How the muses torpedoed my respectable intentions and made me

I started out with the present project four years ago with a straightforward goal to make sense out of and further elaborate on Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili’s above mentioned idea that MSCs and human sexual response use common neural pathways and that MSCs can thus be thought of as evolutionary byproducts (or spandrels) of human sexual development.

The work was to be based on available neurological data. My original strategy was simply to “read in” deep enough in both sexology and neurological analyses of MSCs to be able to recognize the emerging parallels. To a certain extent this worked, too – at the level of Newberg and d’Aquili’s supposed characteristic patterns of hypothalamic activity during both types of expe-riences. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these parallels had to do with a curious male homoerotic “bias” (described with excellence by Jeffrey Kripal) in the descriptions of MSCs.² I saw this bias as relating to Newberg and d’Aquili’s concept of hypothalamic “spillover”, a state of hypothalamic overexcitation supposedly at work during both MSCs and sexual orgasms.³ This scenario leads to a prediction that MSCs should be found to be gender-dimorphic both neurally and phenomenologically. If both MSCs and sexual orgasm are explained in terms of hypothalamic overexcitation and at the same time we know that male and female hypothalami are anatomically different (and that having an atypical hypothalamus may be related to one’s displaying patterns of behavior unusual for her gender⁴), then it follows that MSCs, too, should be found to be gender dimorphic. It could seem, thus, that my original strategy was a fruitful one since it resulted in an important and testable prediction.

However, it quickly became apparent that such a simplistic comparison-based heuristic is of very limited use when it comes to systematic theory-generation – developing a wider understanding of the link between MSCs and orgasmic states. This is illustrated by the fact that, except for the

2 For a discussion of this, see chapter X and: Kripal 2001.

3 The “spillover scenario” actually goes back to Ernst Gellhorn and William Kiely’s classical modelling of altered states in: Gellhorn, Ernst, Kiely, William F. Mystical States of Consciousness: Neurophysiological and Clinical Aspects. – The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 154, No. 6, 1972, 399–405. For a discussion of this model, see chapter IV.

4 For references on this, see the writings of Simon LeVay, Doreen Kimura, Rhawn Joseph etc. An excellent introduction to the topic can be found in: Kimura, Doreen.

Sex and Cognition. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London (UK), The MIT Press / A Bradford Book, 2000. Pp. 129–131.

mentioned suspected similarity in hypothalamic activity during MSCs and orgasm, no immediate neurological parallels seemed to be coming up. Even worse, close reading of up-to-date papers on sexuality revealed a rift between the current theories of orgasm (it is textbook sexology that maintains the importance of the hypothalamus in the generation of orgasms) and the experi-mental data obtained via functional brain-imaging. In contrast with accepted theories, the experimental results – although inconclusive – were not parti-cularly supportive of the hypothalamic overexcitation concept.⁵

I then tried another strategy for approaching the MSC-orgasm link. The

“logic” behind it was that since the original strategy did not reveal enough clues to form a weighed hypothesis on the nature of the MSC-orgasm link I ought to systematically research Newberg and d’Aquili’s coauthored texts (because it was here that I originally found the hint on the neurological link between the two types of experience) in order to find out the origin and bases of the byproduct/spandrel account of MSCs and to find additional clues as to where to look for more parallels.

At first it seemed that the best way to proceed with such research would be hermeneutical analysis. Unfortunately, here, too, it quickly became clear that even though the hermeneutical approach allowed me to expose with clarity the importance of context when it comes to statements such as ‘MSCs are an evolutionary byproduct of human sexual development’ it left unanswered most of the central questions such as what, after all, is the decisive neurological link between MSCs and orgasm (provided that it exists).

Consider the following clarification by Donald Ratcliff: hermeneutical analysis is a way of making sense of a written text.⁶ Its goal is recovering the meaning of a text for people in situation, i.e. – not its “objective” meaning but meaning-in-context. This is done by bracketing out the researcher’s “self”

during the analysis. The point is to try to tell the “story” the text itself is telling, not the researcher’s view of it. This involves different layers of interpretation and, above all, using the context – the time and place of writing – to understand.

What was the text’s cultural situation and its historical context? What was the author’s intent/purpose?⁷

Now, such an analysis is extremely important in order to understand what Newberg and d’Aquili intended to claim (as opposed to what one thinks their claims mean) and what the relevant context was. It can also reveal multiple new clues as to how to develop Newberg and d’Aquili’s claims from the status of mere speculation to that of a scholarly hypothesis. But it leaves one at a complete loss when – after having “cleared” the context and Newberg and

5 Komisaruk et al. 2006 vs. Holstege et al. 2003; Georgiadis et al. 2006. See chapter VII for a discussion on this issue.

