What is "Self Transcendence"?

A recent study by Italian researchers uncovered the fact that neurosurgery involving certain brain structures can effect personality changes that make one feel more "spiritual". 88 patients underwent pre- and post-surgical personality assessments while treated for tumours, and the results were combined with lesion mapping procedures (to precisely locate lesions) after surgery to measure changes in a personality construct called Self-Transcendence (ST). It was found that patients with posterior lesions experienced a considerable increase in 'spirituality' after the surgical removal of their tumours than those with anterior lesions, and that those with more aggressive types of tumour were most likely to describe themselves as religious. For a fuller report and discussion of this fascinating study, please see Mo Costandi's Neurophilosophy.

As I read through various articles detailing this announcement, I became intrigued at the constant mention of ST as a measure of personality. In his paper, Cosimo Urgesi describes ST as reflecting "the enduring tendency to transcend contingent sensorimotor representations and to identify the self as an integral part of the universe as a whole." ST is among several other personality dimensions in the psychobiological Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) that was devised by C. R. Cloninger and colleagues in 1994. The TCI has been used in genetics to show ST as a heritable trait, and in molecular neurosciences to show ST related to the functioning of the serotoninergic system. According to Cloninger et al. (1993) their model followed on from previous research that confirmed four dimensions of temperament; novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence, and added three more dimensions that mature in adulthood; self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence.

In their discussion of ST, Cloninger et al. begin with the amusing sentence: "Most people meditate or pray daily, which is more frequent than sexual intercourse according to population surveys". They go on to note the lack of spirituality-related traits from personality inventories including the well-known Five Factor Model, which is odd considering that spirituality is an integral aspect of people's lives and mental activity. In describing their definition of spirituality, they say:

"Self-transcendence refers generally to identification with everything conceived as essential and consequential parts of a unified whole. This involves a state of 'unitive consciousness' in which everything is part of one totality. In unitive consciousness, there is no individual self because there is no meaningful distinction between self and other—the person is simply aware of being an integral part of the evolution of the cosmos. This unitive perspective may be described as acceptance, identification, or spiritual union with nature and its source ... The person may identify (or feel a sense of spiritual union) with anything or everything. They may experience the feeling that they are part of or being guided by a wonderful intelligence, which is possibly the divine source of all phenomena. Ultimately, there may be loss of all distinctions between self and other by identifying with the concept of an immanent God as one-in-all."

So it all sounds rather New-Agey (the paper mentions Buddhism and nirvana, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta), but I was still curious about the actual questions themselves. In formulating questions to measure personality dimensions, care is taken to ensure that they accurately represent the concepts they try to measure. Moreover, statistics such as Cronbach's Alpha are employed to ensure that the measure has a high level of internal consistency; the higher, the better it is at measuring a personality construct. In this context ST consisted of three sub-scales; Self-forgetfulness vs. self-consciousness, transpersonal identification, and spiritual acceptance vs. materialism, all three exhibiting a Cronbach Alpha of above 0.7. This indicates that each of the three sub-scales were reliable in excess of 70% in measuring what they claimed to measure.

PsychMaven kindly helped me aquire a copy of the TCI. Bearing in mind that the "questions" are actually statements that one ought to rate on a 5-point scale (1 = Definitely false, 5 = Definitely true), here is the complete list (in order of appearance) that purport to contribute to the ST dimension of personality:

12. I often feel a strong sense of unity with all the things around me.

25. Often I have unexpected flashes of insight or understanding while relaxing.

29. I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living process.

32. I think that most things that are called miracles are just chance.

42. Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time and space.

43. I sometimes feel a spiritual connection to other people that I cannot explain in words.

52. Sometimes I have felt my life was being directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being.

56. I have had moments of great joy in which I suddenly had a clear, deep feeling of oneness with all that exists.

68. I often become so fascinated with what I’m doing that I get lost in the moment – like I’m detached from time and place.

73. I often feel a strong spiritual or emotional connection with all the people around me.

91. I have made real personal sacrifices in order to make the world a better place – like trying to prevent war, poverty and injustice.

95. It often seems to other people like I am in another world because I am so completely unaware of things going on around me.

99.I often feel like I am a part of the spiritual force on which all life depends.

106. I have had personal experiences in which I felt in contact with a divine and wonderful spiritual power.

112. Often when I look at an ordinary thing, something wonderful happens – I get the feeling that I am seeing it fresh for the first time.

118. Religious experiences have helped me to understand the real purpose of my life.

143. I believe that all life depends on some spiritual order or power that cannot be completely explained.

148. I often feel so connected to the people around me that it is like there is no separation between us.

151. I am often called “absent-minded” because I get so wrapped up in what I am doing that I lose track of everything else.

157. I often do things to help protect animals and plants from extinction.

175. I have a vivid imagination.

190. I would gladly risk my own life to make the world a better place.

206. I think it is unwise to believe in things that cannot be explained scientifically.

212. Often I become so involved in what I am doing that I forget where I am for a while.

223. I have had experiences that made my role in life so clear to me that I felt very excited and happy.

232. Reports of mystical experiences are probably just wishful thinking.

It could be argued that statements such as these are anything but 'transcendent'. As Costandi eloquently put it in his report, Urgesi et al. fall short in their study of truly defining spirituality because it is likely that different patients will hold different ideas of spirituality and how it affects their lives. Furthermore, spirituality is an area that consists of many ideas apart from 'transcendence' which, by all accounts, is generally taken to refer to a state of being philosophically and affectively 'above and beyond' this world and all forms of mundane issues. Although many items deal with experiencing spiritual connections and having a sense of oneness with the universe, items that attempt to measure patients' attempts to save plants and animals from extinction hardly qualify as being transcendent and neither does gladly risking one's life for any purpose do the same. Having a "vivid imagination", however, is certainly a questionable inclusion which is bound to draw some sarcastic remarks.

