…and this is a 
How nice!
Category: Books • Neurobiology
Posted on: September 4, 2007 9:13 PM, by PZ Myers
Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary have come out with a new book, The Spiritual Brain, that Ms O'Leary has announced on her blog. I asked if she'd send me a review copy, and oh, boy, she's going to. This could be interesting.
It's received accolades from such stellar reviewers as Andrew Newberg, Michael Egnor, Michael Behe, and Jeffrey Schwartz, and it apparently concludes that "spiritual experiences are not a figment of the mind or a delusion produced by a dysfunctional brain". See? It's getting fun already.
Even better, I'm currently re-reading Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — we're using the book in my neurobiology course — and I can't help but notice that the Beauregard/O'Leary thesis seems to be one that we were moving away from in the 17th century. A comparison of these two books might be entertaining, too.
Of course, book reviewing can be a risky business. I might get sued again, or worse, converted to Catholicism. Tune in in a few weeks and find out!
Comments
Mother Teresa apparently lacked a "spiritual brain," though she managed to fool everyone for decades. I wonder what Beauregard and O'Leary have to say about that.
Posted by: Mark Plus | September 4, 2007 9:36 PM
Best of luck to you, PZ. I hope your brain/mind survives the ordeal intact.
Posted by: Justin H. | September 4, 2007 9:39 PM
It will be interesting to see if there is any science in the book. I recently had a run in of O'Leary when she googled her favorite terms and found a dissection of non-materialist neuroscience that I had been working on. She wrote about it on her blog and on the UD blog . Her only substantial criticism that didn't amount to name calling was that I called Beauregard a co-author. I tried pushing her to address some science but she erased my comments.
Posted by: tmtoulouse | September 4, 2007 9:40 PM
Well, if it convinces me I have a soul, at least the Catholic church in town is only two blocks from my home.
Posted by: PZ Myers | September 4, 2007 9:49 PM
Coincidence or divine providence?
Posted by: tmtoulouse | September 4, 2007 9:52 PM
Who else couldn't parse "Dr. Mario" as part of somebody's full name? Fess up.
Posted by: Alex Whiteside | September 4, 2007 9:56 PM
Please don't convert to Catholicism! I would then not be able to write curmudgeonly criticisms of the RCC over evolution.
I just bet you'd be a Teilhardian, too.
Posted by: John Wilkins | September 4, 2007 10:00 PM
Posted by: FiveAcres | September 4, 2007 10:01 PM
Can you imagine me doing the 21st century rewrite of The Phenomenon of Man? You should welcome it -- you could then Medawar me!
Posted by: PZ Myers | September 4, 2007 10:11 PM
My brain just contacted a reality outside of itself, which told me that Denyse O'Leary is an intellectual mediocrity whose posts to multiple blogs get less than a twentieth of Pharyngula's comment volume.
Posted by: notthedroids | September 4, 2007 10:29 PM
Which is to say, PZ, you are doing her an undeserved favor, but hey, throw the dog a bone.
God bless.
Posted by: notthedroids | September 4, 2007 10:31 PM
Haha...
Mario Beauregard lists "William Dembski, Ph.D. Baylor University et Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture" as a collaborator...
I feel sorry for his students at L'Université de Montréal... Even if they are doing good graduate work, (which they probably are), their reputations are going to take a hit for being so closely affiliated with this guy...
Posted by: Matt the heathen | September 4, 2007 10:44 PM
Say what you want about Dr. Mario, but he had a pretty cool pill-matching game in the 80s.
Posted by: Marc | September 4, 2007 10:54 PM
Say what you want about Dr. Mario, but he had a pretty cool pill-matching game in the 80s.
Posted by: Marc | September 4, 2007 10:55 PM
I promised a friend I would read it (at the time it seemed as though it would never get published so I thought I was safe.) But even still, I wonder and await with bated breath how they can show a connection to religion even if the MRI's show what they claim. A "religious state" is not going to be proof of a non-material activity especially if they are using instruments which measure material activity.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD | September 4, 2007 10:57 PM
The Dr. Mario video game wasn't released until 1990.
Posted by: K. Engels | September 4, 2007 11:01 PM
I got a sick feeling to my stomach when I saw the name Jeffrey Schwartz, and thought you meant this guy.
http://www.pitt.edu/~pittanth/faculty/schwartz.html
http://www.pitt.edu/~jhs/
As I understand it, he had published some mildly unorthodox ideas in human evolution..., but only mildly unorthodox. Fortunately it is not him.
