(This is a repost of an old post and that was a chapter in the short book Brain Function and Religion)
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”– Picasso
Mysticism and spirituality involve the brain naturally if unusually functioning and processing sensory information in particular ways. I wrote about this in the below two previous posts:
What mystical experiences tell us about human knowledge
The relationship between schizophrenia and religious visions
With their brains functioning differently than that of adult humans, and young children and non-human animals perceiving the world differently, children and non-human animals appear to be able to, if perhaps not more able to, think in spiritual ways.
Psychology professors Lisa Miller Ph.D. of Columbia University and Diana Divec Ph.D. of Yale have argued that children are hardwired for mystical thinking and that this type of thinking plays a crucial role in their mental development. Child psychologist Rebecca Nye Ph.D. notes that "a growing body of research demonstrates that children’s spirituality is not something esoteric, nor something exclusive to precocious children. It is also not confined to specific religious practices, nor do we need to look at the early lives of saints to understand it."
Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes, author of the seminal 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett wrote that children’s brains lack the mature cognitive structuring of adults that normally suppresses mystical thinking in our daily lives. Jaynes says it is not a coincidence that many religious “seers” were traditionally children. This also indicates that they often grow out of the spiritual or mystical way of thinking.
Notice how often it is the child in stories who has transcendental experiences that adults do not. From Peter Pan to The Exorcist, The Wizard of Oz to Little Red Riding Hood. In The Shining, five-year-old Danny experiences epileptic-like seizures where "It’s like when I go to sleep, he shows me things." In Peter Pan, Peter’s childhood adventures are forgotten when he becomes an adult. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy embarks on her fantastical journey while unconscious, literally entering a different state of consciousness.
Further, children psychologically and optically perceive the world differently than adults. The following are two particularly fascinating examples:
Adults’ brains combine senses to make one holistic perception of the physical world. However, young children’s brains keep separate each sense, including eye-to-eye. The result is that adults can identify some physical qualities in a scene that young kids cannot, and kids can identify physical qualities that adults cannot.
For kids under a certain age, what they know is more important than what they see. When asked to draw a coffee cup in front of them with the handle hidden from view on the the other side, an adult will draw a cup as seen without a handle. The young child, who can’t see but knows there is a handle on the cup, will draw the cup with a handle on the side. The child will often also draw steam rising from the cup even if the cup is empty.
The question to ponder is which drawing is more accurate. Consider that Picasso, who trained himself over the years to draw like a child, was a pioneer in cubism. His cubist paintings show the three-dimensional sides of a figure in two dimensions.
.
Non-Human Animals
While humans cannot fully understand what non-human animals perceive, and their perception involves sensory information beyond human sight and hearing, several medical scientists believe numerous non-human animal species, such as primates and dogs, have the capacity for spiritual and mystical experiences.
Like young children, non-human animals lack the advanced cognitive structuring that adult humans use, relying more on the emotional parts of their brains to process information. Some experts suggest this allows non-human animals to have a more immediate experience of their physical world.
Research indicates that spiritual experiences originate from deep, primitive areas of the human brain—areas shared with other animals with similar brain structures. University of Kentucky neurology professor Kevin Nelson MD and University of Colorado evolutionary biology professor Marc Bekoff Ph.D. both believe that animals can have spiritual experiences similar to those of humans.
Miller writes: “It is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences . . . In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth’s gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch. There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain.”
,