We Are Our Brains (42 page)

Other religious precepts have a more rational basis. Shellfish like mussels aren't “unclean” just according to Jewish dietary laws; North American Indians were also prohibited from eating them. There seems to be a good reason for this. In 1987, around a hundred people suddenly fell seriously ill within a day of eating mussels from Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada. Besides nausea and vomiting, the victims also had serious neurological symptoms including disorientation, headache, and paralysis. Four died, and seven fell into a coma. A year later some of the victims were still experiencing severe memory problems. They could no longer recall events that would normally be unforgettable, like a daughter's wedding. Postmortems were carried out on the brains of four people who died in this incident. It turned out that the hippocampus and the amygdala, two structures essential to memory, had been severely damaged. That summer, extreme weather conditions in Canada had led to an explosive growth of algae (
Nitzschia pungens
). The shellfish filtered and ingested high concentrations of the algae, which proved to contain domoic acid, a substance that's toxic to the nervous system, destroying brain cells by overactivation. This effect isn't confined to humans. In 1961, bizarre behavior was seen in a colony of sooty shearwaters in Santa Cruz County, California. The birds were flying into windshields
and lampposts and pecking and vomiting on people. There were many dead birds in the streets. Alfred Hitchcock requested the local papers to send him reports of the strange behavior. Two years later he made the film
The Birds
, probably inspired by these accounts and of course by Daphne du Maurier's short story of the same name. In 1991, in a similar epidemic in the same area, in which cormorants and brown pelicans suddenly started behaving strangely, the corpses were indeed found to contain high concentrations of domoic acid. So we should definitely take account of certain biblical precepts—it's just a pity that we don't know which ones. Playing safe by keeping all the laws in Leviticus is no longer an option in this day and age. So read its punishments and tremble!

Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Darwin's, was the first person to investigate the efficacy of prayer statistically. He concluded that public prayers for the health and longevity of kings and queens were ineffective, since their lives were not on average any longer than those of other classes and professions. Equally, the many prayers said for the safety of voyages undertaken by missionaries and pilgrims didn't result in fewer shipwrecks than average.

Many recent studies have shown that prayer has no effect on patients with leukemia or rheumatism or those dependent on kidney dialysis. Praying for patients by means of a headset while they were anesthetized for open heart surgery proved equally ineffectual. Certain publications make claims for the efficacy of prayer, but their experimental methods are fundamentally flawed. For instance, in a trial involving prayer for patients in a heart-monitoring ward, it emerged that the secretary who divided the patients into groups was also registering the results (so it was not a blind trial) and that the group being prayed for was already in better health than the control group at the start of the trial. A combination of fourteen good studies led to the conclusion in 2006 that praying for others didn't have a curative effect. However, one large, well-controlled study showed that it had an injurious effect on heart patients. It looked at 1,802 patients who were undergoing coronary bypass operations. The patients were divided into three groups. The first two groups were told they might or might not be prayed for. Group 1 was prayed for, while Group 2 wasn't prayed for. Prayers were also said for Group 3, who knew that they would be prayed for. To everyone's surprise, this last group had the highest percentage of complications. Perhaps it was because being told they were being prayed for made them fear that they must be in a bad way. Another study showed that the more psychiatric symptoms patients had, the more they prayed. But you can't conclude from that that praying causes psychiatric problems; these patients were probably desperately seeking aid for their mental health difficulties. Whatever the case, no universally convincing evidence has been presented that praying for others is effective. No one, for instance, has ever seen an amputated limb grow back after prayer.

Despite the negative literature on the efficacy of prayer, the vast majority have no doubt whatsoever: 82 percent of Americans believe that prayer can cure serious diseases, 73 percent believe that praying for others can cure disease, and 64 percent want their doctors to pray
for them. Why does the majority believe in the efficacy of prayer, when research doesn't support it? I think it's because people who habitually pray feel good when they do so. It provokes a relaxation response, reducing the level of the stress hormone cortisol. So praying for others is largely something you do to relax yourself. It's not a new idea. Spinoza didn't see the point of petitionary prayer, because he didn't believe in a personal God who responded to appeals. He did, however, regard prayer as a means of concentration and meditation. You can achieve the same result with yoga, meditation, or listening to your favorite music. Doing yoga also reduces cortisol and increases production of the sleep hormone melatonin (as does meditation); the sympathetic autonomic nervous system is also less active after yoga exercises. So it has a de-stressing effect.

Incidentally, studies on the efficacy of prayer are beset by unique methodological obstacles:

In the face of all these methodological problems, the only way to establish whether praying for someone else is effective would be through a well-controlled experimental study with animals. As yet I haven't come across one.