Posted by: Sheldon | September 4, 2007 11:01 PM
I can attest that congenital Catholicism can be cured, although it can be a difficult convalescence. Acquired Catholicism syndrome, on the other hand, has an extremely guarded prognosis when it occurs in adults. You should be careful.
Also, consider the problems attendant on your actually crossing the threshold of your local Catholic church, PZ. There could well be collateral damage when the steeple explodes and the holy water font vanishes in a cloud of superheated steam.
Just saying.
Posted by: Zeno | September 4, 2007 11:03 PM
I haven't read the book, PZ, but I suspect you're in for a treat.
Read Beauregard's paper on "Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns" published last year in Neuroscience Letters (405, 186-190, 2006), and you'll know exactly what I mean. (A word of advice: have a glass of scotch or other meaningful dose of hard liquor ready as you approach the task.)
Posted by: Andrea | September 4, 2007 11:04 PM
Let me guess. The brain is like a radio receiver, except instead of radio waves, it receives "soul waves", and when the brain is damaged, it's not able to receive these "soul waves" so well, but this in no way indicates the soul wave transmitter in heaven -- the soul -- is damaged, for the soul is eternal, blah blah blah puke.
Well, I wonder if it will be that clever.
Not that it's all that clever, and not that there's any evidence for any such thing, and never mind the evidence that we use artificial neural nets every day for voice recognition (think phone system) and those neural nets are largely modeled on what we have learned by looking into physical brains... so it seems, from the evidence, the brain acts like something other than any sort of receiver... or else Sprint and AT&T and all those other neural net users are hi-jacking celestial soul waves and making them slavishly perform voice recognition tasks.
But, perhaps I erect a strawman, obviously not having read the book.
Posted by: SteveC | September 4, 2007 11:05 PM
Straw man argument contained in O'Leary's blog:
"Most neuroscientists are committed to the view that mystical experiences are simply the result of random neurons firing"
This is the kind of language that tends to upset Richard Dawkins when he hears people say evolution is a supposedly 'random' process. It's not. Neither are the neurons firing in a religious person's brain to produce a sort of spiritual phenotype.
Keep in mind that the authors are the same people who claim to refute the God Gene Hypothesis as materialistic hogwash by, get this, using materialistic "evidence" (e.g. examining brain scans of nuns while they pray.) which doesn't even support their case or any case for that matter.
Will someone explain logic to these clowns and please give their instrumentation to someone more worthy?
Posted by: Phillip Bost | September 4, 2007 11:09 PM
When on earth were you sued?
Posted by: Murkanen | September 4, 2007 11:14 PM
I caught that "random" comment, too. It made me want to scream.
That's such a terribly stupid assertion.
phat
Posted by: phat | September 4, 2007 11:42 PM
PZ was pivared by a classic crackpot. It was so silly it could only have happened on Earth.
Posted by: blf | September 4, 2007 11:51 PM
Prof. Myers, will you be quick and merciful in your critique of The Spiritual Brain, with one, maybe two stileto stabs to the vitals, or will you be cruel and messy, shaking and worrying the poor carcass until the organs and colon-contents burst out?
Posted by: Stanton | September 5, 2007 12:36 AM
"Pivar" has become a verb now? It looks like he got all the publicity he never wanted. From a relative unknown to laughing stock of a decent bit of the web, I'm pretty sure that wasn't how he imagined it working out.
Posted by: uknesvuinng | September 5, 2007 12:56 AM
I think you should just take a little baby jesus doll and nail it thru the crotch to her book and say,
Posted by: qedpro | September 5, 2007 12:56 AM
I might get sued again, or worse, converted to Catholicism.
Hey, Catholicism wouldn't be so bad, they even believe in that newfangled eeeeevolution nowadays! (Tho' I hear they're still a bit touchy on the whole heliocentrism thingie, but, you're not an astonomer, so no worries.)
Posted by: tikistitch | September 5, 2007 1:00 AM
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had spiritual experiences of God telling him to kill prostitutes.
Modern science (ie O'Leary) is now validating those experiences of his.
