In Saturday’s session, Alasdair Coles, a neurologist at Cambridge, surveyed the scientific research on brain functioning and religion. Most interesting were the studies shwoing that Alzheimers patients become more artistically creative as their disease progresses. Bruce Miller, the researcher who performed this study, theorized that the left hemisphere is the “bully part of the brain” that suppresses the creativity of the right part. When the left brain degenerates (as happens with Alzheimers) the right brain is given a brief moment to flower and dominate.

These paintings, of the same bridge, were made by an artist named Carolus Horn as Alzheimers became more advanced:




Coles then wondered allowed whether future research might suggest a similar pattern with religion – that the left brain suppresses the religious instinct among some people. “The normal human brain is a conflicted series of modules. We suppress a series of talents that are only revealed when the bully part of the brain [fades]. Perhaps in every brain there’s a religious part of the brain that’s being suppressed.”
For those figuring what questions to study, I’d add the question of whether certain rituals or chanting or even drugs might be more likely to achieve some of that same effect.