Throughout the science world, new brain-imaging research is being conducted to pinpoint specific brain circuits that function while religious and mystical experiences take place.

Experts say that “out of body” experiences – ones that make subjects feel as if they are individually separated from the rest of the world or that time has stopped – are caused by interrupting particular brain sequences.

ISU professors of psychology and religion agree with some aspects of the argument and disagree with others.

A point argued has been if God created the impulse or if the impulse created God. Neurologists tend to believe things that can be seen, heard, felt or thought are crafted by the brain.

Brian Brooks, graduate assistant in psychology, said he doesn’t believe neurology can answer the questions it attempts to answer.

“Everything that we perceive or experience is reducible to patterns of neuro-activity in the brain,” said Brooks, who teaches a class on brain and behavior in the summer. “Whether or not it’s actually true, neuroscience couldn’t really get at.”

Brooks compared the spirituality example to countless experiments researchers have done using color to stimulate the brain.

Neuro-imaging can detect which parts of the brain function in seeing color.

He said the same part of the brain is sparked when the brain imagines color as when the eye actually sends a signal to the brain that it has detected color.

“Since we don’t understand the correlation between neurology and spirituality, we are not ready to make these types of distinctions,” he said. “As a psychologist, I don’t think we are ready to make that judgment.”

Brooks also said there are two likely psychological possibilities in correlating the human brain and mystical experiences.

The first is that the specific human is actually tuned in to pick up those types of “out of body” experiences. The second is determining whether the occurrences are, in fact, truth disclosing.

David Hunter, ISU professor of philosophy and religious studies, said he is not surprised to see the correlation of spiritual and religious experiences to physiological changes in the human brain.

“We should expect human emotions of every sort, from the basest to the most elevated, to register in some way in human biology and chemistry,” he said.

Hunter said he does not believe that spirituality is something the science community can chemically answer.

“Empirical scientists can and should explore all of the physical dimensions of human experience,” he said. “But the question of the `authenticity’ or `validity’ of spiritual experience exceeds the competence of the empiricist.”

Hunter said science cannot legitimately tell the world whether there is anything beyond what it can actually investigate.