system: for example, that one has seen God, experienced dissolution of the self,
or been at one with the universe. Livingston also recognized that in some
experiments the same stimuli that incited religious experience in already
religious subjects and/or in a religious setting failed to generate such experi-
ence in non-religious individuals and/or in a non-religious setting. He there-
fore added more details to his basic model, including the role of prior
knowledge. An even greater challenge is posed by the fact that while only a
small percent of the population has ever had intense religious experience
(either meditative or ecstatic) of the sort Livingston discussed, the majority
of people in the United States and in most parts of the world describe
themselves as religious believers. Drawing on Whitehouse’s Modes Theory,
Livingston identified a variety of social and psychological factors that make
religious adherence attractive to the majority of people who do not havefirst-
hand religious experience.
7.3 THE LOBES THEORY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCEIn a series of articles (Czachesz, 2012a, 2012c, 2013), I elaborated on Living-
ston’s suggestions and formulated the“lobes theory of religious experience.”
The Lobes Theory is informed by a number of more recent empirical studies,
such as Newberg and colleagues’(2006) work on glossolalia, Azari and her
colleagues’(2005) experiments on Protestant Bible reading, and newer medi-
tation studies (Khalsa et al., 2009).
Importantly, the studies just mentioned focus on religious experiences that
are not exclusive: indeed, practically all adherents of certain religious
movements are having such (moderate) experience on a regular basis.
While Ifind Livingston’s connection between types of experience and brain
areas intriguing, the identification of“frontal lobe”experience with non-
theistic religion seems too narrow. For example, Khalsa and colleagues
(2009) found deactivation in the superior parietal lobe (a characteristic
change associated with the dissolution of the self), but no increased activity
in the prefrontal cortex (typically associated with conscious executive con-
trol) during chanting meditation. We can explain this if we consider that
participants in this experiment performedguided meditation: they were
listening to a CD that led them through the exercise. An earlier study on
guided meditation even found deactivation in this area (Lou et al., 1999).
Further, focused attention on texts is typical practice in Western religions,
which Azari and colleagues (2005) associated with increased frontal-lobe
activity and intense experiences of being connected to superhuman agency
(God or Christ). Newberg and colleagues (2006), in turn, examined the brains
of believers practicing a dramatic form of glossolalia“involving singing, vocal
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