We may quibble about the exactness of ST items and whether they accurately measure spirituality, the neurological findings nevertheless support the dependence of religious beliefs on brain function and even further increases evidence that religious beliefs can be experimentally studied. Urgesi et al. even go as far as to say that "dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviours".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S., Skrap, M., & Fabbro, F. (2010). The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence Neuron, 65 (3), 309-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.026

Cloninger CR, Svrakic DM, & Przybeck TR (1993). A psychobiological model of temperament and character. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50 (12), 975-90 PMID: 8250684

Further Thoughts On 'No More God Spot?'

Regarding my previous blog of a few days ago, discussing the recent research by Kapogiannis et al. (2009) on the psychological and neuroanatomical framework of religious belief they've provided, I had some further thoughts on the study that I'd like to delineate. But first, just a quick note. Some may wonder whether my treatment of the issues reveal a sympathy in me for affairs religious and/or that I might be a - shock horror! - a Creationist (ID) infiltrator. I'm putting that to bed right now: I am NOT an IDiot! :-)

I am simply aware that there may be many in my audience who are religious, and so I treat the subject neutrally as I see no need to offend. But then again, some might take offence at my describing ID proponents as 'IDiots' as I just did above, and before I know it I'll be wallowing in qualifications and disclaimers and everyone'll have forgotten what I came to say. Blah blah, this is my space in the end. In seriousness, however, a neutral attitude is the best attitude to take. To be properly academically trained in matters scientific means to maintain a neutral - and yet sceptical - attitude. Apart from the fact that it helps you save face at a later date when your assertions turn out to be wrong ("Oh well I was always neutral about it anyway"), it is really the only position you can take with any measure of comfort given the extremely fast pace at which scientific research is being carried out and announced. Maintaining an attitude of scepticism is also important as it helps promote an attitude of critical thinking, which itself helps to spot numerous errors in studies (if any) as well as gaps and drawbacks in any research by which further endeavours can plug up.

That said, the Kapogiannis study is being touted by some as "proof" that religious faith is "deeply embedded" in the brain which is "programmed for religious experiences". You know this is a media article when you hear the word 'proof', for only they can give masterclasses in sensationalist articles and headlines. However in my last post I showed that it isn't quite that simple. I spoke of the earlier "God Spot" research that I encountered in 2004/2005 and how this new study seemed to contradict the idea of a single spot in the brain that mediated almost all religious feeling.

I also mentioned how I had not kept up with the research specifically investigating this "God Spot" and that this represents a gap in my knowledge that I'll have to catch up on. (By the way, if anyone has any good links to sites or papers I can read, it'd be appreciated.) But from what I recall of it, God Spot research mainly focused on the capacity of the brain that enabled sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy to have regular spiritual experiences in the form of "religious visions", which we know as visual hallucinations. In the wider context of the limbic system, it was thought that various elements of the limbic architecture combined together along with amgydala and hippocampal functions (and vague links to the autonomic nervous system, ANS) in order for a visual hallucination to be produced. To me, it seemed like a workable theory that explained several instances of the physiological and emotional phenomena that sometimes characterises the incidence of deeply held faith. However, there are obvious gaps in this argument: Not all temporal-lobe epileptics are religious, and also, not all religious people are temporal-lobe epileptics.

This is why I clearly mentioned that this latest Kapogiannis paper simply set out to understand how religious beliefs and feelings are modulated in "normal" brains. Indeed, you do not get many religious people going around making claims of receiving divine and prophetic visions and the Vatican ain't deluged with nominations for sainthood. Most religious people are "normal" in the sense of going to church on Sundays, scriptural study, prayer, and just having a general religious worldview that is satisfying for them. And this is what Kapogiannis and his colleagues wanted to understand: Do their brains used specialised "God Spot" circuitry to modulate all these feelings, or do they use normal processes?

That the answer turned out to be the latter option does not necessarily contradict previous God-Spot research, in my opinion. I personally find it interesting that studies take place on different ends of the spectrum; how the 'normal' and 'visionary' brains are functionally activated for religious processing.

I still don't think much of the criticism referring to the drawback of testing only 'thinking' participants, those who agreed or disagreed with the statements being read out to them, instead of analysing a 'visionary' brain. How exactly would that work? Who made such a criticism like this? Do they even know what fMRI scans involve and how difficult or expensive they are to do? Ask Andrew Newberg (MD), the guy who apparently thinks it's sooo easy to scan a brain in the middle of a religious experience that he hasn't tried to do it himself. Or has he? Looking over his website and the research papers he's come out with, I notice that most of them were written for Zygon. If you've been following my blog for a while, you'll know exactly what I think of Zygon. Now I don't want to seem like I'm unnecessarily attacking some poor guy without provocation, but it comes to something when a titan like PZ Myers doesn't think much of him either. It is incidences like this that make it so hard for genuine science to reach the public and educate their little cotton socks, because Templeton yes-men like Newberg tend to pop up when you're least expecting them and feed something silly into the public imagination which, when investigated, turns out to be an overblown exaggeration.

