Medical Reason for Visions? | The Story of God

Ian Ball had never been a religious person. He never really thought about God. But scarring from brain surgery brought on a series of visions that made him question everything.

"It's carried on for about three or four weeks. About how often? Every day. Every, every morning I felt like I was being so transported and being revealed fundamental truths about the nature of reality. One of which is that all inanimate objects are conscious. All beings are conscious, including walls, tables, and chairs, which seemed very counterintuitive to me. I mean, who — you know, how can you have consciousness without the brain?

The other thing that seemed to be happening was that everything is bound together in one thing by an endless unconditional love. There was this huge wave of emotion that came with this experience, which was really powerful and uplifting."

"Are you religious?"

"I wasn't. Agnostic. I didn't know how to understand it. I don't know if it was God. You don't know that it wasn't. I don't know that it wasn't. I don't know what it was."

Ian wanted to find out whether his visions had a medical cause, so he joined the Cambridge University study conducted by Dr. Joseph Tennant. It was searching for a connection between epilepsy and mystical experiences.

"That's the scan of the tumor that was the cause of the seizures I was having. So, I mean, as you can see in the scan, the growth from the skull with the left temporal lobe and so this is pushing up against Ian's brain. They had to cut all that section away. But obviously, when you do that, you leave a bit of scarring on the left temporal lobe. So it seems something about the temporal lobe is potentially capable of producing spiritual experiences."

"You have not come to any sort of conclusions yet on it."

"We can't induce a seizure on someone of a mystical nature and hope that we can get a good scan of it under an MRI. We don't know when these seizures are happening."

"Can't you come to some sort of conclusion behind that?"

"Uh, not quite. I mean, drop right — God exists? Joan of Arc? Saint Bernadette? Do you think that there is a possibility that they experienced this sort of epilepsy?"

"It is possible. So there was a neurological paper that speculated that Paul's vision on the road to Damascus was epilepsy. But I mean, so what? Because the thing that occurred afterwards was Paul was moved to go preach and become Saint Paul."

"Right, as a scientist, I can't tell you whether these are metaphysical or not. The thing we can look at is to say that something in the brain is capable of producing religious experience and can do so even when it's not intending to."

"All right. Here's the 64 thousand question: how has it changed?"

"Well, I think, you know, it did remove any sense that I had that the universe is a meaningless, cold place. I think it gave a kind of foundation of meaning for me. And I think this idea of was it a revelation or was it just an aberration in the brain — I've come to the conclusion it doesn't really matter. Because the thing that really sticks with me is that feeling of endless unconditional love. And I don't think that really matters where it came from: a divine force or from my damaged brain."

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