Brain Scans Examine “speaking In Tongues”

[Ex-COG]

I just saw this on another forum that I frequent.

 

Brain scans examine “speaking in tongues”

 

When mem­bers of cer­tain re­li­gious sects “speak in tongues,” they mouth what sounds like an in­com­pren­si­ble lan­guage, which to them has great mean­ing. Now, re­search­ers have tak­en what they say are the first brain scans of peo­ple speak­ing in tongues.

 

The sci­en­t­ists, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia School of Med­i­cine, found de­creased ac­tiv­i­ty in the fron­t­al lobes, a brain ar­ea be­hind the fore­head as­so­ci­at­ed with self-con­t­rol.

 

It’s “fas­ci­nat­ing be­cause these sub­jects tru­ly be­lieve that the spir­it of God is mov­ing through them and con­trol­ling them to speak,” said the uni­ver­si­ty’s An­drew New­berg, one of the re­search­ers.

 

The “re­search shows us that these sub­jects are not in con­t­rol of the usu­al lan­guage cen­ters dur­ing this ac­ti­v­i­ty, which is con­sis­t­ent with their de­s­c­rip­tion of a lack of in­ten­tio­n­al con­t­rol.”

 

The study ap­pears in the No­vem­ber is­sue of the jour­nal Psy­chi­a­try Re­search: Neu­ro­im­ag­ing.

 

The in­ves­ti­ga­tion com­pared the brains of those speak­ing in tongues to people sing­ing gos­pel mu­sic. “We no­ticed a num­ber of changes,” New­berg said, in­clud­ing in re­gions tied to emo­tions and the sense of self.

 

“These find­ings could be in­ter­preted as the sub­ject’s sense of self be­ing tak­en over by some­thing else. We, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, as­sume it’s be­ing tak­en over by an­oth­er part of the brain. But we could­n’t see, in this im­ag­ing stu­dy, where this took place.”

 

New­berg con­clud­ed that the changes in the brain dur­ing speak­ing in tongues re­flect a com­plex pat­tern of brain ac­tiv­i­ty. Fu­ture stud­ies will be needed to con­firm the find­ings and de­mys­ti­fy the phe­nom­e­non, he added.

 

Speak­ing in tongues, which has ex­isted for mil­len­ni­a and is men­tioned in the Bi­ble, is tech­ni­cal­ly called glos­so­la­lia. In Chris­ti­an­i­ty it is particularly as­so­ci­at­ed with Pen­te­cos­tal de­nom­i­na­tions.

 

The re­search­ers used Sin­gle Pho­ton Emis­sion Com­put­ed To­mog­ra­phy, a type of scan in which a bit of a ra­di­o­ac­t­ive drug is in­jected in­to a vein. The scan­ner then makes de­tailed im­ages of tis­sues where cells take up the drug. The pro­cess can give in­for­ma­tion about blood flow and me­tab­o­lism.

 

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/061101_tongues.htm

 

I certainly do hope they plan more tests, in order to "demystify the phenomenon", as Newberg said. I'm sure the charismatics will have something to say about this, and try to turn it into "proof" that it's the Holy Spirit taking over their brain.

[woodsmoke]

Nevermind that our very own webmaster has been an atheist for decades and can still "speak in tongues" on cue. Of course, in his case I'm sure it's just Satan taking over instead of the Holey Spook.

 

I also like the fact that the "language" they speak in is never a comprehensible one. I remember Heimdall recounting a story once of a man starting to babble in what another man "identified" as Chinese. Everyone but our consummate Deist just kindly ignored the fact that the man's "Chinese" was completely non-tonal and probably would have been just as incomprehensible to anyone born and raised in China as the English-speaking congregation he was babbling to.

 

Yeah, I'm with you. Study and categorize this scientifically so we can drive home another nail into the coffin lid.

[Antlerman]

Yes of course the holy rollers will take this a evidence of the supernatural. They always do until the rest of the data comes through showing its not. At which point, they just keep repeated only the first part of the test, and try to either ignore or disredit what they don't like. God of the Gaps. Always and ever, how the faithful practice science.