That is why an attitude of neutrality and scepticism is needed. It is indeed hard to maintain neutrality especially in a world where the Creationist/ID movement have drawn 'first blood' in an unwinnable war, but by being on guard through the critical examination of new research (especially hyped research) it may be possible to score a few points in the service of scientific endeavour and public education.

---------------------------------------------------
Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811717106

No More God Spot?

Back in 2005 when I was an enthusiastic undergraduate, I was amazed at the scientific knowledge that proliferated on theories of religion. After reading Ramachandran's impressive Phantoms In The Brain and gaining an acquaintance with the neurobiological structures that underly religious experience, I became aware of scientific research that was suggesting the existence of a "God Module" in the brain, a system of specialised neural circuitry that appeared to be the central mediator of religious emotions and feelings as well as other things. The evidence seemed to point towards the temporal lobes and the larger limbic system as the location of this "God Spot", as evidenced by this 2004 TIME article: 'Is God In Our Genes?' It sounded great, we were finally boiling down religion to it's essential neural components! And I'll be honest in saying that I was an enthusiastic follower of this theory.

Now I haven't followed the progress of this line of research in the intervening years, and I'm unsure as to where the research stands on that particular point, but I understand through recent developments such as a recent announcement by Scientific American that a much more lateral theory has been developed that basically says that religious feelings co-opt different brain circuits, those that are engaged in more more mundane pursuits such as politics, music, food, and so on. On the face of it, this theory makes much more sense. Religion, like many things, has many facets including contemplation, group activities, dietary requirements, social obligations, and many others, and so it stands to reason that these activites are moderated by the same neural circuits that moderate them in non-religious contexts! In fact the paper, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, claims to reveal three psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge) in networks that process Theory of Mind (ToM) regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics and imagery. ToM, in short, is the ability of individuals to understand their own and other people's mental states in terms of beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, etc. You know your own thoughts, and you know that other people have their thoughts too, because you have a Theory of Mind.

Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. discuss the aim of their research; to define the psychological structure of religious belief and to reveal the brain areas activated by the cognitive processes involved. They give a nod to previous "God Spot" research by acknowledging how they have largely focused on the neural correlates of rather vivid and unusual experiences, sufferers of temporal-lobe epilepsy (which was mainly responsible for linking religiosity with the limbic structures), executive/prosocial aspects of religion being linked to the frontal lobes, and mystical religious experiences being linked with decreased parietal lobe activity. They mention that all these findings rarely corresponded with each other and generally didn't succeed at discovering a psychological architecture that underlies religious belief. Regarding the dimensions, the authors mention that factor analytic studies showed how the perception of God's involvement and anger are key components of belief, and this formed their first hypothesis that these concepts would quite naturally be related with the prefrontal and posterior regions of the ToM structure that deal with intent and emotion. Remember, ToM is the ability to understand one's own and others' mental states, so it stands to reason that understanding God's involvment in world affairs or his being angry for some reason or other fits nicely under ToM conceptions of intent and emotion. The second hypothesis proposed to test doctrinal knowledge being mediated by neural circuits processing abstract semantics, and that experiential knowledge engages circuits that process memory recall and imagery. The third hypothesis proposed that adoption of religious belief uses networks used in cognitive-emotional processing.

Just so we're clear, this study isn't aspiring to make any kind of statement on religious belief one way or the other. All it's trying to do is figure out whether religious belief uses "normal" neural circuits that are used for a variety of everyday things or thoughts, or whether "specialised" circuits are being used solely to process religious thoughts and ideas.

Multidimensional scaling (MDS, similar to factor analysis in concept) was applied to ratings of conceptual dissimilarity so that they appropriate correlated within the structures of the three aforementioned dimensions. They don't appear to have mentioned the use of any standardised scale measuring religious beliefs so I can only assume they created their own list of statements (can be seen in supplementary data). 26 particpants with variable levels of self-reported religiosity performed the ratings. Interestingly, Dimension 1 (D1) correlated negatively with God's perceived level of involvement (-0.994), D2 correlated negatively with God's perceived anger (-0.953) but positively with God's perceived love (0.953), and D3 correlated positively with doctrinal (0.993) and negatively with experiential (-0.993) religious content. After that, they fMRI-scanned 40 new participants and measured their brain activity while they listened to the statements being read out to them.

Excuse me for getting bogged down in the details, but at the end of the day this is what was discovered: "the neural correlates of these psychological dimensions were revealed to be well-known brain networks, mediating evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions." In other words, religious beliefs and feelings use the same brain networks as beliefs and feelings about politics, food, martial arts, music and whatever else form your hobbies and interests.

D1 indeed hit ToM circuits in order to "understand God’s intent and resolve the negative emotional significance of his lack of involvement." D2 indeed hit the more emotional ToM circuits when, considering God's emotions of love or anger, activated the same areas that respond to fear and happiness respectively. And finally, D3 engaged areas dealing with the decoding of metaphorical meaning and abstractness (doctrinal), and areas that generate memory and language-based projections of oneself (experiential).

