Stroke Induced Spirituality
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke which allowed her to study the brain from the inside out. In this 20 min talk she describes how she was able to call for help and the feelings of spirituality that came over her as the left side of her brain was malfunctioning.
More links of interest:
from epilepsy.com
Famous religious figures with symptoms of epilepsy.
They include St. Paul, Joan of Arc and Soren Kierkegaard
From ScienceDaily
Out of body experience induced in the lab
From Debunking Christianity
Reasonable Doubt About The Soul
More links of interest:
from epilepsy.com
Famous religious figures with symptoms of epilepsy.
They include St. Paul, Joan of Arc and Soren Kierkegaard
From ScienceDaily
Out of body experience induced in the lab
From Debunking Christianity
Reasonable Doubt About The Soul
8 comments:
Wow! That was truly phenomenal! Makes you appreciate our being all the more!
(JH)
What a literally mind-blowing experience! And what a funny, perceptive, and touching woman Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is!
Those TED talks are amazing. An even better link than the YouTube one is this official one: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
One of the things I find very interesting here is just how much her experience supports the naturalist position on the human mind. The mind is what the brain does, and when the brain has problems, the mind has corresponding problems.
Her mental understanding of temporality was compromised, leaving her with a mind that was unable to remember what she'd just recently done. She had to look around at where she was and deduce what she'd been up to every few moments.
Her mental understanding of identity, or the "law of identity" was compromised, leaving her unable to tell where her arm ended and the wall began. She was experiencing the numbers on the phone as simple percepts, rather than concepts: they were just little squiggles that had to be matched up visually. I'll bet she's lucky that the font on the business card was sans serif like the numbers on the phone.
I know that the thiest/dualist is able to point (unconvincingly) to cases like this and say something along the lines of, "well, this is just correlation between the mind and the brain, not causation. This just proves that the soul needs a functioning physical brain to control a physical body."
But I think that the correlative evidence is growing, and is especially strong in this case. The evidence here might even bleed over into causation. For example, people in favor of theistic dualism will point to things like Near-Death Experiences as evidence that the mind or spirit continues to think and experience the world in a relatively normal way (being oriented in space, aware of the passage of time, able to understand people talking, etc.), even while the body is dying or the brain is technically "brain dead". This account is strong evidence in the other direction: that the mind is NOT thinking and experiencing the world normally while the brain that gives rise to it is dying or dysfunctional.
Hi hamilcar,
thanks for the overview and analysis of the video. I would have linked to the TED site, but I am more familiar with how to get a youtube video to display in the article according to our 'standards'.
Maybe you are familiar with the out of body experience induced in the lab?
I am going back and posting this link in the article.
Interesting video. The human mind is an intriguing subject.
I hate to be an ass, but I would have rather heard it from a neurologist's perspective explaining the function of the brain than from a new ager's perp on how we are all energy...blah, blah, blah.
atheist okie:
My take on this talk is that she's being very subtle here, and subversive. She's putting things in very spiritual terms -- she talking about energy and universality and transcendence -- to show that these are human experiences which are ultimately tied to the brain and dependent upon it. She's undermining the stereotypical space-cadet new-ager mysticism by pointing out: hey, this kind of experience is open to any person, it's part of our brain and our human experience, it doesn't derive from or necessitate any sort of actual supernatural realm.
By sharing her spiritual experience, and then clearly explaining the neurological processes going on in her head at the time, she's laying out her premises. By not explicitly spelling out what they imply, she's allowing the audience to come to the conclusion independently, which is a powerful persuasive device.
Hi AO,
I thought it was a little too new agey as well the first time I watched it, but the second time I noticed that she introduced the 'energy' term when describing the sensory inputs. Strictly speaking, the light you see is radiation, the touch you feel is energy transferred. The energy surrounding you is interpreted biologically and then converted to more energy in the form of electrochemical information transmitted through the nerves to be interpreted in the brain.
While I have no doubt that she has some new age leanings, I just think she was tailoring her presentation to her audience.
In any case, please don't let the terminology detract from the point that her spirituality, whatever it was, was biologically based, and any 'spirits' residing in her cranium were not heading off to any blonde haired blue eyed jesus or any lake of fire, but were firmly anchored in her roiling sea of consciousness.
Hi Lee,
I'll second the wow! Thanks for sharing that with us it was excellent. She seems like a neat person. I have never heard anyone share their stroke experience before.
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