[Fonkey]

woodsmoke, you gave me an interesting idea... has anyone analyzed the phonemic content of speaking in tongues? It would be interesting to see if people speaking in tongues even use sounds that don't exist in their own language. You could also anlayze for any grammatical structure...

[Rafiki]

does anyone know if there are cases of glossolalia that happen in other religions or is this just a christian thing?

[woodsmoke]

woodsmoke, you gave me an interesting idea... has anyone analyzed the phonemic content of speaking in tongues? It would be interesting to see if people speaking in tongues even use sounds that don't exist in their own language. You could also anlayze for any grammatical structure...

 

You know, that's an excellent idea. I'm willing to put a hefty sum of money on the bet that you'll never hear an English-speaker use a "clicking" sound like those found in some African languages.

[pandora]

does anyone know if there are cases of glossolalia that happen in other religions or is this just a christian thing?

 

 

Certain African tribes do something similar to speaking in tongues.

[Antlerman]

Lots of religions speak in tongues. The Zulus in Africa do, it's done in Voodoo, etc. Even Plato mentions them doing it in the mystery religions 400 years before Christianity. No, this is not the Holy Ghost.

 

If no one has ever seen this video, it's worth watching: http://exchristian.net/exchristian/2006/01...thank-lawd.html

[Rafiki]

Lots of religions speak in tongues. The Zulus in Africa do, it's done in Voodoo, etc. Even Plato mentions them doing it in the mystery religions 400 years before Christianity.

 

Thanks, I've never really looked into the whole speaking in tongues thing but I guess that disproves it right there.

[Bluescreen]

Hmm, this is a very interesting article, thanks for posting it!

 

Fonkey - I had a similar idea in trying to analyze tongues. So I sat down and experimented on myself! I had noticed that my glossolalia sounded like Japanese - recognizable Japanese phonemes, no non-Japanese consonant sounds 99% of the time, and recognizable pronunciation. So I wrote down in romaji some speech and began to run it through every English-Japanese translator I could find. The results?

 

Complete nonsense. No grammatical organization whatsoever, jumbled, unrelated words mixed with untranslatable gibberish. Japanese has a fairly limited number of phonemes and MANY homonyms, so that explains how I wound up with any real words at all.

 

Some other interesting observations - I had noticed a long time ago that, when speaking in tongues, I tended to repeat a smallish number of "words" every single time I spoke. I got to recognize those repeating patterns over months of tongues-speak. It stood out to me because I almost never heard words that I would have expected to say if it were real tongues - words for heaven, god/spirit, etc.

 

Furthermore, my tongues changed over time. The first few months it used sounds in English mixed with pseudo-Hebrew sounds in an unidentifiable babbling. Hmm.... just like what one would stereotypically expect - and it was triggered after repeating "thy will be done" and "maranatha" over and over. Then I began to read lots of Japanese mythology, and voila! It became "Japanese."

 

Finally, I've noticed that when doing glossolalia, one has a tendency to speak very, very, very fast in a racing, uncontrolled manner. I only spoke "intelligibly" with seemingly correct pronunciation when I was singing along to music, thus slaving my speech to an external rhythm/time guide! Without music, all that came out was a torrent of unrecognizable sound.

 

And of course, I can still do it any time I like, at the drop of a hat.

[Ex-COG]

Linguistics

The syllables that make up instances of glossolalia typically appear to be unpatterned reorganizations of phonemes from the primary language of the person uttering the syllables; thus, the glossolalia of people from Russia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil all sound quite different from each other, but vaguely resemble the Russian, English, and Portuguese languages, respectively. Many linguists generally regard most glossolalia as lacking any identifiable semantics, syntax, or morphology.[12] Glossolalia has even been postulated as an explanation for the Voynich manuscript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia#S...ic_perspectives

 

I found a different twist on this story at Pharyngula; it seems that Andrew Newberg is a New Agey type doctor (funded by the Templeton Foundation) that thinks something outside the brain is controlling the mind. Witch Doctors in America. So if he wants to demystify the phenomenon, does he really mean that he wants to prove it's God?