This image shows the effect of D3 on the brain: Experiential (above) and Doctrinal (below). Activations for experiential knowledge are displayed as a spectrum whereas doctrinal activations are represented in purple. This seems intuitively reasonable; theoretical or 'bookish' knowledge of religion is localised in a small area when activated, as compared with experiential knowledge that recruits larger areas in order to 'remember' spiritual experiences, projecting it within one's mind with all of the emotion associated with the event. This isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, it's simply a descriptive statement of what's going on neurologically under different religious circumstances. However, in assessing the overal effect of religiosity on the brain, it was discovered that religiosity is modulated in brain areas that tend to be related with stronger episodic (mainly autobiographical) memory retrieval and imagery, and suggested that the religious participants had a greater and more meaningful understanding of the religious statements that were read out to them. Hardly a surprise.

Regarding the last hypothesis dealing with the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs, some interesting results were reported for the religious group. Disagreement with religious statements among the religious group activated anterior insulae areas commonly associated with emotional-cognitive integration, suggesting that rejection of religious beliefs involves a larger role for emotions in that process. The researchers explain away this finding as saying that negative emotions (such as aversion, guilt, fear of loss) in the religious participants may have been triggered by disagreeing with the statements, and that this could be viewed as a normal event where one encounters statements that go against one's belief system. Results were not reported for the non-religious participants, implying nothing worthy of reporting, so this activation amongst the religious must have been pretty high to merit a mention. The lady doth protest too much, methinks! ;-)

The researchers conclude their paper by relating their findings to their hypotheses and basically patting themselves on the back for a job done well. An important disclaimer relates to the fact that the measured religiosity was that of a sample of modern Western society, and the findings may differ with respect to other cultures. Quite an obvious experimental drawback but it remains to be seen whether the results will remain relatively consistent if or when replicated.

But what does all of this mean for research on the neuropsychological effects of religion? For a start, it shows rather well that religious feeling cannot strictly be said to be located in a single area (as per "God Spot"), but employs general neural circuitry. One may dream of a blissful holiday in quite the same way as one dreams of a blissful afterlife, one may respond well to smiles or bullying in quite the same way as one may respond to "God's love" or "God's anger", and one may interpret theological metaphors and relate them to one's life in quite the same way as one may enjoy reading and analysing a good piece of literature, and relating that to one's life!

Another interesting consideration relates to the evolutionary development of the brain. As the authors suggest that their findings now provide a "psychological and neuroanatomical framework for the processing of religious belief" that may be a specialised human function. Kalanit Grill-Spector, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, notes that other primates share the same brain structures although it is debatable as to whether they use them in the same capacity. Other critics note that this study simply analyses a "thinking" brain as opposed to a brain actively undergoing a religious experience. This is such a lazy methodological criticism that I wonder how it can even be considered seriously. It is facetious to think or even expect a "visionary" or prayerful brain can be appropriately analysed, difficult as the process is already, what to speak of asking others to do so. I suggest that this type of armchair logic is unsuitable and unhelpful in further understanding this already very complex topic.

The final sentence is worth a quote: "Regardless of whether God exists or not, religious beliefs do exist and can be experimentally studied, as shown in this study."

------------------------------------------------------------------
This article carries further thoughts.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811717106

How Your Brain Creates God

Great article in the latest New Scientist (04 February 2009):
----------------------------------------------------------
Born believers: How your brain creates God

No wonder religion is so prevalent in human society – our brains are primed for it, says Michael Brooks

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30) The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works. That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects. This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.

Mind and Matter

Bloom says the two systems are autonomous, leaving us with two viewpoints on the world: one that deals with minds, and one that handles physical aspects of the world. He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate - and separable - package. "We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views."

There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability," he says.

Useful as it is, common-sense dualism also appears to prime the brain for supernatural concepts such as life after death. In 2004, Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast, UK, put on a puppet show for a group of pre-school children. During the show, an alligator ate a mouse. The researchers then asked the children questions about the physical existence of the mouse, such as: "Can the mouse still be sick? Does it need to eat or drink?" The children said no. But when asked more "spiritual" questions, such as "does the mouse think and know things?", the children answered yes.

Default to God

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people. The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. "You see bushes rustle, you assume there's somebody or something there," Bloom says.

This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don't have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real. Again, experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind. Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people. These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Our predisposition to believe in a supernatural world stays with us as we get older. Kelemen has found that adults are just as inclined to see design and intention where there is none. Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life". Though she doesn't yet have evidence that this tendency is linked to belief in god, Kelemen does have results showing that most adults tacitly believe they have souls. Boyer is keen to point out that religious adults are not childish or weak-minded. Studies reveal that religious adults have very different mindsets from children, concentrating more on the moral dimensions of their faith and less on its supernatural attributes.

Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain, says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away." Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. "They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it," Bering says. The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, Atran says. The problem is something he calls "the tragedy of cognition". Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong - including their own death, which is hard to deal with. "You've got to figure out a solution, otherwise you're overwhelmed," Atran says. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.

That view is backed up by an experiment published late last year (Science, vol 322, p 115). Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation. The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it. It does, however, suggests that god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the "path of least resistance", says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.

These findings also challenge the idea that religion is an adaptation. "Yes, religion helps create large societies - and once you have large societies you can outcompete groups that don't," Atran says. "But it arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds. I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes." Supporters of the adaptation hypothesis, however, say that the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. As David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York state points out, elements of religious belief could have arisen as a by-product of brain evolution, but religion per se was selected for because it promotes group survival. "Most adaptations are built from previous structures," he says. "Boyer's basic thesis and my basic thesis could both be correct."

Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford - the researcher most strongly identified with the religion-as-adaptation argument - also has no problem with the idea that religion co-opts brain circuits that evolved for something else. Richard Dawkins, too, sees the two camps as compatible. "Why shouldn't both be correct?" he says. "I actually think they are." Ultimately, discovering the true origins of something as complex as religion will be difficult. There is one experiment, however, that could go a long way to proving whether Boyer, Bloom and the rest are onto something profound. Ethical issues mean it won't be done any time soon, but that hasn't stopped people speculating about the outcome.

It goes something like this. Left to their own devices, children create their own "creole" languages using hard-wired linguistic brain circuits. A similar experiment would provide our best test of the innate religious inclinations of humans. Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? "I think the answer is yes," says Bloom.

-------------------------------------

God of the gullible

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is propagated through indoctrination, especially of children. Evolution predisposes children to swallow whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them, he argues, as trusting obedience is valuable for survival. This also leads to what Dawkins calls "slavish gullibility" in the face of religious claims.

If children have an innate belief in god, however, where does that leave the indoctrination hypothesis? "I am thoroughly happy with believing that children are predisposed to believe in invisible gods - I always was," says Dawkins. "But I also find the indoctrination hypothesis plausible. The two influences could, and I suspect do, reinforce one another." He suggests that evolved gullibility converts a child's general predisposition to believe in god into a specific belief in the god (or gods) their parents worship.

Upcoming 'New Scientist' Feature

The next issue of New Scientist magazine will run a feature on 'God And The Mind: What Happens When Neuroscience Meets Religion?'

This looks right up my street! Though I sigh at the thought of the vested interests taking part in the same old 'science vs. religion' debates that this will generate.

Anyhow, stay tuned. :-)

Why IDiotic Research is BAD for Science

This is a partial repost of a previous blog as I wanted to have a separate post outlining one of my postgraduate experiences of scientific research for a paper, and how it can be scuppered when Creationist/ID papers start entering research databases. After I've outlined my general concerns about this, listen to this tale of research woe. The following exchange took place in the context of a conversation with a believer:

Question: In response to your statement about religious scientists engaging in intellectual dishonesty and their position being unjustifiable, why should you or anyone object to what someone wishes to spend their time researching?

Answer: Because they basically waste everyone's time with what is essentially junk science. In fact its not just scientists, but a whole load of other people like swamis and gurus who think that they can make scientific pronouncements and get away with it. I discussed this briefly at someone's blog a few months ago. This is a very good question you've asked. This summer [2008] it is likely that I'll be involved in a massive scientific project that I hoped would be along the lines of an investigation in the religious content of auditory hallucinations in non-psychotic populations. If I get ethical approval for the basic idea, there is a possibility of significant expansion which will result in investigations beyond the original proposal and quite probably end up a something seriously publishable. As such, it is my duty to do the background research (for the introduction of what will be my paper as I explained above) by seeing what has already been done and how my study can fit in with any previous research. I came across this paper:

Norris, R.S. (2005). Examining the structure and role of emotion: Contributions of neurobiology to the study of embodied religious experience. Zygon, 40(1), 181-200.

A paper that I can only describe through gritted teeth as absolute shit. There was nothing whatsoever of any value in it, least of all to me. Norris basically draws some thoughts together along the lines of: "Look at how this explains this, and how that explains that. Isn't this grrrrrreat?" I was so disturbed by this paper that I checked out the Zygon journal. Strange name for a scientific journal, don't you think? But apparently it is also known as the Journal of Religion and Science, and here's what's written on their website:

"The journal Zygon provides a forum for exploring ways to unite what in modern times has been disconnected—values from knowledge, goodness from truth, religion from science. Traditional religions, which have transmitted wisdom about what is of essential value and ultimate meaning as a guide for human living, were expressed in terms of the best understandings of their times about human nature, society, and the world. Religious expression in our time, however, has not drawn similarly on modern science, which has superseded the ancient forms of understanding. As a result religions have lost credibility in the modern mind. Nevertheless some recent scientific studies of human evolution and development have indicated how long-standing religions have evolved well-winnowed wisdom, still essential for the best life. Zygon's hypothesis is that, when long-evolved religious wisdom is yoked with significant, recent scientific discoveries about the world and human nature, there results credible expression of basic meaning, values, and moral convictions that provides valid and effective guidance for enhancing human life."

Sounds pretty cool, huh? Like some of those weird ideas you hear about science and religion coming together in a synthesis. Personally I'd be suspicious of a publication that had people like Viggo Mortenson on their advisory board but there you go. If I did some digging around, I'm sure I'd find these guys all to be a bunch of Creationists. Whoops, Intelligent Design advocates, sorry. These statements of purpose and all sounds very professional and above-board until you take a look at some of their articles. By virtue of my ATHENS login I was able to access their latest March 2008 issue, and here's an abstract from an article entitled 'The Centrality of Incarnation':

"What we urgently need at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a christological vision that can shape and inform a new and powerful way of helping humankind to interpret their place within the universe. A christological vision that is unintelligible and uninteresting can have a profoundly deleterious soteriological implication: the orbit of God's saving grace will not be wide enough to encompass the universal place of humankind. Arthur Peacocke's move is clear and to the point: Only when the foundations and universal scope of God's grace are fully established for all of creation, only then can the importance of God's specific work in Jesus the Christ be established."

