Mesearch

Brugger pursued a Ph.D. in biology and steered his research toward the phenomenon of perception. For his dissertation, he performed an ESP study on two groups of people: those who believed in the paranormal and those who did not. He exposed his subjects to a rapid sequence of light flashes, and made them believe that the stimuli contained dice faces. The paranormal enthusiasts were particularly unlikely to repeat the same guess for a die twice in a row. Brugger concluded that those who have a hard time accepting that weird occurrences are purely due to chance tend to believe in the paranormal, because it is a way to explain the coincidences they naturally distrust. Those who believe that funny occurrences—such as two identical die rolls in a row—sometimes happen haphazardly don't need to blame unseen forces. It was then that Brugger stopped believing.

His Research: After 20-plus years of scientific exploration, Brugger has accumulated evidence to show that belief in paranormal activity is a brain function, just as emotion and cognition are. The brain chemical dopamine is an obvious suspect. "People with too much dopamine literally see things; they have suspicious thoughts. They see too many patterns in what is random," he explains. Parkinson's patients take dopamine to control their motor symptoms. "If you give them too much, they begin to see things like schizophrenics do," he points out. But the brain's role in one's belief system is much more complicated than that, he says. And his youthful wonder still manifests itself in his research. Based on an interest in out-of-body experiences, he's been exploring the phenomenon of phantom limbs. He discovered that patients register brain function in cortical areas when they "move" a phantom arm or leg, though not in the same areas that a person with limbs would activate if she were to imagine moving them.

His Insight: "I've always had to find the answers to my questions," Brugger says. As a child, he wondered how toothpaste could have alternating red and white stripes, so he cut open a tube. Similarly, he sliced into the question of paranormal beliefs to find answers that satisfied him and also advanced scientific knowledge about belief systems. If he met his younger self today, he says, "I would probably think, My God, how can he possibly believe in something beyond chance, just based on these few coincidences!" Nonetheless, Brugger "would still be willing to switch back to being a believer if someone could really convince me there is something." After all, he points out, believers as a group are happier than skeptics.

Mind's Eye Opened: Jill Bolte Taylor

Her Story: Jill Bolte Taylor became a neuroanatomist to try to understand the difference between her brother's brain—he is a schizophrenic—and her own. She taught at Harvard and worked in a lab, examining specimens of schizophrenic, schizoaffective, and bipolar brains, to determine their microcircuitry. Then, when she was just 37 years old, her life—and her life's work—changed. She woke with a pounding headache, "like when you bite into ice cream," she says. "It gripped me, then released, then gripped me again."

She tried to ignore it and started her day, hopping on her cardioglider, then heading to the shower, but she noticed that her body was slowing down, and her perceptions were altered. "Eventually, I realized I could not perceive where my body began and ended. I detected myself as being energy and felt as big as the universe." When her right arm became paralyzed, she realized that she was having a stroke. "I thought, This is so cool!" she says. She also realized she had to get help.

Riding in an ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital, she curled into a fetal ball. "I thought that either the doctors would rescue me or this was my moment of transition." When she recovered from an operation that removed a golf-ball-size clot from her brain, "I was an infant in a woman's body," she says. She had to relearn how to walk, talk, read, write, and practice neuroanatomy. Her recovery took eight years.

Her Research: The stroke, which was caused by a congenital malformation, gave her unique insight into the workings of the brain. As the hemorrhage in her left hemisphere grew that morning, she found herself drifting in and out of reality. She lost her comprehension of numbers and her abilities to translate her thoughts into speech and define the boundaries of her body. She also felt an incredible sense of peacefulness as the practical chatter ("I have 10 minutes to take a shower"or "It's time to go to bed now")from her left hemisphere ceased.