In a very good book written by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, titled The Spiritual Brain, (I would give it five stars, if I rated books with stars at my website) there is a chapter called "The Strange Case of the God Helmet" which describes a physical device that "scientists" place on their head so that low-powered magnets can stimulate the temporal lobes of the test subject. Seriously. The tin-foil hat crowd now has legitimate competition. Only a person who doesn't believe God exists and has apparently become desperate to prove it would deliberately try to artificially simulate the effect that belief in God has on people of faith. About neuroscientist Michael Persinger (co-inventor of the God helmet) Beauregard wrote: Echoing Dawkins, Persinger has called religion "an artifact of the brain" and a "cognitive virus." (page 81) Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he had to try the helmet himself, of course, but he didn't experience any of the hallucinations the helmet can allegedly sometimes cause. Persinger attributed the failure of Dawkins to "experience God" using the helmet was due to his "well below average" score in temporal lobe sensitivity to magnetic fields, whatever that means. Of course, Persinger had to publish the results of his 2002 "study" in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Beauregard (and O'Leary) wrote: Persinger concluded two things: that the experience of a sensed presence can be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience "may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits, and … [Read more...]