Wired News Blog posted an interesting piece today regarding brain activity and speaking in tongues. I have re-posted the article in its entirety below.
Is Speaking in Tongues a Language?
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have performed the first brain-scan study on a group of Pentecostal practitioners while they were speaking in tongues, a practice also known as glossolalia.
It turned out that activity in the language centers of the Pentecostals' brains decreased during the tests, "although the practitioners spoke in a coherent language-like way," according to an email from Mark Waldman, who is editor of Transpersonal Review and is writing a book with the lead Penn researcher on the study, Andrew Newberg.
To me it's not so surprising that the language centers weren't very active. I'm not sure how speaking in tongues is coherent and language-like at all, and to me the results seem to simply suggest that speaking in tongues is not related to language. But Waldman and Newberg suggest other explanations:
...the language was being generated in a different way, or possibly from some place other than the normal processing centers of speech. For the believer, this experience could be taken as proof that another entity had actually spoken through them. For the disbeliever, it might simply mean that other unique circuits were being stimulated that directed the style and form of glossolalic speech.
Newberg also discovered, Waldman writes, that the practitioners had an unusual and permanent asymmetry in thalamic activity. The same asymmetry was found in nuns and Buddhists, which supports the theory that either intensive prayer permanently alters the brain, or that people with an abnormally functioning thalamus are more prone to having spiritual/religious experiences, according to Waldman.
The glossolalia work will soon be published in a psychology journal, Waldman said. Newberg and Waldman's book, Why We Believe What We Believe, is due out in September.
(HT: Nacodoches Player)
Ahh, Wired finally takes up tongues. My grandmother would be proud. She could never work a computer to save her soul, but she spoke in tongues till the day she died.
Posted by: J. Michael Matkin | August 11, 2006 at 04:35 AM
I have put online, into the "public domain" a book that refutes cessationist teaching by proving that the gifts of the Spirit are for the church today. Please incorporate it (for free) into your teaching. My book/site is not on search engines yet but you can access it by typing in the address on the address bar at the top of your computer http://www.pentecostal-tongues-theology.org
Posted by: Peter Kwiatkowski | August 14, 2006 at 01:58 PM