측두엽, 후두엽 전기자극하면 환각, 환시 일어난다 - 마이클 퍼신저 교수 Dr. Michael Persinger

[석수]

전기자극 한방이면 된다. 환각은 눈 자체가 아니라 시지각에 관여하는 피질 영역 즉, 후두엽 및 측두엽 또는 두정엽이 손상되었을 때도 쉽게 나타나곤 한다. 그리고 전기적 자극만으로도 간단히 일어난다.


캐나다 로렌티안대학의 마이클 퍼신저는 지원자의 머리에 전자석이 장착된 헬멧을 씌웠다.

헬멧은 컴퓨터 모니터와 비슷한 정도의 약한 자기장을 발생시켰다. 자기장이 측두엽에서 집중적 전기 활동을 자극하자 지원자들은 초자연적 또는 영적 체험, 즉 유체 이탈현상이나 영기(靈氣)를 느꼈다고 말했다.


퍼신저는 종교적 체험은 측두엽에 소규모의 전류 폭풍현상이 일어나 발생하는 것이며, 그 같은 폭풍은 불안감, 개인적 위기, 산소부족, 저혈당 그리고 단순한 피로에 의해서도 유발된다고 추측했다. 그런 순간에 ‘신을 발견하는’ 사람들이 나오는 이유를 설명해주는 것이다.


The Controversial Device That Might Make You Feel the Presence of a Higher Power


The "God Helmet" has its detractors as well as fans.

In the middle to late 1990s, the frenzy for neuroscientific explanations for everything from why we laugh to how we fall in love was only just gaining a toehold in the popular science. And word was there was some interesting data coming out of a small lab in a Canadian hinterland.


Really interesting: Dr. Michael Persinger, an American ex-pat and cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, had found God.


In the brain. Your brain, my brain, the brain. 

“As a neuroscientist, I realized that all experiences are determined by brain activity. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean causal, but it means it could be correlation, and the correlation could be so high that you could consider it causal,” Persinger explained on the phone from his lab. It was 8:30 am London time, 3:30 a.m. his time. He works better at night, he said.


“That is, the brain is generating all experiences: The experience of love, the experience of knowing who you are, the sense of presence, the sense of yourself, the feeling that you’re real and that you’re important, these are all products of brain activity in terms of various configurations within different regions in the brain.”



But he wasn’t actually trying to find God in the brain or rather, the neural correlates of religious experience. “I could care less about God, I think it’s a useless and out of date concept,” Persinger said. “We were interested in something that I think is much more important, which is creativity.”



To put this in context, Persinger explained, neuroscience says that the “sense of self is primarily a language-based phenomena, primarily involving more left hemispheric activities.” The right hemisphere, by contrast, is the intuitive, emotional hemisphere; this is where inspiration strikes, if it strikes at all. He wanted to find out what would happen if you stimulated the right, creative hemisphere with electromagnetic fields; he’d written several papers in the past about the resonance that certain electromagnetic fields have with parts of the brain.


To do this safely, he turned to his Laurentian colleague and technologist Professor Stanley Koren to help him design a helmet that would be able to apply magnetic fields to the temporal lobes, the parts of the brain associated with hearing, speech, processing sensory information. The first helmet was actually a snowmobiling helmet, bumble bee yellow with two black racing stripes down the top, with two solenoids—a coil of wire that acts as a magnetic when electricity is applied—affixed to either side, roughly above the ears. It looked like a prop from Ghostbusters.   



He and his team designed their experiments to gently batter the right hemisphere with weak but “physiologically-patterned magnetic fields”.“Now that’s the critical key: If you apply a sine wave or a square wave, that doesn’t do anything, there’s no information in it.” The information in these magnetic fields employ the “electromagnetic signature of the key correlates of experience that the brain generates during various kinds of states”, he said—in other words, mimicking the kind of electromagnetic jig that your brain does during, for example, an epileptic seizure or a transcendental experience.


Persinger hit upon one of these patterns, he said, in the 1980s, when he was watching the EEG of a woman meditating in his lab. “Basically, she was having what we call an absence seizure. It was localized, so it would be technically speaking a complex partial epileptic seizure. Right hemisphere. And I looked at her and she smiled… You’ve seen people have god experiences, their face has that glow about them, from the sebaceous secretion, their eyes may flutter, when they’re feeling that kind of euphoria that goes with an ecstatic state or rapture,” he recalled. “So I asked her, ‘What happened?’ She says, ‘God was here.’ I said, ‘Can you describe it?’ She said, ‘He was all in the laboratory, I felt his presence.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was having a seizure.”



Persinger used her brain pattern in trying to induce a similar state in other people; they called it “Burst X”. The other pattern he used, he said, is associated with the generation of fear. As to whether he was concerned that the patterns could have an adverse reaction on someone, he was not. “First of all, I try everything on myself at the beginning,” he said, adding that the fields are on the order of microtesla—very weak, not even as strong as putting your head near your computer.
Back to the helmet. “So when we stimulated the right hemisphere, we were surprised to find that many people reported a sensed presence, a feeling of a sentient being standing nearby,” he said. “And it suddenly struck us that what the right hemispheric experience is, the sensed presence is, is the right hemispheric equivalent to the left hemispheric sense of self. And the minute we knew that, everything fell into place.”


And Persinger does mean everything. “With respect to how to recreate it, what parts of the brain were involved, and why it’s a powerful phenomenon that drives the human species, often into killing each other to determine whose god that verifies that sensed presence is the strongest.”