This Is Your Brain on Drugs

 
Denyse O'Leary has been telling us for months that she's preparing a new book in collaboration with Mario Beauregard, a researcher at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The first publicity for this upcoming book has been spotted by an astute reader at the HarperCollins website. The title of the book is The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul. It's due to be published any day now and you can already order advance copies at Amazon.com. Here's the description.

The Spiritual Brain
Beauregard, Mario with Denyse O'Leary

THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN is a study of the scientific evidence or otherwise for the existence of a human soul. It seeks to answer the question: Did God create the brain, or did the brain create God? Mainstream neuroscience has long held that mind, consciousness, and the soul are simply by-products of electrochemical brain processes. Thoughts, feelings, and desires are all merely random by-products of the activity of the brain as an organ, and spiritual/mystical experiences are simply delusions created by the brain.

But with THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN, University of Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard challenges this basic doctrine, and for the first time, a highly regarded neuroscientist seeks not to debunk traditional spiritual beliefs, but rather to support them. Using brain imaging technology on Carmelite nuns, known for going into deep prayer and trance, who agreed to have their brains monitored during these mystical experiences, Beauregard argues that spiritual experiences are actual connections to a presence outside ourselves, and that their power to transform our lives is a power which derives from an authentic encounter with an outside reality.

Rights sold: Portuguese (Brazil)/Record; English(Canada only)/HarperCanada
Publication: September 2007 (MP)
Estimated length: 288 pages

Mario Beauregard earned his Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal in 1991. His first postdoc was at the University of Texas Medical School (Houston) and his second was in neuroimaging at the Neurological Institute in Montreal (1994-1996). He is currently a researcher (chercheur agrégé) in the Departments of Psychology and Radiology at the Université de Montréal.

His website shows images of brains under different stimulation conditions. He lists one of his research interests as the neurobiology of the mystical experience. There are three projects in this category. One of them is to examine the brains of Carmélite nuns while they are haivng mystical experiences. Another is to look at patients who have survived clinical death experiences. The third study will look at the functional neuroanatomy of love.

There's nothing wrong with examining the activity of the brain while people are experiencing different states of mind. What's troubling about the book blurb is the implication that Marion Beauregard has scientific evidence that "spiritual experiences are actual connections to a presence outside ourselves, and that their power to transform our lives is a power which derives from an authentic encounter with an outside reality." I'm betting that he has no such evidence. Instead he's interpreting the bahvior of the nuns in terms of what he'd like to believe and not what he actually observes.

It will be interesting to see how the Canadian scientific community responds to the book when it comes out in a few days. This is the same community that has been highly critical of social scientists for merely hinting that intelligent could be taken seriously when a McGill Professor was denied a grant [Research Council Endorses Intelligent Design]. I can't wait to see how they treat a scientist who publishes with a genuine IDiot like Denyse O'Leary.