Four years ago when Michael Persinger ? a neurologist from the Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada ? claimed to have invented electromagnetic headsets capable of stimulating religious or spiritual feelings in humans, even die-hard atheists had reservations on the findings.

Persinger?s research made headlines, even though serious neuroscientists ignored his ?magnetic stimulator?.

Now, Pehr Granqvist, a Swedish psychologist, has come out with new findings that challenge Persinger?s claims. In a research paper, published this month in Neuroscience Letters, Granqvist, who is based at the Uppsala University writes that Persinger?s methodology had huge flaws. In the original experiment, Persinger asked volunteers to put on a specially-designed helmet ? tailormade to transmit weak pulses to the temporal lobes of the brain (beneath the temples) to evoke spiritualism. Granqvist thinks that Persinger?s equipment produced nothing but a placebo or dummy effect of spiritual bliss in the volunteers.

Persinger has launched a counter-attack, saying that Granqvist hasn?t used his machine properly.

The quarrel between the two may seem inane at first sight, but to adherents of a controversial and fledgling discipline called neurotheology (these neurologists believe that religion is all in the human brain), this is something serious. It is also an important issue for Tibetan Buddhists, the only religious group which recognises the supreme role the brain in man?s spiritual quest. They, however, believe that to experience deep mystical feelings one needs long-term mental training, such as meditation. The simplistic headset (which costs $ 225), invented by Persinger can hardly be an alternative.

Religious mystics ? irrespective of their faith ? can turn off their sensations to the outer world during intense meditation or prayer. Devotees often describe how their surroundings gradually melt away ? earthly sights and sounds don?t disturb them at all. Then they begin to feel a sense of ?unity with the Universe?. And a feeling of deep awe and significance. Some claim they can sense an invisible presence.

The serene feeling is defined as mysticism to the religious, but to most modern neurologists equipped with a host of sophisticated brain scanners the moment of serenity is defined as a loss of orientation. To them it?s nothing more than blips in brain chemistry.

This demystification of moving experience wasn?t initiated by Persinger. It was Julian Jaynes, a Princeton University psychologist, who first confronted the ancient religious phenomenon. In his controversial 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he argued that the brain activity of the ancient people ? those living in the stone age, prior to early evidence of consciousness such as logic, reason, and ethics ? would resemble that of the sufferers of the mental disorder called schizophrenia.

Jaynes theorised that, like schizophrenics, the ancients heard voices (hallucinations), summoned up visions (seizures), and lacked the sense of metaphor (symbolic or abstract thought) and individuality (loss of orientation) that characterises a more advanced mind. He argued that these were the handiwork of some ancestral leftover synapses (connections between nerve cells) buried deep inside the modern brain which would explain many of our present-day sensations of God or spirituality.

Such gross oversimplification wasn?t taken seriously by most neuroscientists, except the likes of Persinger who had just joined as a neurolopsychologist at the Laurentian University. ?My primary philosophical goal had been to discern the commonalities that exist between the sciences and to integrate to the fundamental concepts,? he writes in a statement posted on a personal website.

After having treated scores of patients suffering from mental disorders Persinger had come to realise that supernatural sensations had something to do with electromagnetic patterns in the brain. In 1987, in a controversial book titled Neuropsychological Base of God Beliefs, he proposed that intense religious experiences carry a hefty emotional charge originating in the limbic system. His idea was that the sensation described as ?having a religious or spiritual experience? was merely a side-effect of our bicameral brain?s feverish activities. The book concluded tossing the idea of applying mild electromagnetic fields to the brain to induce some sort of spiritual orientation.

The seemingly preposterous idea almost remained dormant for nearly a decade until neuroscientists from the University of California in San Diego claimed to have discovered a ?god module? in the brain. The region which was believed to be responsible for man?s evolutionary instinct to believe in religion was actually spotted in epileptics.

The study on an unusual group of epileptics ? known to have profoundly spiritual experience during seizures ? claimed to have located a circuit of nerves in the temporal lobes which appeared to be electrically active when the patients mused on God. Dr Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, head of the research team, said in the Society of Neuroscience meet in October 1997 that the study involved comparing 40 epilepsy patients with normal people and a group who said they were intensely religious.

These patients said they had frequently experienced intense mystical episodes and often became obsessed with spirituality. Electrical monitors on their skin ? a standard test for activity in the brain?s temporal lobes ? showed that the epileptics as well as the deeply religious displayed a similar response when shown words invoking spiritual belief.

In his book Phantoms in the Brain Ramachandran made the case for a dedicated neural machinery in the limbic part of the brain (the temporal lobes located just above the ears) which is responsible for arousal of mystical and religious feelings in our brain. If this part gets stimulated, according to Ramachandran, a person will have a variety of manifestations that include an obsessive preoccupation with religion and the intensified and narrow emotional responses that are characteristics of a mystical experiences.

