We Are Our Brains (43 page)

The Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, had a history of epileptic seizures linked to religious experiences from the age of six. He had his first visions in
A.D.
610. While asleep in a remote place in the hills near Mecca, he heard a voice that he later ascribed to the Archangel Gabriel, who commanded him, “Read” (
iqra
). He answered, “I cannot read.” The voice repeated, “Read, in the name of Allah who created!” Terrified that something was wrong with him, Muhammad considered throwing himself down the mountain. But he subsequently heard a voice saying, “O Muhammad! You are the Messenger
of Allah, and I am Gabriel.” From the first time in the cave of Hira he continued to receive revelations from Gabriel up to the time of his death. These were subsequently written down and collected as the suras of the Qur'an.

Joan of Arc was born in 1412 to a farmer in the French village of Domrémy and was burned to death at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, at the age of nineteen. Her life history, including her epileptic attacks, was minutely documented by the Inquisition and the Catholic Church. She was thirteen when she first heard the voice of God. It came from the right and was usually preceded by a bright light on the same side. Not long after the voice, saints appeared to give her daily advice during her campaigns. Her epileptic attacks were sometimes provoked by church bells, the sound of which affected her deeply and caused her to drop to her knees and pray, even on the battlefield. The ecstatic seizures were accompanied by a feeling of bliss, making her cry when they were over. Between seizures she displayed all eighteen characteristics of Geschwind syndrome, including emotionality, euphoria, a conviction of dedication, a lack of humor, modesty, a strong moral sense, asexuality, impatience, aggression, depression, suicidal tendencies, and extreme piety.

In 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to the hospital in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He was suffering from epilepsy, along with many other health problems. During bouts of psychosis he had visual and auditory hallucinations as well as bizarre religious and paranoid delusions. During one such attack, he cut off a piece of his ear and sent it as a present to a local prostitute named Rachel. In between attacks he displayed Geschwind syndrome characteristics. His hypergraphia manifested itself not just in the over six hundred letters he wrote to his brother but also in his enormous productivity as an artist, turning out an oil painting every other day. He'd become increasingly religious from the age of twenty and reread the Bible obsessively. He wanted to become a pastor but was rejected on the grounds of his personality. In 1887 he spent his time translating the Bible into French, German, and English. On Sundays
he went to four different churches, and on the wall of his house in Arles he wrote, “I am the Holy Ghost.”

In 1849, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested for being a member of a liberal group of intellectuals and sentenced to death. After a mock execution in which he and fellow prisoners stood waiting to be shot by a firing squad, he heard that his sentence had been commuted to four years of exile with hard labor in Siberia. He suffered hundreds of epileptic seizures, and his novel
The Idiot
contains lyrical descriptions of his religious experiences during the ecstatic periods just before the seizures. He wouldn't have missed them for the world: “You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure. Mahomet, in his Qur'an, said he had seen Paradise and had gone into it. All these stupid clever men are quite sure that he was a liar and a charlatan. But no, he did not lie, he really had been in Paradise during an attack of epilepsy; he was a victim of this disease as I am. I do not know whether this joy lasts for seconds or hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the delights of this world.” This account shows how the ecstatic periods, which last only a few minutes at most, can seem much longer. Dostoyevsky also wrote about the religious visions he experienced, describing how heaven came down to earth and absorbed him, how he felt the presence of God and was filled with it, and cried, “Yes, God exists.” After that, he remembered nothing, which suggests that he subsequently had a generalized epileptic seizure. His seizures were frequent, coming once a week or every three days, and are also described in his book
Demons
(
The Possessed
): “There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It's something not earthly.… If it lasted more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I'd give my whole life for them, because they are worth it.”

Many may be disappointed to hear that people from non-Western cultures with this syndrome have never reported seeing Jesus or a
Western image of God during a seizure. In Haiti, temporal lobe epilepsy is interpreted as possession by the spirits of the dead and a voodoo curse. It seems that the divine image imprinted in our brains during early development reemerges during epileptic seizures, along with artistic, literary, political, or religious creations and our mental store of thoughts and convictions.

It all started amicably. Around nine years ago, the Dutch newspaper
Trouw
published an article (September 30, 2000) about a lecture I'd given on the brain and religion, using the title of my lecture as a headline: “We Are Our Brains.” Not long afterward, Monsignor Everard de Jong, the auxiliary bishop of Roermond, wrote a long, eloquent letter to the newspaper setting out his criticism (which boiled down to us being more than our brains) and ending with the question, “Surely Professor Swaab's wife doesn't love him solely—or primarily—for his perishable brain?” A little later he came up to me in the intermission of another debate and introduced himself as the author of the letter.

“I'm delighted to hear that,” I said, “because I think I can answer your question. My wife said that if my brain was transplanted into the body of Steve McQueen, she wouldn't object at all.” The bishop, completely perplexed, responded with a glassy look. Apparently he'd never heard of Steve McQueen. After Cees Dekker presented a copy of his book
Looking Up in Flatland
, about science and faith, to the education minister Ronald Plasterk, I was invited to join a debate with Dekker—as was Monsignor de Jong. As soon as I saw him I asked him if he now knew who Steve McQueen was. He had to
admit that he still didn't! The bishop subsequently made a sympathetic attempt to put me back on the straight and narrow by sending me a copy of
The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul
, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary. The book hasn't shaken my unbelief, though.

