Also please read the references on my website, there is a section on functional neurogenesis. Click here to go to my website

I just wanted to say that it doesn’t always take a near death experience to experience The Light. My life hasn’t been easy, but the knowledge of this experience has been a true blessing, which I have drawn on many times. It is all about love. And I knew that when I was about sixteen. I am still learning.

Over the years, when I thought it might be appropriate, I have shared this experience with close friends. But yes, it is something that most do not understand. Therefore I could not let this opportunity pass without telling people that do know. Thank you.

You wrote the following and I would appreciate any references to details of this process of new neuron formation and transport in the brain.

Thank you.

Functional neurogenesis: This is the fairly recent discovery that thoughts change brain structure. Even more fascinating is that thoughts alone can trigger the healing of brains severely damaged by strokes or other causes. This healing begins precisely in the same brain structures responsible for our sense of self, personality, memories, and relationship to god. The newly formed brain cells then migrate throughout the brain to where they are needed.

I was a student when Fred Gage, a pioneer of neurogenesis, was at Johns Hopkins. I vividly remember him saying how disturbing it was that the brain could alter itself and change. He mused about how personality and memory could be stable in an unstable brain (if they are only brain based). I was already struggling with the same questions, as I was taking care of patients who had had one half of their brain removed for seizure control. Post-operatively they had the same personalities, memories, and even walked and talked with very little apparent neurological deficits.

Best Regards

Existing in the brain does not make something less than real. Dreams are in the brain. So are our emotions, our hunches, and our imaginations. So, it seems, is God. All of these offer very real experiences that cannot be shared with others, and whose existence can only be ‘proven’ through brain imaging. No other evidence can prove that any specific dream ever happened.

“GET REAL Persinger, Andrew Newburg, Michael Shermer, Mathew Alpert and the rest of you sloppy scientific thinkers, experiencing god is just as real as any other human experience.”

Experiences that happen only in the brain are very real. Saying that God is a real experience doesn’t address the question of whether it’s happening only in the brain.

I think, Dr. Morse, that you may need to use the phrase “objective existence” more often.

If the researchers you disagree with on this page are right, then God has no objective existence, though the subjective experience is very real. “Real” enough to alter the personalities, emotional habits, and ways of thinking for those who have it – by making many (very many) very small changes in the brain.

According to Persinger, we all live in the earth’s magnetic field, which allows communication between brains, though usually during dreams. However, this supposition does not mean that information exists outside the brain rather than in it. The bulk of the information that influences you would appear to be in your brain, but some of it is outside it.

The magnetic component of consciousness could also exist outside the brain – if the earth’s magnetic field serves as it’s medium. So also could those of memory.