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During my career I had occasion to suggest some patients out of their hysterical paralysis. I was trained by doctors who took pride in doing that as fast as possibile, to keep patients out of the hospital and save them other side effects of being paralyzed, so I did what they did, which is to quite frankly manipulate the patient, to use their ignorance of how a paralyzed limb is supposed to flop around and show them how they are in fact demonstrating strength by holding some position, then encouraging them to push that particular strength further. One keeps it up until they have functional strength again, even if they are still somewhat nuts.

That’s treating my patient as an object. I’m performing on them as surely as if I were doing surgery. I am the one doing something. They are a very predictable object. I am depending on them to want to get better. Some want that more than others, but everybody wants it some, so assuming that is not assuming too much. Assuming that I am the one who is manipulating someone into being slain in the Spirit, though, is something else. I know how I manipulate someone into being strong. It’s a very mechanical thing to show people their strength and ask for more of the same, even predict more of the same as the patient comes out of his or her mind’s decision to be weak. What am I doing if I talk them into being slain in the Spirit? As I said, “suggestion” is not enough of an explanation that I am doing this, not the Spirit, whatever the Spirit is.

What is it people are looking for when they are slain in the Spirit? They want to give up something to God, power, life, something. They’ve seen others do it. They want the same, but only if they can believe it’s real. OK, so someone comes along who encourages them to be slain in the Spirit. Is that person doing it? Derren Brown sees it that way, as if to say, “look, I did this, not the Holy Spirit”, because he thinks his performance does it, just as I think my performance lets people drop their hysteria and embrace their strength. I’m a catalyst. So is Derren Brown. But is that the whole story, that I did this to someone else?

No it’s not. People wanted it done. That’s the most important factor. I objectify my patients in seeing myself as knowing how to help them. Derren Brown objectifies his subjects in seeing himself as knowing how to fool them. But it’s not the whole story.

What makes people be slain in the Spirit? What makes people speak in tongues? I don’t know that. I know how people move muscles strongly if the appropriate pathways are intact, even if hysteria has them temporarily ignoring them. Spiritual experiences are something else. I’ve had many spiritual experiences, but I’ve never fallen down and never spoken in tongues. I related my experience with the former. With the latter I’ve been curious to fake speaking in tongues, but I can’t keep it up as I’ve seen others do it. It’s not authentically spiritual, though it is authentically the best I can do faking it, which makes me doubt that large numbers of people fake it, which was something I wanted to know. I wanted to know it’s not just a person’s will. I’m also confident from watching the process in myself and in others it’s not something that someone else does to them as an object.

How do you or Derren Brown know that the Holy Spirit wasn’t using him to let people feel what it was like to be slain in the Spirit, something I bet wasn’t fully reversed by “de-converting” them after the show? You don’t. It’s only if you objectify the subjects and say Derren Brown did this to them, not the Spirit that you can make the claim that this experience is meaningful about the possibility of God or the Spirit. What’s going on in the subject that makes him or her more than a piece of furniture in this process?

Evolutionary psychologists describe a number of needs we have for God. I haven’t seen one call this a God-shaped void, but I like calling it that. It’s no proof for God. In fact it might make it easier to see spiritual experiences as something natural that the brain does rather than supernatural that God does. Something in us reaches for a God that either is there or isn’t. Theists say see, there must be a God because we reach for Him, yet that God might be contained entirely in my mind. Atheists say see, someone like Derek Brown fools people. There’s nothing there. Or similarly with whatever other foolishness people do for religion. None of that is evidence either way, except that the answer to what best fills our God-shaped void is not an easy one.

It takes a trained examiner to tell the difference between hysterical paralysis and paralysis due to brain damage. The existence of one doesn’t negate the other, but says that there’s more than one way weakness happens. Likewise it takes training to tell the difference between hysteria and conscious faking or a problem in the brain and one in the limb.

I wasn’t saying that Derren Brown was oversimplifying in pointing out how people take an anecdote about a Ouija board and stake their belief in a spirit on that. That is exactly what people do, on many subjects, including what it means that some spiritual experiences can be brought out in situations where someone is just following a script. It isn’t simple.

I like Ian Rowland’s approach to psychic debunking. He doesn’t say that he can disprove psychic powers, but he does say that he can show non-psychic techniques which produce effects which are at least as good. Similarly Derren Brown’s stuff cannot disprove the Holy Spirit, but it does show that subjective experience is not conclusive evidence for a Holy Spirit. I’m going to try and find the time to blog about this article in New Scientist, which is about the power of subjective experience, so I’m not discounting it as a serious phenomenon.

I’d also disagree about Brown seeing his subjects as mere objects. Despite the hypnosis section being extremely critical of the notion of an altered state of consciousness, Brown prefaces his section on how to perform hypnosis with a long section on the dangers and ethics of working with other people. It’s precisely because people are not objects and not simplistic that he sees hypnosis as a potentially dangerous activity. Even if it is all suggestion you’re still leaving your subject vulnerable and exposed. Other places in the book make it clear that people are not open books.

If I give the impression that Derren Brown has a simplified model of the mind then I’ve done him a disservice. To a large extent he has no overall model of the mind, at least not in this book, but what he does have is an appreciation of its complexity.

I’ve admired the many professionals who can simulate the supposed ESP of cold reading and predicting drawings. I wonder how much practice it takes to use one’s words so strategically. I think I like being free in what I say too much to work at fooling people this way, but I’m glad there are some who can say such things are suggestion and ordinary perception, not magic.

