The left frontal lobe enables one to peacefully detach from the striving towards individual gain
The frontal lobes for each hemisphere only negate the posterior regions rather than resist, enabling something new to arise. To take an example from the left hemisphere. The relative detachment from the body displayed by the left hemisphere (The right hemisphere sees the body as something we live, while the for the left it is devitalized), and its tendency to abstraction (The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context), normally serve its purposeful striving towards individual gain. The left frontal lobe, however, brings distance, and allows the experience of the peaceful detachment from the material realm and ‘emptying out’ described by experts in meditation as a mystical experience. Again this is no negation, but an elaboration, of what the left hemisphere affords. There is not likely to be ‘a God spot’ in the brain, and the area is fraught with problems of terminology and methodology: but there are areas that are often implicated as accompaniments of religious experience.
An appropriately cautious and objective review of the literature to date by Michael Trimble concludes that there is a slow accumulation of evidence in favor of religious experience being more closely linked with the ‘non-dominant’ hemisphere, especially the posterior right hemisphere (temporoparietal region). But, to illustrate my point, the other region that is implicated lies in the left frontal lobe—specifically because of its power to inhibit the posterior left hemisphere (temporoparietal region), the seat of language and of sequential analysis.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 183). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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