LAST MONTH, in Britain’s first televised exorcism, a man known only as Colin was hooked up to start-of the-art brain-imaging equipment in East London and prayed over by a po-faced Anglican priest. The programme provoked some predictable anger from the moral majority, but the defence of its commissioning editors was more novel. The exorcism, they said, was not a reality TV thriller but a serious-minded scientific experiment into what happens to the brain during possession by evil spirits. It was, they claimed, field research in a new discipline called neurotheology.

Neurotheology is the scientific study of what happens to brain activity during religious or spiritual experiences. It is a recent development, made possible because of advances in brain-imaging. The idea is to use the latest tools available within psychology and neuroscience to detect which parts of the brain are active during spiritual experiences. Scientists have long been puzzled, for example, by the fact that some sufferers from epilepsy appear to experience religious hallucinations or revelations during their seizures. Neurotheology, its supporters claim, might tell us why.

By tracing the neural origins of religious experiences, the more radical advocates of neurotheology hope to understand not only how brain activity mirrors spiritual experiences but also how it can cause those experiences. The discipline first entered public consciousness in the late 1990s, when Michael Persinger, an Ontario academic, used a helmet filled with magnets to surround the skulls of his subjects stimulating their temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field. The result, according to Persinger, was to induce a “mystical experience” in four out of five people taking part. Religious epiphanies, he concluded, were simply bursts of electrical activity in the frontal lobes which could be triggered by a variety of emotions or physical stimuli.

If we take neurotheology literally, the implications are severe. If God lies within our brains rather than within our souls, it seems likely that we invented God rather than the other way round. Some neurologists go farther, arguing that religion is a mere figment of delusional mental processes, a kind of mental illness. On the other hand, if one part of the brain is “wired” to have religious experiences, it might explain why religion refuses to die in the modern world. Given that the soul can be a fickle instrument, if God has reserved Himself a place within our brains it may simply be his insurance policy against atheism.

But it is not just the religious who balk at some of the implications of neurotheology. It rather devalues any kind of human spirituality if the same effect can be conjured up with the help of a few magnets. The mysteries involved in the human subconscious might well be tracked to blips in our brain activity, but it remains doubtful whether it can be explained by them.

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