Good for the open minded materialists

books:


	• The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul Mario Beauregard, Denyse O'leary HarperOne, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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Good for the open minded materialists

If you are open minded, it will demonstrate that the current theories of some materialist fall short in evidence from a scientific point of view. The author used many references and was very methodical and objective in his critique of the most popular myths about mainstream materialists science. He uses science to show that the consciousness remains after bodily death or it at least shows that the materialist theories are wrong. I also recommend "Creation solved?" by Ron Pearson (google it)

An excellent book

In The Spiritual Brain, Dr. Beauregard explains why his research on the brain states of 15 Carmelite nuns shows that religious, mystical, and spiritual experiences cannot be explained away as merely a "God spot" in the brain or a "God gene". He states that the findings of his study do not "prove that mystics contact a power outside of themselves", but that "to the extent that spiritual experiences are experiences in which we contact the reality of our universe, we should expect them to be complex. We can certainly say that the patterns of the serious mystics definitely are."
An excellent book, and not just for the insight you will gain into how Dr. Beauregard's neuroscience research has led him to conclude that religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences are real and not merely a product of the functioning of a brain, but also for the shear scope of topics covered in addressing the validity of a non-materialist belief system. No stone is unturned as the reader is introduced to the leading thinkers, researchers and ideas related to the subject of a non-material mind in fields ranging from quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence to PSI phenomena and near death experiences. I highly recommend his book.

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In defense of spirituality.

Beauregarde argues that the entire edifice of today's accepted science is based on the twin pillars of materialism and scientism. Materialism insists that everything in the universe consists of only one substance, matter. Scientism asserts that only the methods of natural sciences, like physics and chemistry, provide real knowledge. Both postulates, however, are at odds with the occurrence of what the author calls "Religious, Spiritual, and Mystical Experiences" (RSMEs). He defines these as "specific, deep felt, transcendental experiences that make those who experience them aware of a benevolent non-physical power which appears to be partly or wholly beyond, and far greater than the individual self." Such experiences, says Beauregarde, have been at the heart of every religion that came to existence.

The author studied cases of RSMEs and Near Death Experiences, which he considers similar, and argues that not only they are real but they (or even just their memories) activate simultaneously certain large areas of the person's brain. This last is in direct contradiction to the recently proposed theory that RSMEs result from the activation of one specific spot in the temporal lobe, and can be thus related to epileptic seizures and other brain malfunctions.

Beauregarde does a credible job of proving that normal mechanistic theories cannot explain such things as mind, ego, and consciousness, or even properly define them. As an example he discusses the power of the thinking mind over the body's reactions: the placebo effect, and its reverse, the nocebo; how fearful thoughts increase the secretion of adrenaline in the brain, whereas happy thoughts increase endorphin secretions.

Arguing that Near Death Experiences prove that RSMEs occur even when the brain is not functioning and clinical criteria of death have been reached, he concludes that consciousness is independent of the physical brain. He thinks that no person experiences more than two such events in his lifetime, which, if true, would explain Mother Teresa's complaint that she had lost "touch" with her God. He goes on to discuss that people's lives are greatly changed by RSMEs, and that they become more loving and have greater empathy than before.

The book concludes with his measurements of the brain activity of some Carmelite nuns while they were in a deep contemplative state. Although none of them experienced any actual RSMEs during these tests, their brains did exhibit simultaneous activation in many areas usually associated with self-consciousness, emotion, body representation, visual and motor imagery, and spiritual perception. He asked them to think back on their RSME experiences, and concluded that people remember them with the same detail they remember real experiences, in contrast to the vaguer way in which they remember hallucinations, delusions, and dreams.

Does all this prove that the soul exists as the title states? Unfortunately, the author does not define anywhere in the book what the soul is, and only mentions it briefly once. He does argue, however, that consciousness is external to the brain and not related to its operation. Does the book prove that God exists? Again this is true only if you restrict your definition of God to something loving and all-encompassing. Even with these limitations, I still wish that this book had been published a couple of years earlier so that I could have made reference to the author's findings in my own book.

(The writer is the author of "The Way of the Butterfly: A Scientific Speculation on God and the Hereafter," and of "Christianity Without Fairy Tales: When Science And Religion Merge.")

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Mind is not brain

The author writes a necessary book which starts out be describing limits to the current approach to neuroscience, which is based on a materialistic philosophy. He cites paradoxes, including the placebo effect, which the current research programs cannot adequately answer. He then goes on to explore many examples by which physical changes in the brain are invoked through concentrated will and belief, 2 entities that hard-core materialists won't acknowledge. Through a multi-disciplined argument he hints that there are workings in the human being that are not merely physical. The book is a good overview but stops short of the science of that which is not merely physical, such as quantum mechanical gaps operating at the electrical states in the brain, and the shared mind concept which operates across society and which may be related to memes. There is also very little in the way of theology supporting the word spiritual in the book's title.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are loath to consider?that it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain.

Beauregard and O'Leary explore recent attempts to locate a "God gene" in some of us and claims that our brains are "hardwired" for religion?even the strange case of one neuroscientist who allegedly invented an electromagnetic "God helmet" that could produce a mystical experience in anyone who wore it. The authors argue that these attempts are misguided and narrow-minded, because they reduce spiritual experiences to material phenomena.

Many scientists ignore hard evidence that challenges their materialistic prejudice, clinging to the limited view that our experiences are explainable only by material causes, in the obstinate conviction that the physical world is the only reality. But scientific materialism is at a loss to explain irrefutable accounts of mind over matter, of intuition, willpower, and leaps of faith, of the "placebo effect" in medicine, of near-death experiences on the operating table, and of psychic premonitions of a loved one in crisis, to say nothing of the occasional sense of oneness with nature and mystical experiences in meditation or prayer. Traditional science explains away these and other occurrences as delusions or misunderstandings, but by exploring the latest neurological research on phenomena such as these, The Spiritual Brain gets to their real source.

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