Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps : Interdisciplinary Explorations of Religious Experience

Rating:
Summary: Waiting for a science of religious experience
Review: This book is a reprint of the November/December 2000 issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I read it looking for something that I will continue to wait for, a science that goes beyond descriptions and speculation regarding the nature of religious experience. Are those who say cognitive psychology and atheistic assumptions are enough to explain religion correct in that? I don't believe so. Religious experience is data waiting for a way of analysis that would convince a skeptic of that. Maybe the wait will be beyond what anyone can wait. This book does not provide anything new along these lines, but it is a good summary of some areas.

The difficulty is not for lack of effort. Jensine Andresen does a good job summarizing 50 years of research on physical effects of meditation. The autonomic effects are well documented, including how different meditation styles and different degrees of experience can induce relaxation or activation. Brain imaging studies are described, though it remains to be seen if findings noted there are actually adding anything to the meaning of autonomic effects measured peripherally. The greatest obstacle to doing more with this is not anything subjective about the experience. It's a matter of how limited neuroscience remains to answering certain questions. The simplest theory of how meditation lowers blood pressure is easy to state in terms of reducing input to the sympathetic nervous system, but what are the details? What inputs are there as we go about our lives in an ordinary state of consciousness? What aspect of meditation is necessary to change that? What aspects make the effect optimal? How might the benefit of lower blood pressure be extended further into states of normal consciousness? What is actually going on here? This book describes how crude studies relevant to such questions have been done across many types of meditation, but it is neuroscience itself that is still lacking techniques to connect cause and effect in a way that such studies can say anything more than, "There's something there." Maybe more experience with functional brain imaging will change that, but it remains to be seen.

Much of what else is described in this book suffers from the same problem, only more so, because the effects being addressed by other authors include perception, cognition, and motivation, transcendent or otherwise, where it's even harder to talk about brain mechanisms in a detailed way. Other authors are also less systematic than Andresen and prone to speculative models of experience and consciousness that don't necessarily have anything to do with natural or spiritual principles.

This book may be useful to those who are interested in learning more about the phenomenology of religious experience. It does provide multiple approaches to choose from. Other authors who are notably conscientious about their subjects include Phillip H. Wiebe writing on Christic visions and James H. Austin on the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of consciousness. Don't expect any useful conclusions. Until neuroscience becomes even more detailed or experiments such as those regarding the power of prayer in medicine become more impressive, this sort of thing is still going to be a matter of preaching to the choir.