Spirituality, Science and Mental Health

Anyway, eventually I ended up teaching a course about spirituality at a local charity for the disabled. The trouble is that I have never been able to define exactly what spirituality is. But I do think it exists, and believe I know what it does to me.

Let me describe the symptoms. During spiritual experiences the hair on the back of my neck prickles and I may want to cry. If it's particularly acute I can get a deep longing for a place I hardly dare hope exists where there's a final home, peace and healing. These feelings must exist in other people or Somewhere Over the Rainbow wouldn't have been such a big hit.

I'm a Catholic and on and off I've gone to Mass. Spiritual experiences have happened to me often in church, but I don't think the spirituality we all share has necessarily got much to do with religion. It seems to me rather that some people with strong family traditions express their spirituality in cultural forms, and my cultural background is Catholicism. By contrast my great friends Mahesh and Chandrakant who run our corner shop are Hindus, and it's astonishing how much we share in talking about this stuff. We've decided in conversations punctuated by sales of voddy to youths that spiritual experience even of the most mundane sort makes us want to be better people.

What are the triggers which set off these symptoms outside church? I get it when I look at stuff or hear music I like sometimes. Matt Cardle gave me the tingle factor when he sang The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face on X Factor. A spiritual experience which I have to say, I do not get from the Birdy Song. The Neasden Temple and Michaelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's Basilica, Rome blew my mind as well. Sometimes making love does it. Taking a picture of a spider in a dewy web a few weeks ago did it.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists decided it would have a shot at defining spirituality.  It said:

"Spirituality involves experiences of:

• a deep-seated sense of meaning and purpose in life
• a sense of belonging
• a sense of connection of 'the deeply personal with the universal'
• acceptance, integration and a sense of wholeness.''

It's good to see that the College is taking the issue seriously – it didn't use to. They don't use the word 'God' though. I find this more than strange when a large number of service users would want to say that there is at least some anecdotal evidence for the existence of a deity and its involvement in their spiritual lives, but there you go. The horse of psychiatry still rides with the blinkers of Freud.

Is there any hard science to back all this spirituality stuff up though, or is it all wishy-washy airy fairy nonsense? Well guys, it seems to me that Freud was wrong when he dismissed it all as neurosis (and most of the other sometimes contradictory things he said about it.) The neurological professors and their post-graduate students have been buzzing about it for a while now and have identified the long sought-after ‘God spot'  (as other parts of the brain look after other functions) which is responsible for spiritual experiences. This means that, in my best Bill Bryson terms, if you stick a needle in someone's head in the right place he will have one of them. As an example of the media coverage, The Independent's science section reported on it in their article Belief and the brain's 'God spot'

If this theory is correct, there would be big implications. If we all have this spirituality system in our brains, can't it go wrong? I'm particularly interested because I had a period of religious mania in my teens. Many service users express themselves in religious language and some recall spiritual visions or hallucinations. The discovery of clear neurological pathways for spirituality might offer insights into what is going on in their minds, and encourage the development of drugs specifically aimed at the areas of the brain involved.  It may be that medication could also help militant atheists who may similarly be suffering from a kind of colour-blindness and who now seem to me to be flying in the face of science.

Next big question.  Does the fact that spiritual experiences are ‘simply' part of a brain mechanism make them an illusion? I don’t believe so. All our organs have been shaped by evolution to have a necessary function in our anatomy. Why should evolution bother with the existence of ears if there were nothing to listen to?  And if I have the misfortune to be deaf, it does not mean that sound does not exist or that ears have no purpose.

I find all this rather heartening and very exciting.  For most of my life I have hitched my wagon to hopeless causes of one sort or another and I always thought my most stupid one was religion in a secular age. I suppose it just shows you how scientific thought comes round, and the certainties of yesterday are no longer those of today.  

So what has my bitter little first paragraph got to do with spirituality?  A lot I think, because I believe that the evidence is now in favour of saying that our brains are hard-wired to respond to a spirituality which inspires to goodness, and part of goodness is justice, even, dare one say it, love.  The injustice we are concerned about when considering how the disabled generally and the mentally ill in particular are treated, is a symptom of a deep spiritual malaise at the heart of our governance.  A better understanding of the 'God spot' could just possibly make a difference.