She came up to the third floor at the end of the work day. Her boss asked her to close up at nine. A quiet settled on the store, the kind of eerie quiet when the space is bereft of any soul. However, on this night, this wasn’t exactly true. There, by the electrical room sat a young man who didn’t even acknowledge her presence. He wasn’t a customer, at least not from this era, as his appearance would vanish right in a matter of seconds. I stood listening to her story, about the ghost, who seemed to reflect the furniture store’s previous owners. It was called MacDonald’s, a seed and feed store, and now, almost a hundred years later, patrons and employees alike still claim that customers from the past are still visiting to this day. Scientists disagree. They believe something in the electrical room probably stimulated her temporal lobe.
Religious stories have been with us for more than a millennia. They’re the reason why we fear going to hell and pray to powerful gods and angels to save us. But never before in history have we been able to study these stories with new perspectives from the brain. The documentary, “God on the Brain” (Horizon) tells the story of how epileptic patients have powerful visions of God, angels and hell while having seizures. Their accounts are reminiscent of those from ages past, where the mentally ill or healthy, plead for others to believe in their visions of Heaven or Hell. This time, however, they are believed wholeheartedly except by doctors investigating the temporal lobe rather than God.
By far, one investigator comes to the forefront of this research, Montreal researcher, Dr. Michael Persinger. He claims to have found an experiment on how to track electrical impulses in the brain and, consequently, hallucinations. He has constructed a helmet to deliver electrical impulses to the temporal lobe to see what happens when that area is lit up. The result is a positive correlation. Parsinger calls it the “Presence of Other” and likens it to a spiritual experience like sensing God in the room. He even tests it on world-renown atheist Richard Dawkins.
What better way to disprove religious experiences than to show how the world’s foremost atheist could have a religious vision too? But it doesn’t work. Dawkins can’t be inspired to see God even if you inspire him through electrical impulses to the brain. But for others, the experiment works. They do sense God in the room and scientists have one more reason to believe that religious visions aren’t paranormal. Persinger concludes that temporal lobe sensitivity causes subjects to sense a God in the room when, in truth, there isn’t any .
Back in Ottawa, I ask the woman a key question about her apparition. What was he wearing? Surprisingly, she said, he wasn’t dressed in 19th century attire at all. His clothing looked normal. Not a ghost, I thought, but just a guy from her psyche that came out during a stressed out night. She doesn’t hesitate to tell me, before I leave, that a fire occurred in the electrical room the day after, right where she saw the ghost.
I realize now that the damage to the electrical wiring could have caused a field strong enough to stimulate her temporal lobes too. She didn’t see a ghost, but had an hallucination as Dr. Persinger predicted. Fascinating.