Quotes from a recent article:
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> "Selective brain damage modulates human spirituality"
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> http://www.physorg.com/news185027522.html
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> "recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible."
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> "The group found that selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase in ST" 
> [ST = "self-transcendence"]-Thank you George for this reference. It is much like the work of Andrew Newberg, M.D. as reported in his books, especially "Why God Won't go Away".

My thanks to George, who has referred us to an article on brain damage that modulates human spirituality. The research has started to make "the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible." -Dr Cosimo Urgesi, the lead author, writes: "Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness." Mention of "damage", "mental illness" and "personality disorders" could be taken to suggest that self-transcendence ... "a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify oneself as an integral part of the universe as a whole" ... is a kind of mental aberration. Dr Urgesi does not say this explicitly, however, and I'm impressed by George's self-restraint, as it must have been tempting for him to associate religious experience with brain disorder!-None of us would deny that certain areas of the brain are associated with particular perceptions and activities, and the fact is that some spheres are more developed than others in different people. Hence their greater mathematical / scientific / artistic / practical / intellectual gifts. A dog has more than 220 million olfactory receptors in its nose (we have about 5 million) and an additional olfactory chamber called a vomeronasal organ. But although we can't smell what the dog can smell, it would never occur to us that the dog imagines scents that aren't there. Well, maybe (I'm only speculating) there are some human brains with a more highly developed network of frontal, parietal and temporal connections that sharpen awareness of realities beyond the material world as most of us know it. -Our brain is an instrument both of perception and of imagination. Of course it can be influenced by drugs or illness or accident, but not all religious or "paranormal" experiences can be attributed to these. In many cases, we don't know whether the areas of the brain involved are perceiving or imagining (though we'll use our subjective judgement as to whether a case is to be taken seriously or not). Just as a dog smells things we can't smell, perhaps certain people may perceive sounds, visions, wavelengths beyond the range of others with a "normal" network. This would be what enables them to sense a form of life that transcends their own individuality, or to obtain information to which they apparently cannot have had direct access (as reported, for instance by BBella and David and countless others down through the centuries).-Dr Urgesi says that "information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking." The question remains open, then, as to whether the network of physical connections creates spiritual experiences or perceives them.

Here is another article on how our brains work. -http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/21-0-It's nothing particularly to do with spirituality, I just didn't want to open up a new thread unnecessarily.-It seems we think in metaphors.-This may also be relevant to the thread on mathematics:
QUOTE: "And in doing arithmetic, students who used their hands to group numbers together had an easier time doing problems that required conceptual grouping. This is predicted by the analysis of mathematics in Where Mathematics Comes From by myself and Rafael Núñez where we show how mathematics from the simple to the advanced is based on embodied metaphorical cognition"-QUOTE: "My Berkeley colleague, Srini Narayanan has shown what computational properties such circuits must have. In still unpublished work, he has shown that the relative timing of first spikes across a synapse predicts the directionality of elementary metaphors in all known cases. The very idea that such low-level phenomena at the level of neurons can result in the vast range our metaphorical thought is truly remarkable."-QUOTE: "Primary metaphorical thought arises when a neural circuit is formed linking two brain areas activated when experiences occur together repeatedly. Typically, one of the experiences is physical. In each experiment, each subject has the physical experience activating one of the brain regions and another experience (e.g., emotional or temporal) activating the other brain region for the given metaphor. The activation of both regions activates the metaphorical link."-I'm sure I've read about this research before, some time ago, but have not seen it expressed so clearly as here.

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GPJ