1st Todd Murphy Lecture: God and the Brain.

(1 hour 45 minutes)

This lecture is about the brains role in:*

visions of God*
near death experiences*
cases histories of people who've seen God*
And the God Helmet*

This is a discussion of the Persinger "God Helmet" (actually the Koren Helmet) and the Todd Murphy "8coil Shakti"

(0:00 to 4:28)*

Tod Murphy:*

Forum code:*

Good evening,*

Welcome to the first lecture in our series on Spirituality and the Brain. The theme of tonight’s talk is God and the Brain. I just want to start off by more-or-less jumping into it and giving you a fairly straight forward way of arriving at the conclusion that God, (whatever that means) and the brain actually do have a point of connection.*

If you look at an EEG, an Electroencephalogram something that displays brainwaves and you’re eating, you’re going to have one set of patterns that appear on it. If you’re falling asleep you’re going to have another. If you’re running full-tilt up-hill you’re going to have another set of brain wave patterns.*

Each human behaviour each way of thinking gives us a different set of brain wave patterns. So it’s not a very big step to think that if you’re somehow connected to God through prayer, through an actual vision of God, or by reflecting on your points of your faith in God, your EEG pattern your brainwave pattern is still going to have another pattern.*

This should come regardless whether you’re praying, thinking of God or even hearing words that remind you of God.*

So, just from this simple, straight forward way of thinking of it we arrive at the conclusion that God, (whatever that means to you) has some place in your brain or some effect on your brain. The two are not unrelated. That’s an important starting point. If we don’t take a moment to consider that we can kind of get lost in some theological concerns that might come up here.*

The understanding of the role of God in the brain or the brain in understanding God began quite a while ago. But one of the decisive observations about this came from the famousneurosurgeon Wilder Penfieldwho did his best work between the 1940s – 1960s. He actually elicited a number of what were called in those days’ psychical visions, out-of-body experiences, strange and even spiritual moments that came up not only for his epileptic patients but also for the patients on the operating table.*

He would stimulate the surface of they’re brain and all sorts of interesting things happened. He’s well known for this work. But he also recorded a case where one of his epileptic patients actually had visions of God, coming down from the sky, framed as if in a picture. This was published in the scientific literature which is what makes it such an important observation.*

And that one actually ties-down the notion that epilepsy, (a brain disorder) can have spiritual even theistic impact. The experience of God can occur during an epileptic seizure. (3:38)*

(3:38)*Dostoyevsky*who wrote about it in his book The Possessed, had seizures that included not so much clear visions of God but the experience of bliss and ecstasy that was so intense that he couldn’t attribute it to anything else.*

The next major step forward in this, and I’m skipping by a lot of research by some very excellent people, was accomplished by aDr. Michael A. Persinger*who is director of the (?) program and has been my mentor for about thirteen years. He was actually able to induce visions of God in the laboratory.*

He used a piece of equipment for this called the*Koren Helmetwhich has also gotten the nickname the God Helmet and we’ll be seeing it further along in this talk. (4:28)*