Certain neurological and psychiatric disorders can give rise to religious mania, at least if religion has been programmed into the brain during an individual's youth. After an epileptic seizure patients can lose contact with reality, and a quarter of these psychoses take a religious form. Religious delusions can also result from mania, depression, or schizophrenia or constitute the first symptom of frontotemporal dementia. The murder, in 2003, of the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh was, for instance, committed at the “command of Jesus” by the twenty-five-year-old schizophrenia sufferer Mijailo Mijailović, who had stopped taking his medication. He thought he'd been chosen by Jesus and couldn't resist the voices that were instructing him to kill. John Nash, who in 1994 won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, had been diagnosed at the age of twenty-nine with paranoid schizophrenia. Some of his delusions were religious in nature; he saw himself as a secret messianic figure and the biblical Esau. Near-death experiences can also have a religious slant. One woman with a lung embolism claimed that Jesus himself had sent her back from heaven to earth to look after her children.

Ger Klein, a former Dutch state secretary for education and science, wrote a vivid description of his own religious mania. I met him in the summer of 1975, when he was forced to cut 200 million guilders from his budget in the space of a single week. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research (NIN), which was waiting for a new director; the Institute for War Documentation (RIOD), headed by the historian Loe de Jong; the
Dutch astronomical satellite program; and several other important bodies. I was a thirty-one-year-old researcher at the time, and although I had no administrative experience whatsoever, I took it upon myself to try, with the rest of the NIN's staff, to get the government decision reversed. After talks with all the parliamentary factions and a hard-fought campaign, we ultimately succeeded; the House of Representatives voted unanimously to preserve the institute. In the negotiations that followed, Klein and I got along well, despite our very different interests, backgrounds, and characters.

In 1978, Loe de Jong revealed at a press conference that Willem Aantjes, the leader of a new party called the Christian Democratic Appeal, had signed up with the SS during World War II. Klein, who only shortly before had been responsible for the RIOD in his capacity of state secretary, was dismayed. According to Klein, De Jong was completely out of order in subjecting Aantjes to what was in effect a summary execution. Klein thought that De Jong, with whom he'd clashed in the past, should have left the government to deal with this issue. Getting more and more agitated, he started preparing for the upcoming debate in the House like a man possessed. By four o'clock in the morning he'd already drunk three liters of strong coffee. But the Labor Party elected someone else as spokesman for the debate, and to make matters worse, Klein was torn to shreds by the education minister, Arie Pais. When he drove back home after the debate on November 17, 1978, he suddenly felt as if he had been given an almighty punch in the forehead. That marked the start of his manic phase, which he compellingly described in his 1994 book
Over de Rooie
(Seeing Red). He was under the impression that he'd undergone a brain operation and was being controlled by external forces. A booming voice said to him, “You are not just God, no, you are the God of Gods.” He went and stood outside a supermarket, announcing to all passersby that a humanist salvation awaited them. He wasn't at all surprised when people hurried away, rather than stopping to listen, because that meant they had taken the urgency of his message seriously. Later he took off all his clothes and ran in circles
around his house in the middle of winter. This manic period made way for a terrible depression a few months later.

After reading Klein's enthralling book, I wrote to him to ask if he still remembered me and to tell him that now, nineteen years on, we both had a common interest: manic depression. By way of a subtle hint, I enclosed some of our publications on postmortem studies of the brain tissue of patients with the disorder. I received a long and kind letter back, which I still preserve between the pages of his book. “Of course I remember the consultations between your delegation and the ministry about the closure of the Institute.… The decision to ax it following the budgetary cuts that were forced on me almost cost me my political career, but I'm sure you must be satisfied with what was achieved.… The research into manic depression naturally interests me very much. As a layman I know little about it: Perhaps we could meet in the near future so that you could explain the medical advances in this field to me. Would this be a possibility?” Of course I immediately invited him to visit the institute. However, he died two years later, in December 1998, without having taken up my invitation.

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy sometimes have ecstatic experiences, making them think that they are in direct contact with God and receiving orders from him. One man had visions of a bright light
and a figure resembling Jesus. He turned out to have a tumor in the temporal lobe that was causing epileptic activity. After it had been removed, the ecstatic seizures disappeared for good. The divine visions in attacks of this kind are usually very brief—between thirty seconds and a couple of minutes—but they can permanently affect a person's personality, transforming them emotionally or inducing hyperreligiosity. Between attacks, these individuals often develop Geschwind syndrome, whose symptoms include obsessive writing, loss of interest in sex, and extreme religiousness. This rare form of epilepsy may well explain the behavior of various historical figures.

When the apostle Paul was still using his Hebrew name Saul and was on the way to Damascus to track down and imprison Christians, he had an ecstatic experience: “As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' ‘Who are you, Lord?' Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' he replied.… For three days [Saul] was blind” (Acts 9:1–9). It seems distinctly possible that the apostle had temporal lobe epilepsy, as there are other known cases in which it has provoked ecstatic experiences culminating in temporary cortical blindness and conversion to Christianity. The text of Corinthians 12:1–9 and the visual hallucinations reported by Luke, Paul's chronicler, lend weight to this diagnosis. In one of the hallucinations Jesus spoke to him encouragingly; in another he fell into a trance while praying in Jerusalem and saw Jesus.