Talk:Faith-sufferer
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The neutrality of this entry is suspect. The tone within the entire piece is antagonistic towards religion in general.
I agree. Worse still, this article, as it stands, claims that many people who are psychotic suffer from a psychosis yet that few people who suffer from a psychosis are psychotic. Psychotic is merely the adjectival form of the noun psychosis. I suspect the word the editor was searching for representing the popular use of the word psychotic as "meaning violent and out of control" is psychopathic although being "out of control" is not a sign of psychopathic personality.--24.217.183.224 10:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Text moved from the article
I see no relationship between the concept of Faith-sufferer as explained in the article and the text bellow, so I’m moving it here for discussion. Is there a reason to mention physiology of religious experience in the article? How is it related with the concept of Faith-sufferer, since the section mentions neither mental health nor mental illness? --Leinad ¬ 
»saudações! 13:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
- This section pretty clearly outlines the parallels between physiologically-inducted hallucinations and purported religious experiences, as well as citing examples of "religious" individuals who became so only after physiological changes. Since mental health or illness is demonstrately linked with the integrity, interaction, and functionality of the physical structures of the brain, it seems pertinent to examine those physiological effects in relation to religious experience. This section outlines those effects. -- Tonyfuchs1019 ¬ »talk -- 13:30, 31 October 2006
- Physiological effects
In a SPECT study, Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili found that during deep prayer, the brain shuts down activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe which includes the orientation association area. As a result, the individual loses the ability distinguish between the self and its surroundings, creating the neuropsychological illusion of being "intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real" to the theist 3; the suppression of the left PSPL dissolves the individual sense of self, while the suppression of the right PSPL dissolves the individual perception of space.
Newberg also noted increased activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex, which includes the attention association area; among its functions are "the seat of personal will" (medial area) and "concentration on a given task" (dorsolateral area). The focus required to engage in the active approach to meditation accounts for both the increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, as well as the suppression of the posterior superior parietal lobe, as the dorsolateral area filters out extraneous sensory input not directly related to the individual's task (in this case, reaching a peak in meditation). Newberg has further postulated that the hippocampus and the thalamus are involved in the regulation of neural flow, which he calls the process of deafferentation. Unsurprisingly, such a state of selfless interconnection has been described by believers for centuries at the height of prayer 4.
Using an artificial magnetic field generator, Dr. Michael Persinger found that 80% of test subjects whose temporal lobes were stimulated reported "a feeling of 'not being alone'. Some of them describe it as a religious sensation"; such results are consistent with the seizures caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. Dr. Persinger also developed an apparatus known as the God helmet which applied concentrated "magnetic fields to the temporal lobes of the wearer;" 80% of his test subjects reported experiencing what he called a "sensed presence," being a sensation that another person was nearby when none were.
Persinger's study also revealed that TLE patients exhibited responses of physical excitement to words of a religious nature while non-TLE subjects exhibited physical excitements to words of a sexual nature. In a classic example, Ellen White, one of the founding members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church sustained an injury that resulted in a three-week coma and subsequent brain damage in 1836; only afterwards did she begin experiencing her "powerful religious visions" 5.
In December of 2004, Swedish researcher Pehr Granqvist attempted to replicate Persinger's God-helmet experiment; he failed to achieve similar results due to the fact that he applied only "weak magnetic fields" to the temporal lobes of his subjects, and later admitted "that stronger magnetic fields might have the kinds of effects that are suggested by Persinger’s research" 6.
