The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience (review)

"It's only recently, in Western culture at least," writes Nelson, "that near-death experiences have been recognized as relatively common and acknowledged as a type of spiritual experience" (117). According to Nelson, moreover, some 18 million Americans claim to have had such near-death experiences (95), and 15 million lay claim to out-of-body experiences (137). And even though he is aware that "the mind leaving the body is sometimes just weird, not godly" (139), he knows "the ways our brain distorts through subtle filtering, shaping, and interpreting the raw data of our experience" (116). It is for this reason, he writes, that he "was determined that somebody strongly based in neuroscience, who knows how the brain works, should try to explain the nature of spiritual experience," but to do so without explaining it away (6). He therefore sees himself as entering into a new field of "spirituality and the brain" that is directed to providing an understanding of the "neurological foundations of spirituality" (11, 15). Nelson sets out his argument in three sections: the first deals with the character and capacities of the human brain ("The Architecture"), the second presents his "REM intrusion hypothesis" as a reasonable account of the major features of near-death experiences ("At the Doorway"), and the third ("The Other Side") deals essentially with the question whether "these cold, hard clinical facts suck the divine nectar from our spiritual lives" (259).

Whatever a spiritual experience is, Nelson claims in chapter 1, we should be able to agree that it depends wholly upon the operation of the brain (15-16). He uses the adjective spiritual to refer to direct personal experience and therefore differentiates it from "religious experience," which takes place, as he puts it, in "a collective of brains in social contexts" (26). Spiritual experience should be understood in terms of "the profundity of their effects on us," he maintains, rather than "by what causes them" (32). Spiritual experiences in his understanding, therefore, lie beyond language, impart insight rather than knowledge, are evanescent while still leaving strong memory traces, and are passive and amount to an extraordinary kind of consciousness (32-34). They can be properly understood, therefore, only in terms of the kinds of states of consciousness available to human brains. It is in chapter 2 that he sets out an account of consciousness in an effort to determine where and how what he calls "spiritual arousal" happens.

Consciousness, for clinical neurology, Nelson argues, amounts to "awareness of oneself and one's surroundings and it engages brain systems in a certain order." It also recognizes three states: wakefulness, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep (38) and the opposite of consciousness, which is coma. A switch in the brainstem, he points out, regulates these three states of consciousness, and his research, he claims, suggests "that spiritual experience erupts in the borderlands between conscious, unconscious, and dreaming—when our consciousness states are not whole but fragmented and blended with one another" (38). Under such a condition, he points out, people can appear to be dead even though they are alive and can be alert to what is going on around them (43). And it is the difficulty in determining an individual's exact state of consciousness that he claims leads to the construction of supernatural explanations of how patients who have "died" could know something that they should not have been able to know.

Understanding how all of this happens, claims Nelson, requires understanding the arousal system of the brainstem, without which there is no conscious awareness. From Nelson's point of view, then, "the neurological basis of consciousness is well established. The brainstem awakens the thalamus and cortex above, which in turn brings in the human experience—the mundane and the transcendent" (50). Without brainstem activity there is no consciousness, even though the individual may still be alive. Therefore, since it is in the brainstem that...