January 28, 2007
Scientists bridging the spirituality gap
From MSNBC:
Religion and science can combine to create some thorny questions: Does God exist outside the human mind, or is God a creation of our brains? Why do we have faith in things that we cannot prove, whether it’s the afterlife or UFOs? The new Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania is using brain imaging technology to examine such questions, and to investigate how spiritual and secular beliefs affect our health and behavior. Newberg's center is not a bricks-and-mortar structure but a multidisciplinary team of Penn researchers exploring the relationship between the brain and spirituality from biological, psychological, social and ideological viewpoints.
How does the center test the relationship between the mind and spirituality? In one study, Newberg and colleagues used imaging technology to look at the brains of Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues — known scientifically as glossolalia — then looked at their brains when they were singing gospel music. They found that those practicing glossolalia showed decreased activity in the brain’s language center, compared with the singing group.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:30 AM | Permalink
Comments
The director cites New Age neuroscience...what the hell is that?
Humans, it seems, have always had some sense or need for "spirituality," or an appreciateion that something larger was in control--god, gods, nature deities etc. Go back to earliest findings of burials. Why bury the dead? why bury possessions with them? Leaves die and are reborn. Grass dies and is reborn...just perhaps...
Man has always directly or indirctly asked theree things about life:
Where did I come from? Why am I here? What happens to me when I die (I am no longer here)? Many religions if not all try to answer this. And now also Evolutionary thinkers and The Lion King
Posted by: fred lapides | Jan 28, 2007 11:54:12 AM
Could the relationship between the scientifically demonstrable and what is believed by us find an analog in a consideration of light and vision? If light is part of a vast, continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, then it is distinguished by the fact that the eye is sensitive to it. Visible luminous radiations form only a tiny part of the scale of radiations from cosmic rays to long waves. Color, an illusion begotten by light, exists only in light, which to human eyes seems colorless. Human vision has its own often baffling laws, Mueller and Rudolph wrote, which may vary from person to person. We are fitted to see what's visible and to know about and classify forms of luminous energy that are not visible. A long way for the eye to travel from the first light-detecting spot on the body of an animal 300,000,000 years ago.
But, wasn't there light, traveling in straight lines and endowing objects with color, before that animal evolved to detect it? Understanding may depend on who is there to do the knowing: the detecting, the apprehending, the believing. Karen Armstrong has written that the unique way to designate the human animal might as well be homo religiosus as homo sapiens, for it is our nature to believe ever so many things not subject to proof. The tendency to believe and to attach supreme importance to what is believed can only confer evolutionary advantages, or the tendency to believe -- if only in Darwin -- would have atrophied.
Light and vision form the foundation of all inquiry and much metaphor. We may describe both knowledge and belief as illumination, both scientific intuition and more ethereal intimations as vision. Belief can end in knowledge, knowledge in belief, and both can begin or end in doubt. Or co-exist with doubt, if doubting givens is good science, if blind faith is a degradation of the religious experience. Light came before vision and will outlast it, but not forever. Meanwhile, there is the uniquely reciprocal relationship on every level we can conceive of it between light and vision, and adapting to the light, however we wish to think of it, is the signal experience of our long adventure.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 28, 2007 1:17:07 PM
Elatia, instead of "vision" put the word "model". Different patterns on the retina (curved line, horizontal, triangle etc,) cause different subsets of neurons to fire, as has been demonstrated in mammalian brains. These subsets of neurons represent particular shapes and meanings within the cognitive structure of the brain, that model perceived elements of the world around us, just as 26 or so different letters represent the sounds of spoken language. Just as a limited set of letters is sufficient for the composition of a million or so words, and these words can be used to form a virtually limitless variety of sentences, so a fairly small number of basic models of perception are used to analyze the world and create a virtually limitless capacity for understanding. Our minds are constantly searching for relationships and laws that appear to govern the objects and people around us. When we look at the world, we do not, for the most part, see it directly, instead we see it through the perceptional models we have built ourselves or those we have acquired from our parents, society, teachers, books etc..
This language model for thought is fairly probable, because:
A. Minor strokes often blot out particular words or sets of words,
B. Language exists in the brain anyway, so if the basic structure of thought was not a language structure there would have to be a separate 'mechanism' for translating it into the language.
C. This model is very economical in neuron use, because it involves the constant reuse of the same basic models of perception, therefore of the same neuron sets and firing patterns. This economy and re-use means that the system can exist as several copies, or versions, or in different languages in the same brain. Thanks to this high level of redundancy, the brain can therefore survive the death of many neurons before its overall capacity to understand starts to deteriorate. This also means that even much smaller brains, like those of cats or rats, have room for smaller versions of this 'perception engine'.
Where is God in all this? He wrote the algorithms. Not the ones in our thoughts, but the ones which our thoughts assume are operating in the real world, out there. Because we can only perceive the world via thoughts, our minds instinctively assume that the world is created by a Mind, in the same way that we assume that the actions of other people are controlled by thoughts. I 'm not discussing here whether God exists, I'm trying to account for the 'How' question.
I'm not saying that an Atheist cannot not believe (if you follow!) but I do think it’s very difficult to perceive the universe in a totally non anthropomorphic or non-animatory fashion. Even talking about the "Laws of Nature" is to anthropomorphize the world, as if particles and waves 'obeyed' 'laws'. Actually, Physics 'laws' are quite the opposite of human laws. The latter only exist because humans like to break them, whereas Physics 'laws' are declared false if they are broken even once ! But that’s another story.