Posted by: Steven Carr | September 5, 2007 1:13 AM
Just a gentle blogwhore here, but has anyone bothered checking up on Dr. Mario's street creds, particularly that award from "World Media Net?"
Enjoy.
Posted by: CC | September 5, 2007 2:20 AM
UD: All Dark Ages thinking, all of the time.
Posted by: NC Paul | September 5, 2007 5:47 AM
John Wilkins:
Well, that can happen to you if you drink too much Chardinay ...
Posted by: Scott Belyea | September 5, 2007 8:47 AM
Thus disproving the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Has good chances of becoming a textbook case.
Posted by: David Marjanović | September 5, 2007 9:23 AM
Using the Beauregard paper on Carmelite nuns as evidence of brain-independent mind is actually quite interesting twist in logic. After all, if mind can contact God independent of the brain, then the "mystical experience" should *not* elicit any distict brain activation. Would be cool to see how the topic is presented in the book as supporting O'Leary's case - mechanic vibration of brain tissue as soul slips in and out of body at high speed? Looking forward to the review.
Posted by: krish | September 5, 2007 10:28 AM
They're bicameral... and proud of it.
The best thing about The Origin Of Conscoiuosness... is that it is plenty hefty enough to brain (hah!) these people with if flung well.
[The Spiritual Brain] clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader...
Hell, I can do that in two letters: B.S.
And did anybody else hit that link and immediately parse the blog's title as "Mindfuck" before double-taking to read "Mindfull Hack"?
Posted by: Sarcastro | September 5, 2007 11:06 AM
"Pivar" has become a verb now?
Is it in Wikipedia? hint... hint...
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | September 5, 2007 11:41 AM
Right. Because Catholic churches are reknowned for accepting only the holiest of the holy.
Posted by: Brownian | September 5, 2007 1:12 PM
[The Spiritual Brain] clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader...
I'm actually kind of disappointed that they didn't use 'non-scientific terms', but I suppose that would have been redundant.
Posted by: Micah | September 5, 2007 1:57 PM
If Mario Beauregard is a quantum qook of the "observer mind" type, can we ask him to explain if his brain produces any thoughts when we aren't watching? Or to go easy on him, can he show us producing any original thoughts when we are watching?
Nice analysis tmtoulouse, though perhaps a bit long for a wiki. (I'm throwing stones in a glass house here, I realize that. :-P) I haven't read RationalWiki before, so I was a bit dismayed when the linked RW posts were relatively content free. You more than made up for that.
In my experience PZ likes to disemwovel texts from annoying nutters. But when it comes to a whole book perhaps a punctuated library appeals more than phonetic gradualism.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | September 5, 2007 2:54 PM
Posted by: Tegumai Bopsulai, FCD | September 5, 2007 3:04 PM
I never commented to thank you for mentioning Soul Made Flesh on your blog a while back. I bought it based on your recommendation and loved it. I always appreciate science books that are appropriate for the layperson. I don't have much of a science background (one semester each of biology and physics as an undergrad), but I teach science to gifted elementary school students. I fell into it because none of the teachers felt comfortable teaching science, and I'm becoming more and more conviced that good science eduation, by impassioned and informed teachers, is essential.So now that I am the teacher, I try to become as impassioned and informed as I can!
Posted by: Easter | September 5, 2007 4:59 PM
"Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science." From the NYT August 24, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/24body.html?ex=1189137600&en=8f9e9332727c6a86&ei=5070
Spiritual is as spiritual does, but it's all very much like a box of chocolates. Made in some factory somewhere, not so mysterioso after all.
Posted by: VJB | September 5, 2007 5:43 PM
There's precedent; santorum (n.) is on wiki. But I don't think this neologism has legs.
Posted by: Andrew Wade | September 5, 2007 10:32 PM
Unfortunately, this would make for yet another neuroscientist who should know better. Penfield (the pioneering neurosurgeon, did work on cerebral localization) and Eccles both were dualists. Bunge told me that he suspected the usual religious influence in the former case. Even Descartes almost falls in this category, but we can intellectually forgive him, because of the Inquisition and 350 years of more science. These other guys? Not so easy.
Posted by: Keith Douglas | September 8, 2007 4:17 PM
u guys r suffering some kind of "brain overload", huh?
Posted by: Rex | November 20, 2007 3:10 AM