In 2005, two television producers, Rob Muntz and Paul Jan van de Wint, asked me if I wanted to take part in a television program about the brain and religion. At the time their names meant nothing to me, and I wasn't aware of their wild reputation, but we got along very well. Van de Wint planned to interview five believers in their homes and five atheists in church, while in between Muntz asked passersby for their views. The program was to be broadcast by an educational organization called RVU. That all sounded fine to me. We had a nice conversation, and I agreed to take part. Later, the interviews with the believers were dropped on the grounds that they were too boring.

The interview with me, the first in the series, took place in St. Nicholas Church in Amsterdam. I talked about the ecstatic experiences of Joan of Arc, the apostle Paul, and the Prophet Muhammad, as well as about manic patients who think that they are God and schizophrenic patients who receive instructions from God. I also talked about the way in which you can induce out-of-body experiences (like the ones associated with near-death experiences) through electrical stimulation of the cortex. We discussed the aspects of our behavior that are fixed at a very early stage of development, including aggressive behavior and what that implies about our moral accountability for our actions. I also spoke about my personal views on religion, heaven, and life after death.

At an advance screening just before the start of the series, which turned out to be called
God Doesn't Exist
, I was dismayed to see for the first time the absurd clips that had been edited into the interviews (images of a black woman being crucified, for instance), and I realized that we were in for trouble. But it was too late to do anything about it. I was then asked to take the stage to give my comments.

What did I think of the program? I hid my concern and said, “Great—just a shame about all that chattering in between the clips.” It was a lively evening, but my family left feeling worried about the broadcasting of the interview—rightly so, as it turned out.

On June 4, St. Nicholas Church instituted summary proceedings in an attempt to ban the broadcast. But the RVU had kept to its agreements with the church and paid the fee of €50 an hour for using the premises. The RVU's offer to display a message both before and after the broadcast in which the church distanced itself from the program was accepted by the court, and the application to ban the program was turned down. Meanwhile, Muntz and Van de Wint got hate mail from thousands of Christians. The Dutch Roman Catholic and Protestant churches protested jointly before the broadcast but couldn't stop it going ahead. It was rescheduled to a time when the fewest people would be watching (a few minutes before midnight), and the Sunday rerun was scrapped. Those around me were encouraging about the interview, but a lot of people were alienated by the film clips. On June 9, the Reformed Political Party and the Christian Union blocs in the House of Representatives requested that the “downright blasphemous program be banned.” Their written questions were sent to the prime minister and the ministers responsible for justice and the media. According to the main Dutch press agency ANP, the blocs believed that the broadcast “mocked God and the Christian faith deliberately and in the most damaging way possible.” I never heard any more of those formal complaints, nor of the criminal complaint filed on June 23, 2005, by the League Against Blasphemy and Swearing against the RVU program on the grounds that it was “blasphemous and insulting.” So much for the famous Dutch tolerance.

As Freud already said, the idea of the continued existence of an immaterial “something” after death is common to all cultures and all religions. That “something” is usually called the soul. It's presumed to remain in the neighborhood of the body for a short time after death and then to depart permanently for another place. I've been assisted in postmortems several times by people of Surinamese origin; they would knock on the door three times before coming in, so as to warn the soul. In the aboriginal community in Australia, the name of the deceased may not be spoken or written for a period of time (determined by the family) in order to leave the soul in peace. If an aboriginal dies unexpectedly as the result of an accident or crime, a warning is broadcast on the news, and the period of silence
starts. In an ancient Chinese tradition, the deceased was buried with a beautifully decorated container for the soul. So far, however, these have always been found to be empty. The great Jewish scholar and physician Maimonides (1135–1204) wrote about the immortality of the soul. The Qur'an allows for no doubt on the subject, stating that perfect souls will immediately be admitted to paradise.

Over the centuries, people have argued about the moment at which a newborn baby acquires a soul. The religious views on the subject still resonate in the political debate over issues like abortion, stem cell research, and embryo selection. Talmudic scholars hold that the embryo acquires a soul after forty days of pregnancy, perhaps because that is when a fetus becomes recognizable. Before forty days, the Talmud describes a fetus as “water.” This distinction has led to the sanctioning of human embryo stem cell research in Israel. According to the ancient Greeks, the moment at which a baby acquired a soul depended on its sex. Hippocrates (460–370
B.C.
) believed that male fetuses acquired a soul on the thirtieth day of pregnancy and female fetuses on the forty-second day. According to Aristotle (384–322
B.C.
), the difference was somewhat greater: forty days for male fetuses, while female fetuses had to wait for eighty days. The prejudice on which this difference was based was finally explained by the Italian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). A woman was thought to be a
mas occasionatus
, a defective male, and therefore needed more time to develop a soul (
Summa Theologiae
1:92).