6 For a thorough exposition of the method, see: Manen, Max van. Researching Lived Experience. New York, State University of New York Press, 1990.

7 Ratcliff, Donald (ed.). 15 Methods of Data Analysis in Qualitative Research.

Website – qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net/15methods.pdf (accessed 09/22/2008). Pp. 3–

4. This publication will below be referred to as: Ratcliff 2008a.

d’Aquili’s original intent – one asks where do I go from here or, more precisely – what analytic steps to take next. In other words, even though under-standing Newberg and d’Aquili’s original intent is an important prerequisite on the way to devising a (scholarly) hypothesis on the nature of the neurological link between MSCs and orgasm, it tells one next to nothing as to how to actually get there. The broader goal of the project was not, after all, bringing out what the context-embedded meaning of Newberg and d’Aquili’s speculations is – it was forming a hypothesis based on a couple of their speculative claims.

The bottom line is – even though both of my original research strategies seemed to provide important and helpful insights as to the subject matter, they both had major shortcomings. To get a better fix at these, consider the following remark by Flemming Christiansen:

“Any research methodology must enable a research procedure that can actually be carried out. This means that it must describe a procedure that with existing re-sources can answer questions that are relevant within an existing scholarly de-bate. [Second, it must] guide and validate data collection: any research metho-dology must define procedures for how to collect valid research data and how to test their validity. [Third, it must] establish relationships between data, sum-marise these relationships and reveal general principles.”⁸

If one analyzes my original research strategies in this light, then their major shortcomings are at once clear: (a) even though both approaches provided a procedure that could actually be carried out, neither was capable of answering the relevant questions given the existing resources; (b) neither could actually guide data collection; (c) neither was fit to get a fix on the intricate relationships between the existing data.

These were not the only strategies and methods I tried out. I also experi-mented with case study (since Newberg and d’Aquili’s texts can be viewed as an informative case on the MSC-orgasm link), which – in many ways like the above-discussed hermeneutical method – seemed to offer important insights as to the subject matter but also fell short of providing an operational research frame. The same goes for content analysis and the method of analytic in-duction – looking at data, forming a hypothesis about them and then checking if it fits other data of similar type (if it does not, the hypothesis is revised until it can account for all available relevant data).⁹ Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’

Grounded Theory Approach¹⁰ came closest to being operational but it, too – at the end of the day – did not meet the demands of the project.

8 Christiansen, Flemming. Tools for Qualitative Research. Website – http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~chifc/qual.pdf (accessed 09/24/2008). P. 1.

9 The method is developed largely by F. Znaniecki, H. Becker and J. Katz. For refe-rence, see: Katz, Jack. A Theory of Qualitative Methodology. – Contemporary Field Research. Edited by R. M. Emerson. Prospect Heights (Illinois), Waveland, 1983.

10 Glaser, Barney G., Strauss, Anselm L. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Stra-tegies for Qualitative Research. Chicago, Aldine Publishing Co., 1967.

In short, no matter which well-developed and rigorous method I experi-mented with in relation to the MSC-orgasm link, none of them proved to be operational. In all cases, at a certain point it demanded an unjustifiable leap of imagination to fit the data to the analytical frame. It seemed, therefore, that a more “open” strategy is needed.

One such candidate was good old philosophical analysis. As there are no binding methodological “canons” in religion and science (except, arguably, for the general principles of dialogue and common sense), philosophical argumentation seemed to be just about the only workable tool for the “job” at hand. Unfortunately this, too, did not take me very far. Most of philosophy today is done according to the rules accepted by one or another school of philosophy but not by all philosophers. The problem is that the instant one adopts the rules of one or another school, the same difficulties arise as with the more stringent methods discussed above. The MSC-orgasm link could, for example, be investigated by applying conceptual analysis. But the rules of such philosophizing would then deny one access to many important layers of meanings and data involved.

Now – why discuss these failed attempts to format the thesis according to the rules of one or another widely accepted research strategy so thoroughly? The point is simple – to show that even though none of the discussed strategies worked well enough to ground the whole thesis into, they all still provided important insights – insights that, taken together, could form the backbone for a coherent hypothesis on the MSC-orgasm link but that, due to the lack of an appropriate unifying methodological frame, could not be engaged in creating such a hypothesis.

The question, thus, is – what type of an analytical frame should one possibly be looking for when it comes to problems like the MSC-orgasm link. It should be a frame that would allow one to integrate fundamentally different types of data originating in fundamentally different “language games” and provide them with a common denominator. Does such a frame exist? In asking this question we meet Jensine Andresen – a theologian who has fought the same sort of

“battle” and come out of it alive (albeit, admittedly, a bit bruised).

C. JENSINE ANDRESEN AND MY ABHORRENCE