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Year 8

Persinger's God helmet

I can explain Persinger’s God helmet experiment and evaluate its implications for the existence of God.

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Year 8

Persinger's God helmet

I can explain Persinger’s God helmet experiment and evaluate its implications for the existence of God.

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Share activities with pupils
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Lesson details

Key learning points

  1. The God helmet is an experiment designed to see if feelings of religious experience can be induced.
  2. In the experiment, the temporal lobe is stimulated based on testimony of those with temporal lobe epilepsy.
  3. The stimulation brought about effects similar to those of people claiming a religious experience.
  4. Some claim this experiment proves God does not exist, or at least that religious experience is not genuine.
  5. Others argue that a creator God designed the human brain to include the temporal lobe as a channel of communication.

Keywords

  • Evidence - facts or information that supports an idea

  • God helmet - a device that stimulates the temporal lobes with electromagnetic fields to induce religious experiences

  • Michael Persinger - a neuroscientist known for developing the God helmet to study the brain's role in religious experiences

  • Scepticism - a philosophical tool that encourages questioning and doubting things to ensure we have good evidence before believing them

Common misconception

The God helmet experiment has been reliably replicated and proves that religious experiences are just caused by brain stimulation.

In reality, the experiment has not been consistently replicated, and the results have been debated.


To help you plan your year 8 religious education lesson on: Persinger's God helmet, download all teaching resources for free and adapt to suit your pupils' needs...

For additional material A, encourage discussion about how points in the story could be understood differently. Task B part 2 could be used as an extended writing activity or a cloze task (using the sample answer with gaps for students). Teachers could search online for a picture of the God helmet.
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This content is © Oak National Academy Limited (2025), licensed on Open Government Licence version 3.0 except where otherwise stated. See Oak's terms & conditions (Collection 2).

Lesson video

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Starter quiz

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6 Questions

Q1.
A experience is a personal feeling or moment when someone believes they connect with a higher power or God.
Correct Answer: religious, Religious
Q2.
Logic is a tool used in to evaluate arguments and assess conclusions about religious experience.
Correct Answer: philosophy, Philosophy
Q3.
What methods did William James use to investigate religious experiences?
He conducted experiments to replicate religious experiences.
Correct answer: He studied religious experiences through case studies.
He dismissed them as irrelevant.
He analysed brain scans of those who claimed to have had religious experiences.
Q4.
What is neuroscience?
Correct answer: the study of how the brain and nervous system work
the study of ancient philosophical ideas
the study of human behaviour in social groups
the study of the universe and its origins
Q5.
The temporal lobe is part of the .
Correct Answer: brain, Brain
Q6.
How could religious experiences be used to support the existence of God?
Correct answer: they provide evidence of the divine through personal encounters
they can be explained by psychological or neurological factors
they always occur during religious rituals or ceremonies
they are always shared by large groups of people

Exit quiz

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6 Questions

Q1.
What does scepticism encourage us to do?
to accept things without questioning them
Correct answer: to doubt things and ask for evidence before accepting them as true
to believe in supernatural explanations
to always follow the opinions of experts
Q2.
How did Michael Persinger approach the study of religious experiences?
by conducting interviews with people who claimed to have had them
Correct answer: by stimulating the brain to study its effects on religious feelings
by interpreting religious texts to understand the nature of divine encounters
by dismissing religious experiences as purely imaginary and unworthy of study
Q3.
The God Helmet experiment used lobe stimulation to create religious-like experiences.
Correct Answer: temporal, Temporal
Q4.
Which of the following does Persinger’s experiment suggest about religious experiences?
that they are proof of God’s existence
that they are universally experienced by all people
Correct answer: that they can be artificially induced by brain stimulation
that they are only linked to religious individuals
Q5.
Why might some argue that Persinger's experiment does not disprove the existence of God?
Correct answer: it doesn’t explain why humans have the capacity for spiritual experiences
it shows that brain activity is unrelated to religious experiences
it proves that religious experiences are just a trick of the mind
it only shows how God might use the brain to communicate with humans
Q6.
Which of the following is a key criticism of Persinger's God helmet experiment?
the experiment was only conducted on religious people
Correct answer: the findings are unreliable due to the difficulty of replicating the results
the experiment did not take the participants’ expectations into account
the experiment did not include a diverse range of participants.