This is science, are you kidding me? And just to make sure I wasn't being unfair I had a look at some other articles much to my chagrin and my theory of these guys being a bunch of religion-biased creationists was more or less confirmed as many of them praise the ideas of Arthur Peacocke. They are definitely religious anyway and biased with it. Articles entitled with things like 'Jesus and Creativity' don't really catch my interest.

And here's a gem from an article entitled 'Is a complete biocognitive account of religion feasible?' Pretty relevant to my interests, I'd think? Unfortunately not:

"Concluding this critical review, I am convinced, along with other scholars in the field, that the cause of the cognitive science of religion would be better served if detached from the biological approach. Very often the evolutionary ideas are highly speculative, lack empirical evidence, and become misleading."

Not only is this utter nonsense, but is it surprising that it was written by someone from a university in the Vatican City? I am filled with shock even while writing this, words can't express how I feel for these morons clogging up valuable PubMed space with their hokum gobbledygook dressed up as "science". Needless to say, I ain't likely to be referring to Zygon articles in any academic piece I write. Unless I wish to poke fun of course. Much has also been written about the Templeton Foundation and their apparent bias in annually awarding $1.6m to individuals who do something in "trying various ways for discoveries and breakthroughs to expand human perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine creativity". Other religious sects are jumping on this bandwagon too, putting out junk science books such as those authored by Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson; have you read Cremo's 'Human Devolution'? Don't bother, you have better things to do.

So this is basically why I'd object to this type of "research", Member1, because every few years its people like these who also waste everyone's time with court cases against various State Boards of Education in the US that contest the theory of evolution and demand that "Creationism" be taught alongside it in schools. They are outcasts with their junk science.

War On Neuroscience? What War?

After the initial shock of reading the article about Creationism's declaration of war on neuroscience, I thought I had better give some of my own thoughts. It would be very easy (and also very lazy) to rant on as many have already done by condemning them as "stupid" and IDiots (ID = Intelligent Design, IDiots = advocates of ID) although I do feel that way sometimes. One of my favourite science writers, Steven Novella, has written an excellent two-part review of the article and also provides some of the background behind the controversy:

Reports of the Demise of Materialism Are Premature

Reports of the Demise of Materialism Are Premature - Part II

This whole affair annoys me deeply because, as a general researcher, I am bound to keep up with all the latest developments in the field so as to maintain my own standard of knowledge as well as being properly equipped to deal with issues that I come across. What to speak of any patients I may eventually treat! And now I am going to have to take a greater care with what I read. Of course due care and caution needs to be taken with what we anyway, such as whether experimental studies have been carried out by using a fairly rigorous methodology and whether the (statistical) data really do support the conclusions, but now every time I read a paper that presents somewhat startling or surprising results I'm going to have a niggly little voice in the back of my head asking, "Did an IDiot write this?"

I've already had some disturbing run-ins with IDiotic papers (blogged here) and I still shudder at the memory. Aside from all that, though, is the disturbing possibility of how old notions of neuroscience are proposed for ressurrection (for want of a better term!) in order to substantiate this new 'battle', implicated in the very term 'non-material neuroscience' that is being thrown around by them suggests that they are on a mission to decry 'material' neuroscience as if it is a bad thing. What any good neuroscientist would know through years of private practice and research is that a duality between the two doesn't exist: the mind is the brain and vice versa. This is experienced even in empirical ways where we see a patient suffering from brain injury very often undergoes variable personality changes. The effect of any changes of course depends on the severity of the injury, and cases like these have been known about and treated for nigh on two centuries already (as per the incredible case of Phineas Gage). In short, an injury (or deficiency) to an important part of the brain generally causes the patient to exhibit behaviour that is synonymous with the injury or deficit at hand. The important point about cases like these, and which is often missed, is that it is possible to suggest that fundamental things such as 'thoughts' and 'personality' which are usually thought of in abstract terms can be said to have a material origin.

This point is very unpalatable for those who tend to a spiritual or otherwise New-Agey outlook on life, and who would be given to beliefs or sentiments that favour a sense of being a controller of one's own destiny. One certainly can exhibit control over certain areas in ones life, but this isn't about which outlook, viewpoint or worldview is correct or superior. This is about simple facts. And these facts make it clear that a material viewpoint is the only real path one can take to understanding issues of neuronal importance. Any reasonable person who gives a moment's thought to the concept will be able to understand that all our experiences - sensory, emotional, somatic, metaphysical - are processed only through the brain. Thus, even at the outset, the idea of a "non-material neuroscience" as propounded by Schwartz, Beauregard, and those of their ilk, is defeated.

But for me, this is one of those areas where science and philosophy merge to such an extent that it becomes a big blur. What the ID movement is trying to do is ressurrect "Cartesian dualism" which, put simply, is Rene Descartes' idea that mind and body are separate. Applied to neuroscience, this translates as the mind being a separate and different 'entity' from the brain tissues that host it. He summed up this idea in the famous saying, "cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am." According to Descartes, the mind and the body were composed of different types of substances just as oil and water. How could this be? We can see from our own experience that if we think about kicking someone up their bum and have our minds instruct our foot to do so, signals are sent to the leg that prepares and allows our foot to take aim and kick. Conversely, our bodies can also have an effect on our minds; a cut on the hand, for instance, may be painful enough to send distress signals to our brains and perhaps lead us into a state of panic. It seems that there is some ostensible connection between our bodies and minds.