The thing is that not everything Brown does is so controlled. I was especially interested in his show Messiah from 2 years ago where he induces people, dumb Americans of course, to be “slain in the Spirit”. Brown and anyone else can wave a hand and say, “You see, it’s all suggestion.” But how does he know that? It’s one thing to do cold reading and say here’s how I did it, and I can do it again any day of the week, showing that I’m not extraordinary in any way by being able to do this. Talking people into being slain in the Spirit, though, isn’t all contained in Brown’s head. Something has to happen in his subjects. What? With cold reading, it’s understandable how people are fooled. With being slain in the Spirit, I don’t understand it at all, and I’m a neurologist.
Do people really just lean themselves back semi-voluntarily and let go? Is that it? I don’t think that’s sufficient explanation. I think that’s our natural tendency toward oversimplification to see it that way.

I’ve visited charismatic churches when there was a wave of people being slain in the Spirit, along with the “holy laughter” craze in the mid-nineties. It was an amazing sight. The response in the congregration, more than a hundred people, was so complete that at the end of the service the only people standing were the pastor and me. I tried it once. I was open to letting happen whatever would happen. I wasn’t going to push myself back. I wasn’t going to resist. The only thing that happened was I had a sense from the Spirit that lives in me that was something like, “We don’t need this.” OK, I’m not in charge here. The person with his hand on my forehead tried fairly hard. Eventually he gave up. Most of us know we’re not in charge of the whole damn world eventually. It’s too bad. I could have done so much more marketable research if I were in charge of my subjects’ responses.

But Derren Brown sees himself as being in charge, and his subjects as being mere objects. It’s not necessarily so. Yes, people can be fooled, but then what? How many people’s lives are actually run by their cognitive abilities? As frustrated as I get with the prejudice in people’s opinions, most people behave much better than the malice that comes out of their mouths. There are a lot of variables at work there, even spiritual ones if one has an open mind.

Do people let themselves be slain in the Spirit? Why? What are they looking for? Is there in fact something that helps us both in surrendering and in where to go from there? Is it outside of us or is the only God contained strictly within us, as some say? God tells me it’s not all me. That’s not science, but it’s not showmanship either.

What is important, I think, is how well this illustrates Derren Brown’s point about how the mind works. We are indeed suckers for anecdotes and are not good at all at integrating all the anecdotes and whatever more substantial information we have into a rationally comprehensive opinion.

On top of that nature is a wiser part of us that through experience and education is more cautious about the oversimplification and overgeneralization through which people are constantly making intellectual errors. Apparently biological evolution didn’t care about our having that error prone trait. I suppose people reproduce perfectly well without the training that overcomes our foolishness, and the cultural benefits of such training are debatable as well. Personally I’m glad I know better than my intuition, but maybe I’d be happier if I didn’t, maybe more popular. Perhaps that smarter part of you was active in knowing that it was only tongue-in-cheek that David Blaine tells you anything about America. Perhaps not, it’s so hard to tell from mere words. Either way our capacity to say foolish things does surface regularly.

The thing is that this foolishness is not just limited to theists. All dogma sounds alike. People are forever oversimplifying and overgeneralizing from any position in the spectrum of opinions, political, religious, anything. Recently I was amazed at a site for progressive Christians where two people briefly quarreled over whether or not Jesus was gnostic. One said adamantly yes, because of the gnostic gospels. One said adamantly no, because of everything else. Neither could see anything beyond their own opinion. People get like that, atheists, too, and it’s so often about opinions where no one is in a position to see the ultimate reality. I wish I could live long enough to see what genes make us that way.

I know science. I’ve considered the possibility of metaphysics through which science would be an illusion, but no one believes that, so I don’t bother questioning that part. Traditionalists try to argue that “real” science is on their side, in which they make huge mistakes, transparently, because of prejudice and because of this human trait where people can take one pseudofact about evolution and negate everything else, saying, “See, it doesn’t work,” even imagining up an atheist conspiracy with the help of so many like-minded people confirming that for them. Now that’s crazy, only it’s not. It’s ordinary humanity expressing its prejudice.

Yet it’s also crazy that atheists are so sure that life is completely materialistic. The challenge of the scientific revolution is that science has shown no need for God to micromanage anything, if the principles of causality and empiricism are indeed true, if God doesn’t change all the rules tomorrow to show a different metaphysics than we scientists thought is the case. That doesn’t mean there’s no God, especially when people so rarely define what God they mean. So the Bible’s wrong. So is the church and tradition, and one can detail that in lots of ways. I’m convinced there have never been physical miracles. There are other possibilities, but that’s the conclusion I trust from both my intuition and my intellect. Yet I’m quite sure there’s God, even if God is just the better part of me that the kindest sort of atheist would say He is, not the God who created the universe, knowledge about which is beyond me. God to me is whoever answered when I prayed, “God help me!” And someone did answer and kept on going, as did I.

Anyone who dismisses that is just speaking out of his or her intuition, not wisdom. Natural folly can take us in any direction, not just toward a traditional God. It takes some to God just because they’re conformists. Some of us have better reasons for coming to a different God. Some of us are both good scientists and good theists, yet atheists ridicule the religious part and traditionalists ridicule the science. People come to their foolishness naturally. I’m all for understanding that better, but understand no one is immune from that analysis.