not just one little blast of excessive firing, but it's this synchronization across a large portion of the brain where there is excessive firing. So what causes epilepsy to happen? Why do some people have it and some of us don't? Again, there's a lot of debate,

but some promising theories suggest that there's differences at the microstructure level of the brain. So the nervous system in people with epilepsy is a little bit different than the nervous system and the brain of people that don't have epilepsy. And there's data from the lab that supports this. There are animals that are shown that when they have recurrent patterns of seizures,

there's actually differences in gene expression and function at the ultra-structural level. So, epilepsy is a neural storm, and it's brought about potentially by a difference literally in terms of the way the brain is built. Let's get specifically to left temporal lobe epilepsy and the God spot. Clinical reports show that some people that have left temporal lobe epilepsy have heightened religious sensation, as I mentioned earlier. What does that mean? Well, basically it means if you show them a religious image or a religious object like a cross, they have a larger emotional response than if you had to show that same item to someone that doesn't have left temporal lobe epilepsy. Now these sensations typically occur post-seizure.

After a seizure brought about by left temporal lobe epilepsy, these people are in a heightened religious state and they report this increased response to these objects. So again, to think about how these experiments work, you would show these people a series of objects that have religious connotation to them or images that have religious connotation to them, and they have a normal response. And then post-seizure, that response is heightened. And then if you look at people that don't have left temporal lobe epilepsy, you don't see that response. You see a normal or standard response to the objects at all times. And it can go even further than that.

There is a small subset of people that have left temporal lobe epilepsy that report that they feel like they're God, or that sometimes they are God. And this again is post-seizure. So post-seizure, you get this time window in which these people have a pretty strong religious sensation. It's important to note that these effects typically dissipate post-seizure. So there's a time window post-seizure for people with left temporal lobe epilepsy,

where they report this heightened religious sensation, or they report that they're God. Now, these findings led some neuroscientists to hypothesize that there was a center for religious sensation in the brain and that center was in the left temporal lobe. And for a while researchers chased after this. They were specifically looking to see if there was a spot in the brain that had become attuned to religious sensation. One of the more interesting tests of this was the God helmet. Researchers Stanley Korn and Dr. Michael Persinger developed a helmet that was designed to stimulate the left temporal lobe with a magnetic field. It wasn't actually designed to specifically stimulate the God spot. It was designed to test other hypotheses that

Stanley Korn and Dr. Persinger had, but it also allowed stimulation of the God spot. And Dr. Persinger and his colleagues ran some experiments and they claimed that they could stimulate the God spot. They claimed that when the helmet was on and the magnetic field was targeted at the left temporal lobe, people were reporting increased religious sensation and experience. Sadly, no one's been able to replicate this. A bunch of research labs around the world tried to stimulate the God spot using similar techniques or using their own versions of the God helmet, and no one was able to pull it off. Dr. Persinger argued that they didn't

have the magnetic field quite right, but the majority of neuroscientists, myself being one of them, believe that the effect wasn't real. It's important to note that just because the God helmet didn't work, doesn't mean that the hypothesis is completely wrong. We know for a fact that there is a subset of people that report increased religious sensation following an epileptic seizure in the left temporal lobe. So that's true. That's been documented and well studied. But what causes the enhanced religious sensation? There's still a lot of debate about this. Now, there is no doubt that some regions of the brain are specialized for

certain things. I'm going to talk more about this on a future episode, but we know that there is a part of the brain that seems to be very focused on mathematical computation. There is a part of the brain that seems to be very sensitive to touch. There are parts of the brain responsible for understanding language and for speech production. So, you could have a working hypothesis that there is a part of the brain that is sensitive to religious experience or sensation. Now, why might this be? It could be that people with left temporal lobe epilepsy are actually experiencing God.

We'll never know the answer to that, at least I don't think in my lifetime, so we'll move on to the next hypothesis. It could be that the epileptic seizure, for whatever reason, is enhancing firing in the emotional system. And just by the way that the neural regions are linked, it happens that these emotional responses seem to be greater when religious stimuli are presented. Another possibility is that the religious sensation that

people with left temporal lobe epilepsy report is tied to just overfiring of the entire emotional system. That a religious experience, at least in a neural sense, is tied to having strong emotional salience for everything. We've talked about that before. If you recall, emotional salience is this idea that when you see someone you love, for instance, there is a visual response which identifies the person, but tied to that is an emotional response. So the emotional salience is your emotional response to things that have emotional value. So the theory is basically, what if there was heightened emotional salience for everything? Maybe that's akin to the feeling that people with left temporal lobe epilepsy are experiencing. And the last possibility is that there is some specialized neural circuitry in the brain for religion.

Now, I'm not proposing that some kind of supreme being put it there, but it is possible that a part of the brain has learned to become specialized for processing religious feeling or sensation, just like parts of the brain become specialized for working with tools or for processing faces, and that people with left temporal lobe epilepsy, well, that part of the brain gets more stimulated than for the rest of us. So I hope you found that interesting and learned a little bit more about left temporal lobe epilepsy and epilepsy in general, and you know a bit more about the God spot, and now you've heard about the infamous God helmet. My name is Olof Kregolsen,

and I'm that neuroscience guy. You can follow me on Twitter at that neuroscience guy, or I even have a couple videos on YouTube on that neuroscience guy. And my website is www.olofkregolsen.com if you want to see some of the other things that I do. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.