To go along with Andrew’s discussion in class today, this article  I found coincided with the subject of supernatural beings. In Christianity, it is believed that you can acquire the “gift of tongues”  through calling upon the “Holy Spirit.” To the outsider it sounds like a mere gibberish, but it is not them who is talking.

The University of Pennsylvania did a study and monitored five women’s brain waves who were speaking in tongues. They found that the part of the brain that controls what you do, the frontal lobe, was pretty inactive. The language center of their brain was inactive as well, even though they were speaking (Carey, 2006). Although the women had inactive frontal lobes and language centers, their thalamus activity increased, so they were fully conscious“Speaking in Tongues: Medical Study Proves It’s the Holy Spirit Praying.”).  In addition to this, the left caudate which is responsible for positive emotions has been shown to be less active. Which, is another mystery (Carey, 2006). 

It has also been hypothesised that people who speak in tongues are mentally unstable. But, a study done in England of over 1000 Christians who spoke in tongues proved that they are more stable than those who did not. (Carey, 2006)

Although in the scientific community it isn’t allowed to explain something as supernatural, this study has been determined as unknown and it has been concluded that more studies should be done to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon.

Works Cited

Carey, Benedict. “A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Nov. 2006. Web. 18 Sept. 2014.