Although Descartes insisted on their being separate entities and didn't adequately answer how these connections take place, Cartesian dualism, the theory that espouses these views, has come to explain these connections as a form of interactionism, that the (separate) body and mind interacted with each other in some way. In what ways they do that also hasn't been adequately explained. There are other types of dualism of course.

Perhaps the explanations above may go some way in explaining the shortcomings of the dualist theory, and why monism, the conception of the mind and the brain being one entity, is a much better model to use in trying to understand neuroscientific issues and problems. This kind of view is apparent in many modern descriptions of mind: 'Minds are simply what brains do' (Minsky, 1986); "'Mind is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out' (Claxton, 1994); Mind is 'the personalisation of the physical brain' (Greenfield, 2000). To quote Susan Blackmore:

"Such descriptions make it possible to talk about mental activities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate mind. This is probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think of 'mind' today, but there is much less agreement when it comes to consciousness." - Consciousness: An Introduction, 2007 (p. 13).

And this is in fact one of the current problems in neuroscience: how consciousness works. The New Scientist article correctly identifies this as an area where the ID movement are very likely to strike. But before we discuss that, a short description of consciousness must suffice. To describe a neural function that is, to say the least, responsible for our being alive is very hard to do. Is it appropriate to describe consciousness as a 'live' phenomenon? What about those unfortunate individuals who exist in a vegetative state due to horrific injuries, aren't they technically "alive"? Or are they? Who can adequately describe consciousness, in all its fancies and frivolities, dreams and nightmares, naturals and supernaturals, illusions and vividity, in a way that would comprehensively define it? The answer is: there isn't one. Consciousness is simply too big and too difficult to describe and there is no general definition that could come close to fully explaining it.

However, there are ways in which we can come close to understanding it or how it works. The ability to categorise stimuli and react to them, to discriminate between things, the way different cognitive structures integrate to provide information, the reportability of mental states, the mechanics of focus and attention, the deliberate control of behaviour, the difference between sleep and wakefulness, all of these are generally separate issues that can be understood in themselves. They are what we call the 'easy' problems of consciousness, denoting that these issues are relatively easy to understand when sufficient research has been carried out and these processes unfold. When we have 'easy' problems, it automatically follows that we have a 'hard' problem and it is this very hard problem that lies unsolved in the mystery of consciousness. The hard problem can be properly described as how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Or put another way, how can the functioning of neurons (objective processes) give rise to the subjective experiences that make us who we are, our loves, our joys, our sadnesses, our life experiences, our memories, our emotions, everything about us that makes us unique?

This is an issue that neuroscience cannot yet fully explain, although research is always ongoing. Some neuroscientists are sceptical and say that the hard problem will never be solved. Others think, as per the article, that new physical principles need to be postulated in order to guide research and solve it. Still others suggest that sufficient research into the easy problems will cause the hard problem to disappear automatically. Time (and research) will tell.

There will be those who, throwing their hands up in frustration (or thunder from their pulpits à la Jeffrey Schwartz), decide it's all a waste of time and go to the opposite extreme in their extreme thirst for an explanation. As per Daniel Dennett (1991), 'accepting dualism is giving up.' And this is precisely what these people appear to have done in joining the ID movement. But before you start thinking about the influence of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, Steven Novella has shown how the current agents for non-material neuroscience have links to Buddhism, loose associations with Deepak Chopra, as well as the intellectual abuse of quantum mechanics. This makes things a little more difficult because there are some neuroscientists who are interested in Buddhist meditational methodologies (and who employ them in their own lives) as a tool to better understand the experiential quality of consciousness, and some papers are sometimes published that discuss the possibility of what those Buddhist principles may be able to contribute to research in the area. Novella also goes into an excellent discussion of what constitutes the correct understanding of materialism, or naturalism, that is required to understand scientific or neuroscientific issues, and how IDeology diverts and is generally incompatible with the basic precepts of science, such as how a hypothesis should be falsifiable in principle. One example of this is how ID'ers suggest that "unexplained" issues in science can be explained once one accepts the notion of an intelligent top-down designer ('Godiddit!'), but how could this assumption be falsifiable? How is it possible to even prove that an intelligent designer exists? Thus, how could ID ever be scientific in spite of their claims to be so?

All in all, it appears that the IDeologues have learnt nothing from their abject failures in attacking evolution. As outlined in their mission statement they seek nothing less than the destruction of materialism, so it is expected that they will simply up sticks and move somewhere else to kick up a fuss. If they follow similar strategies to when they attacked evolution, we can expect more of the same: attacking all the "weak points" and filling the gaps with God. The disturbing thing is that they do this academically and while wearing the same white lab coats that genuine scientists wear, so the public will be fooled into thinking that any controversy they stir up will be a genuine one and that "conflicting opinions" may have some substance to them. They will publish their "scientific" academic papers (mostly in their own journals) and leave them to confuse the innocent wide-eyed newbies. This is all very disappointing, and underlines all the negatives of being influenced by an ideology that conflicts with the facts. Who would ever attempt to square a circle? Yet this is what the IDiots are trying to do.

I do not think much of their declaration of war. What war? Based on previous history, IDiots hardly ever come up with any real evidence of their claims; they simply re-interpret older and 'classic' experiments to suit their ways of thinking. When the 'weaknesses' of neuroscience are an open secret, the ID'ers will have the tough job of explaining away the 'hard problem' as well as having to explain how Cartesian dualist principles are valid after all. I'm not envious, but I'm not expecting too much from them either. Simply saying 'Godiddit!' to everything isn't a scientifically valid answer nor does it provide satisfactory explanations. It also turns out that David Chalmers, the philosopher who coined the term 'hard problem', has shown significant unease at how it has been hijacked by the ID'ers and has made some interesting points on his blog.