Such people are also found to suffer epileptic seizures originating from the temporal lobe. As a result, epileptics have historically tended to be the people with profound mystical experiences. The Russian novelist Fyodr Dostoevsky, for example, wrote of ?touching god? during epileptic seizures. Other epileptic includes St Paul, Joan of Arc, Vincent van Gogh, St Theresa of Avila.

Evolutionary biologist E.. Wilson has surmised in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge that belief in God, which is a common trait found in human societies around the world and throughout history, may be built into the brain?s complex electrical circuitry as a Darwinian adaptation to encourage cooperation between individuals. Other experts like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have suggested that religion is simply a byproduct of cultural or genetic evolutionary processes that arose to help bind groups of our hunter-gatherer ancestors together, offering them a survival advantage.

While evolutionary biologists chose to home in on a Darwininan explanation for religious experiences, Persinger claimed that he had been able to induce mystical and paranormal events ? the perception of an all-surrounding light glow, images and vision, including visitations by a supernatural being ? in a laboratory. Not very different from what Ramachandran had discovered, Persinger called his attention to the instability of the temporal lobes and how most of us have brief electrical outbursts, or microseizures, in those regions. What Persinger had used ? on more than 900 volunteers ? was a weak magnetic field (roughly the amount generated by a computer monitor) applied through a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation on the temporal lobes. According to him, four out of five people who had allowed the experiment on them felt a spectral or an invisible presence. His conclusion: the visions of gods, demons and religious revelations occur when electrical brainstorms are coupled with our emotions and cultural expectations.

Not everyone accepted Persinger?s thesis that simplistic apparitions could equal what religious devotees or mystics experience.

Most strikingly, Andrew Newberg and the now deceased Eugene d?Aquili, neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had realised that the rare and fleeting experience would be impossible to study in a laboratory. Unlike Persinger, they decided to focus instead on meditation, believing that it transported people to the supreme spiritual bliss.

Without much problem managed to find eight skilled meditators practising Tibetan Buddhism who were willing to undergo brain imaging. Incidentally, Tibetan Buddhists, headed by the enlightened Dalai Lama, had never been at odds with science. For many Buddhist monks, the interest in science is focused on an intense curiosity about the workings of the brain. A monk spends hours in meditation every day, and highly trained among them report being able to focus on a single object for hours without distraction. Deep meditation is believed to offer them a feeling of compassion and calmness.

In his test Newberg asked nine ?highly experienced? monks to settle down with their rugs, cushions and prayer wheels. Before they began to meditate, an intravenous tube was inserted into their bodies so that a radioactive isotope could be directed as they were resting, and again?after they pulled on a string in a prearranged signal ? as they reached a peak meditative state. The isotope remained in the brain long enough so that once the meditation was over the subjects could be put under the sophisticated SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scanner to image what goes on inside brain at the moment.

Once the tests were completed Newberg and d?Aquili compared the activity of the subjects? brains during meditation with scans taken when they were simply at rest. They found intense activity in the parts of the brain that regulates attention (prefrontal cortex) ? a sign of the meditator?s deep concentration. Even more astounding was the altered activity in a brain region (part of the parietal lobe, towards the top and back of the brain) that normally orients us and tells us where our bodies are in space.

The different pattern of brain activity in the particular area may explain why meditators feel transported out of the physical world and into a spiritual realm that seems no less real. ?As the boundaries between self and physical surroundings go away, the meditator feels one with something larger, whether a religious community, the world as a whole, or ultimately, God,? Newberg and d?Aquili later wrote in the book Why God Won?t Go Away.

Newberg and d?Aquili?s findings indicated that religious and spiritual experiences are extremely complex procedures, involving emotions, thoughts, sensations and behaviours. They seem far too rich and diverse to derive from a small spot or module in the brain. Moreover, the research suggested that links between spiritualism and various brain disorders is rather tenuous because not all epileptics or schizophrenics report mystic experiences. Mystics are usually born with exceptional mental capacities associated with creativity or vision.

According to Newberg, the reductionist approach to religion ? adopted by Persinger and his ilk ? had its limitations. The limitations became even more evident when Granqvist went on to replicate Persinger?s experiment in a large number of volunteers.

He found that the presence or absence of a magnetic field had no relationship with any religious or otherwise mysterious experience reported by the participants. He says he does not know which neurological mechanism can generate those experiences.

Granqvist?s failure to stimulate spiritualism makes one thing clear: the origin of mysticism in our brain won?t be so easy to pin down.