Let me state once again why Fr. Ivo's posts in this thread are compounding the ignorance of Goanetters regarding neuroscience, and making them more scientifically illiterate.
Fr. Ivo does not understand that science has nothing to do with the supernatural concepts of Christianity or any other religion. He keeps trying to mix his religion with science, and misinforms readers in the process. This is also true of his latest attempt at describing what is written in some book that he has read. He seems to believe that what is written in that book are scientific facts. This is a false belief. The book "Spiritual Brain" written by a neuroscientist called Mario Beauregard and a journalist called Denyse O'Leary is not a scientific book. It is a book about the religious and philosophical beliefs of the neuroscientist Mario Beauregard. Anybody can write such a book, and get it published, because it does not have to go through a rigorous scientific peer review process. The fact that Beauregard happens to be a neuroscientist is incidental. His religious beliefs have no more credibility than those of anybody else. As I have said before, Beauregard has published two short peer-reviewed scientific papers wherein he has merely recorded the activity of the brain during mystical experiences in Carmelite nuns. That is all. These recordings do not justify a belief or non-belief in supernatural entities such as God or soul. They do not compel anybody, let alone a neuroscientist, to believe anything about materialism or spiritualism. Despite this, in their book Beauregard and O'Leary make wild unscientific speculations about the former's supernatural religious and philosophical beliefs. None of these speculations can ever be experimentally verified or falsified. That is why they are unscientific. They do not contribute anything to the genuine neuroscientific literature. Fr. Ivo has unfortunately been fooled by these unwarranted speculations, and is trying to mislead Goanetters into believing that they are scientific conclusions of a neuroscientist. He also keeps bringing up the word "mediated" without understanding its meaning in my field of neuroscience. He puts all kinds of words in my mouth in doing so. The word "mediated" has a very specific meaning in biology. In the present context it means that if you block the specific brain activity, you will prevent or abort the spiritual experiences that are mediated by it. Of course, not being a neuroscientist Fr. Ivo is not expected to know this. Cheers, Santosh --- On Wed, 3/4/09, Fr. Ivo C da Souza <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dr.Mario has published a book on The Spiritual Mind. > He describes there his experiments and his scientific > conclusions. >............................................. >But he forgets that "mediated" does not mean "created" by the > brain, as Dr.Mario has clearly discussed in his book, which > was written in the light of brain-imaging studies of his > doctoral students. >