Posted by: aguy109 | Jan 28, 2007 4:20:59 PM
God, that was a beautiful and fascinating comment. I can't help thinking -- vertiginously -- of the old story: one summer, a physics professor was sighted making his way around campus in snow-shoes; he had inquired too deeply into the nature of matter, it transpired, and had developed a fear of falling through.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 28, 2007 4:54:13 PM
I started ruminating on that one 30 years ago. Now I've finally written it down. My wife will dump those snow shoes, though, she says my feet are big enough as it is.
Posted by: aguy109 | Jan 28, 2007 5:11:42 PM
No need to bring God in to "write algorithms." They were written by evolution.
Certainly the term "laws of nature" is metaphorical, and scientists (if not lay people) are quite aware of that fact. There is no need to assume that there is a "lawgiver" to lay down the "laws." They are simply descriptions of how things occur.
The question of why those particular laws hold and not others is still open (as is the question of whether that question actually makes sense), but it is just as easy to avoid anthropomorphizing the world as it is to anthropomorphize it. It just takes living in a modern, post-theological culture.
Posted by: JonJ | Jan 28, 2007 6:52:29 PM
Jonj, the ease of thinking non-anthropomorphically is a matter of opinion. I would say that the very fact that metaphors which appear to ascribe intentions or gender to inanimate objects are so pervasive shows that the brain is biased to jump to conclusions and to ascribe personalities to objects. True, scientists teach us how to look beyond these biases and measure things as they really are. However, the brain's propensity to jump to conclusions on the basis of partial evidence is still very convenient. I've never seen you, for example, but from your comments I jump to the conclusion that you are a male, aged between 25 and 60, who lives in the Western Hemisphere. Maybe thats correct, or maybe your comments (which are always thoughtful and worth reading) are actually written by a committee of 16 novice nuns living in a convent in Sicily! I'm discussing here HOW people come to believe certain things, not whether they should or not.
Posted by: aguy109 | Jan 29, 2007 1:26:30 AM
Missed the upper limit in your age estimate by a few years, but otherwise you're correct.
I would agree that these metaphors became embedded in our language at a time when they were not consciously understood as metaphors, but was that because of something built into the structure of the brain? I'm trying to remember how I thought when I first learned about the "laws of nature," and it's difficult to be sure exactly how my child's mind understood this expression. However, I don't remember that I really believed that they were laws given by a "lawgiver."
But then I wasn't raised in a particularly religious household or social environment, so perhaps it's different for people who grow up in such environments, even today. But I think this sort of thing is much more a matter of culture than brain structure.
Posted by: JonJ | Jan 29, 2007 9:44:56 AM
"But I think this sort of thing is much more a matter of culture than brain structure."
JonJ,
It is important to keep the interactions between the two systems at the center of this discussion. Cultural materials can bias brain behavior, but cognitive capacities shape culture in very real ways.
Language, for instance, is certainly a cultural artifact, but elements of the system will not be retained across generations if they are too difficult for children to learn. The cognitive capacities bias the cultural products. The cultural products augment the cognitive capacities...
What a nice discussion to run across
Posted by: jct | Jan 29, 2007 11:09:39 AM
JonJ-
"No need to bring God in to "write algorithms." They were written by evolution."
Exactly why Darwin's "Dangerous Idea" is so dangerous to the human ego and religion in general--
As William James put it-"Religion, a very long chapter in the history of the human ego"-
Posted by: Scott Ahlf | Jan 29, 2007 11:38:03 AM
Quoted from E.J. Hoffman www.contrarianisms.com:
"Consider what Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes had to say in the last chapter of 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'. 'These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas which come together and almost surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific mythologies which fill the very void left by the divorce of science and religion in our time...And they share with religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a rational splendor that explains everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible (like the cancer generals) and beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow beyond the arena of scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a requirement of total commitment.'"
"Critic Arthur Koestler was skeptical about the politics of science (Koestler, The Act of Creation, p. 239). 'The collective matrix of a science at a given time is determined by a kind of establishment (like the Cancer Industry), which includes universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial offices of technical journals (And the money of the U.S. treasury). Like other establishments, they are consciously or unconsciously bent on preserving the status quo-partly because of the deeper fear that their laborously erected intellectual edifice(of the failed war on cancer) might collapse under the impact.'"
"A skeptic might say that there is the tendency to follow the crowd and believe what one's told (as per Hitler's overt methodologies for manipulating the public as set forth in Mein Kampf, and the more covert subtleties in the socio-economic-political arena, not to mention religiosity). There is also the tendency to read more into something than is really there, that is, to 'make mountains out of molehills.', also called prestidigitation. ...The arguments within academia are so intense because the stakes are so low. Shakespeare may have said it best, as per the title of his play Much Do About Nothing, and in Macbeth V, v, 17, '...full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.'"
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Jan 29, 2007 2:41:31 PM
How right you are Winnie, I particularly like your last comment, advocating nudism. No pockets, no hidden weapons thats what I say.
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/01/evolved_for_can.html
Posted by: aguy109 | Jan 29, 2007 5:33:55 PM
Small-group narcissism is always best served by seizing upon the Other's supposedly exotic features the better to other him: you let your own blood (or at least your co-religionists do) on a winter's day that has no particular meaning to me, and you're backwards and probably dangerous; I get the stigmata at Easter, and I'm holy.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 29, 2007 6:01:18 PM
Elatia, your cooking sounds pretty good, but the real art is in washing the dishes afterwards. I also get stigmata on the wrists and ankles, where the mosquito bites tend to congregate to reach the blood vessels.
Posted by: aguy109 | Jan 29, 2007 7:28:13 PM
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