Mary nodded. “I saw the cover story about that in Time.”
Veronica politely shook her head. “It was Newsweek, actually. Anyway, their work combines with Persinger’s and mine. They found that the limbic system lights up during religious experiences—and it’s the limbic system that tags things as significant. You can show a parent a hundred babies, but they’ll only react profoundly to the sight of their own baby. That’s because the limbic system has tagged that particular visual input as important. Well, with the limbic system afire during religious experiences, the whole thing gets tagged as overwhelmingly important.
“That’s why religious experiences never sound good in the telling: it’s just like me telling you my boyfriend is the best-looking guy in the world, and you going, yeah, sure. So I open my purse and show you a picture of him, and I think you’ll be convinced, right? You’ll go, wow, he is a hunk. But if I did that, you won’t have that response. He’s handsome beyond compare to me because my limbic system has tagged his appearance as having special significance for me. But there’s no way I can express that to you via words or pictures. Same thing with religious experiences: no matter how much someone tells you about their own one, about how life-changing and momentous it was, you just can’t get that same feeling about it.”
Ponter had clearly been listening intently, alternately frowning his wide mouth and rolling his continuous blond eyebrow up his doubly arched browridge. “And you believe,” he said, “that this thing your people have and mine do not—this religion—is tied to the functioning of your brains?”
“Just so!” said Veronica. “A combination of parietal-lobe and limbic-system activity. Look at what happens in Alzheimer’s patients: people who’ve been devout their whole lives often lose interest in religion when they come down with Alzheimer’s disease. Well, one of the first things Alzheimer’s does is cripple the limbic system.”
She paused, then continued. “It’s long been known that so-called religious experiences are tied to brain chemistry, since hallucinogenic drugs can induce them—which is why such drugs form the basis of ritual in so many tribal cultures. And we’ve long known that the limbic system might be one of the keys: some epileptics with seizures restricted to the limbic system have incredibly profound religious experiences. For instance, Dostoevsky was an epileptic, and he wrote about ‘touching God’ during his seizures. Saint Paul, Joan of Arc, Saint Theresa of Avila, and Emanuel Sweden-borg were all probably epileptics, too.”
Ponter was leaning now against the corner of a filing cabinet, unself-consciously shimmying left and right, scratching his back. “Those are the names of people?” he asked.
Veronica was briefly taken aback, then nodded. “Dead people. Famous religious people of the past.”
Mary took pity on Ponter at this point and explained “epilepsy” for him. Ponter had never heard of anything like it, and Mary wondered—with the shiver she got whenever she contemplated it—whether epileptic genes were yet another thing the Neanderthals had dispassionately purged from their gene pool.
“But even if you’re not epileptic,” Veronica said, “you can get that effect. Ritual dancing, chanting, and so on have been independently developed over and over by religions around the globe. Why? Because the deliberate, repetitive, stylized body movements during such ceremonies make the limbic system tag them as being of special significance.”
“This is all well and good,” said Mary, “but—”
“But you’re wondering what it has to do with the price of tea in China, right?”
Ponter looked completely baffled, and Mary smiled. “Just a metaphor,” she said. “It means, ‘With the topic at hand.’ ”
“And the answer,” said Veronica, “is that we now understand well enough how the brain creates religious experiences to reliably reproduce them in the lab…at least in Homo sapiens. But what I’m dying to find out is whether I can induce one in Ponter.”
“My own curiosity is not fatal,” said Ponter, smiling, “but nonetheless I would like it assuaged.”
Veronica looked at her watch again, then frowned. “My grad student hasn’t shown up yet, unfortunately, and the equipment is quite delicate—it needs to be recalibrated daily. Mary, I don’t suppose you’d be willing…?”
Mary felt her spine stiffen. “Willing to what? ”
“To take the first run; obviously, I need to know that the equipment is functioning properly before I can take any results from Ponter as significant.” She held up a hand, as if to forestall an objection. “With this new equipment, it only takes five minutes to do a complete run.”
Mary felt her heart pounding. This wasn’t something she wanted to investigate scientifically. Like the late, lamented Stephen Jay Gould, she’d always believed science and religion were—to use his musical phrase—“nonoverlapping magesteria,” each having relevance, but one having nothing to do with the other. “I’m really not sure that—”
“Oh, don’t worry; it’s not dangerous! The field I use for the transcranial magnetic stimulation is just one microtesla. I rotate it counterclockwise about the temporal lobes, and like I said, almost all of the people—of the Homo sapiens, I should say—who try this have a mystical experience.”
“What…what’s it like?” asked Mary.
Veronica said, “Excuse us” to Ponter, and she led Mary away from him—her test subject—so that the Neanderthal would not overhear. “The experience usually involves the perception that there’s a sentient being standing behind them or near them,” said Veronica. “Now, the form of that experience depends a lot on the individual’s own preconceptions. You put a UFO fanatic in there, and he’ll sense the presence of an alien. Put in a Baptist, and she might say she sees Christ himself. Someone who’s lost somebody recently may see that dead person. Others say they’ve been touched by angels or God. Of course, the experience is totally controlled here, and the test subjects are fully aware that they are in a lab. But imagine the same effect being triggered late at night when our friends Bubba and Clete are out in the middle of nowhere. Or while you’re sitting in a church or mosque or synagogue. It really would knock your socks off.”
“I really don’t want…”
“Please,” said Veronica. “I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to check a Neanderthal—and the baseline has to be set first.”
Mary took a deep breath. Reuben had indeed certified the process as safe, and, well, she certainly didn’t want to let down this eager young woman who thought so highly of her.
“Please, Mary,” said Veronica again. “If I’m right about what the results will be, this will be a huge step forward for me.”
Canadian women taking the world by storm. How could she say no?
“All right,” said Mary reluctantly. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter Seven
“Our strength is our wanderlust; our curiosity; our exploring, searching, soaring spirit…”
“Are you all right?” said Veronica Shannon over the speaker next to Mary’s ear. “Comfortable?”
“I’m fine,” said Mary, speaking into a little microphone that had been clipped to her shirt. She was seated on a padded chair inside a darkened chamber about the size of a two-piece bathroom. The walls, as she’d seen before the lights were turned out, were covered with little pyramids of gray foam rubber, presumably to deaden sound.