A Young, Developing Brain That Cannot Process God
Written by Matthew Sabatine
Image credits belong to: rMeghann | Pixabay
The human brain is split into two hemispheres. The corpus callosum is the collection of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres so that sensory, motor, and cognitive information can travel across the two hemispheres. The average corpus callosum has approximately 300 million axons (i.e., threadlike fibers carrying impulses to and away from a neuron). Cutting or slicing the corpus callosum will prevent proper communication between the two hemispheres. If someone's epilepsy has been unresponsive to many treatments, surgical severance of the corpus callosum would be the final, desperate attempt to mitigate the condition.
Christian speaker and psychiatrist, Dr. Curt Thompson, writes about the importance of these two hemispheres and their maintenance of an active working relationship.
This is addressed in his book titled Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships. Our brain’s right hemisphere is inclined to produce more interconnections between neurons than does the left hemisphere during our first eighteen to twenty-four months of life. The right side of the brain contributes to a baby’s following functions:
“An integrated map of the body” – a baby's subjective awareness of its body's location in time and space is not fully mature at birth. Millions of synapsing neurons are linked to its continuous development. They must learn about all of the fundamental and mundane sensory experiences (e.g., movement, hunger pains, wetness) that we adults take for granted.
“Visuospatial orientation” – babies learn about the three-dimensional world as they move through space and time. Their coordination and attention grow as they learn about the location of objects in relation to each other.
“Nonverbal communication” – Everything that happens in a baby’s environment is encoded into their neurons. They are impacted by the quality of what they hear and how they are touched. The neurons of the right hemisphere still pick up on nonverbal cues even though the baby cannot speak.
“Holistic sense of experience” – at birth, humans possess an ability to see multitudinous details at once without being able to estimate or conclude about the general ambience of the place. This ability is used all the time as an adult. This ability has a relationship with the neural activity of the right hemisphere.
“Social and emotional context” – the ability to ascertain your social or emotional context is not an inborn ability. This skill begins its development in young children. Through time, you learn how to avoid dominating a conversation or how to avoid dull humor and to do all the things that help the flow of a conversation. This skill depends on awareness of many cues around you, and it is a function of the right hemisphere.
Eighteen to twenty-four months of age is the time when the left hemisphere increases development. The left hemisphere is responsible for language, linear, logical, and literal processing. When a child begins to speak, this betokens that he/she is beginning to process his/her world in a linear fashion.
The need to ask “why?” is a fundamental feature that traces back to being a child— the need for things to make logical, linear sense. Things must connect meaningfully so we can preclude the confusion that induces anxiety. When things do not make sense, we may jump to conclusions.
Bringing to light the relationship between our two hemispheres, Dr. Thompson makes a point that poignantly captures the essence of why the topic of God is a touchy subject for us all:
“Even as adults, we sometimes jump to conclusions about God when our experiences don’t make sense because they are confusing or painful. God may not lay out for us why our good friend developed cancer or our son lost control of his car and hit a pedestrian. In such situations, our left brain drives us to try to make sense of God’s place in the situation. We may conclude that we’re not on his radar and thus must not be very important to him; that he is not loving after all; or that he is disappointed in us. These assertions largely develop from the neural networks within the left hemisphere.” (pg. 35)
The complexities of God are hard and confusing for anyone to process, already. It must be even harder for young pre-adults who have a constant development that feels chaotic and unpredictable.
The Changes of a Young Person’s Brain
Myelination is the development of white proteins wrapping around and insulating your brain's nerve fibers to increase the transmission of impulses from one cell to another.
Myelination of your neurons in your frontal lobes must advance and grow until your mid to late teen years, or even into early adulthood. As myelination advances, the frontal lobes increase their contribution to brain function, thereby enhancing your attention span and boosting the speed of information-processing, both of which then boost with age.
As a teen grows older, the frontal lobe will increase its management over emotions and the amygdala will decrease its management. With the frontal lobes at the helm, a growing young person can become wise about the world and can grasp complicated situations, which is different from how he/she was previously: expressing raw and unrefined emotions that are enkindled by the amygdala (i.e., almond-shaped mass of gray matter processing fearful stimuli).
It is this changeover that diminishes an adolescent’s ability to properly perceive other people’s emotions, starting at about 11 years old. The problem will be yearly ameliorated until the individual is 18 years old.
Can you imagine the intensity and turbulence that must be raging through a child's/adolescent's brain as they try to process information about an omnipotent, punitive, and damnatory god such as Yahweh of the Bible? Can you imagine how that improperly processed information might translate into adulthood? I feel like this clearly explains why I felt so terrified of God and could not shake the terror during my early years, and why that trauma transferred into my adulthood.
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