The Daily Galaxy reports that researcher Andrew Newberg is planning to do some research on why astronauts often have a ‘cosmic’ epiphany when in space. The obvious example that most people are familiar with is Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, whose experience in space led him to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in order to study other modes of consciousness and knowing. But there are others, including Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart.
Their experiences, along with dozens of other similar experiences described by other astronauts, intrigue scientists who study the brain. This “Overview Effect”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected, sounds somewhat similar to certain religious experiences described by Buddhist monks, for example. Where does it come from and why?
Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/physician with a background in space medicine, is learning how to identify the markers of someone who has experienced space travel. He says there is a palpable difference in someone who has been in space, and he wants to know why. Newberg specializes in finding the neurological markers of brains in states of altered consciousness: Praying nuns, transcendental mediators, and others in focused or “transcendent” states.
Newberg can actually pinpoint regions in subjects’ gray matter that correlate to these circumstances, and now he plans to use his expertise to find how and why the Overview Effect occurs. He is setting up advanced neurological scanning instruments that can head into space to study – live – the brain functions of space travelers. If this Overview Effect is a real, physiological phenomenon — he wants to watch it unfold.
Mitchell describes his experience in his book The Way of the Explorer, which has just recently been reissued by New Page Books (Amazon US and UK):
What I saw out the window was all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, all that I had longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be. It was all there suspended in the cosmos on that fragile little sphere. What I experienced was a grand epiphany accompanied by exhilaration, an event I would later refer to in terms that could not be more foreign to my upbringing in west Texas…from that moment on my life would take a radically different course.
What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed at the time inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is.
John Horgan devotes plenty of ink to the “neurotheology” research of Andrew Newberg in his book Rational Mysticism (Amazon US & UK) – for obvious reasons, considering the title. However, not all commentators are so enamoured with Newberg’s conclusions, with the authors of the contra-materialist tome Irreducible Mind (Amazon US & UK Amazon sellers) describing his model of mystical states as “a neurophysiological fairy tale, concocted by means of radical extrapolation beyond the primitive basis afforded by contemporary cognitive neuroscience, and spelled out in far greater detail than is warranted by anything we really know about mystical states themselves.”
Might discuss this more at some point, it’s an interesting topic.