What worries me are the reactions of the public. As mentioned before, they are likely to be fooled into thinking that non-material neuroscience is just as equal and valid a paradigm as 'material' neuroscience is. We are likely to hear more 'spiritual' explanations for how various neural functions work from individuals such as the odious Deepak Chopra, and quite possibly the repellent 'Godiddit!' chorus from the Bible-quoting (or Dhammapada-quoting) peanut gallery. And of course, the usual criticisms about evil crackpot scientists with their chemicals and their test tubes, and how damn myopic and narrow-minded they are to ignore the "spiritual realm" in their doomed endeavour to search for the meaning of everything. This isn't a fantasy - this is history - which has the peculiar quality of repeating itself. That the whole evolution debacle even made it to several legal courts and education boards brought the indignation of many a scientist and a judge, but the one good thing about this "war" on neuroscience is that it is unlikely to have a large effect on public education as the subject is generally only taught at university level. Still, the idea of graduates' heads being filled with 'alternative' theories (when there are already plenty of 'orthodox' theories to digest) is something that causes me to shudder.

At the end of the day, what matters is that - war or no war - this shift is important to acknowledge and represents a challenge for this scientific establishment to face it head-on. Plenty of people would disagree about there being anything to face, and they would be right, but the final paragraph of the article was very telling: "What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the 'God of the gaps'."

And this is the reason why this blog exists. It represents my very small and humble contribution to public education.

Let's Celebrate The Real Big Questions

Although it isn't directly relevant to neuroscience or neuropsychology, this excellent essay from Lawrence Krauss in the September (2008) edition of New Scientist discusses premises that I often encounter in my discussions with people:

LAST year I agreed to write a short essay for an advertisement featuring the question: "Does the universe have a purpose?" It was to appear in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist and New Scientist. I was asked to express my views in my own words, so I wasn't worried that they would be distorted to support an ulterior agenda. I considered the ad a useful outlet for communicating how I believe science can inform this question.

I was naive. The ad, which was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation - an organisation that aims to find links between science and religion - was the first instalment in a Big Ideas series, and has been followed up by essays on: "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Next week the otherwise well-grounded Skeptics Society is to run a related conference, also sponsored by Templeton, called Origins. According to their promotional material, "the Big Questions... involve Origins", such as the origins of the universe, the laws of nature, time's arrow, life and consciousness. "Science is making significant headway into providing natural explanations for these ultimate questions, which leaves us with the biggest question of all: does science make belief in God obsolete?"

Unfortunately, despite the money being channelled into such meetings and ads, this is neither a very big question nor a very big idea. The issue may be of importance to some theologians and philosophers, but it is essentially irrelevant to scientists. In the academic departments where these origins are being investigated, the question is almost never raised.

Scientists may, if asked, express views on issues relating to purpose and religion, especially to counter ill-conceived notions that might mislead the public, but in our work we focus on scientific questions that can be addressed by the tools we have to explore the universe. Whether any form of modern religion is made obsolete by our progress is a tangential and almost trivial point. If new knowledge about the universe cannot be worked into these philosophies, they will become obsolete. Otherwise, they persist.

While the participants have changed, the so-called debate over the relation between science and religion has hardly progressed in 400 years. Today's arguments about intelligent design, for example, are little different from those of Thomas Aquinas and William Paley, though the realm in which the debate is taking place has been shifted from human scales to scales that are many, many times smaller or larger. Focusing on such stale and fruitless questions prevents the public from appreciating the truly interesting intellectual frontiers in science.

I recently moved to Arizona to lead a new programme on Origins at Arizona State University. Its purpose is to explore and celebrate emerging knowledge on origins: from that of the universe to humanity, consciousness to culture. We will be sponsoring, among other things, a big public event in Phoenix in April 2009, where speakers including Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, Brian Greene and Steven Pinker will focus on the real questions driving intellectual progress across science. Is there a multiverse? Are the laws of nature unique? What caused the big bang? How did life arise on Earth? How abundant and diverse is life in the universe? How did humans evolve consciousness? Can machines think? Can we genetically re-engineer humans?

These are the questions that reflect the remarkable upheavals and challenges that our understanding of nature has faced over the past century. Our efforts to answer them will form the basis of knowledge and action in the next.

Hadron Switch-on

Now that the Large Hadron Collider has been switched on, we can expect a flurry of astounding news and reports that will contribute to the advancement of knowledge and science. For a start, it promises to recreate the conditions at the birth of the universe that will allow scientists a better view of how the universe came into being. Billed as "the largest experiment in the world" where protons will collide at 99.99% the speed of light, there isn't much remaining to say to people who continue to cling to beliefs about sky fairies and diablos as fundamental and important forces in the universes.

Except this:

Quotes of Whoa #5: Evolution of Mind

"[I]f history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure."

-- Edward O. Wilson, 'Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge' (1998), p. 262.

The Genius of Charles Darwin

I've always been relatively vague on the topic of evolution after never getting around to studying it properly, and the minor forays I made to read some evolution websites turned up far too many 'debate' sites for me to discern between the facts of evolution from the controversies. Although I could guess at the rationale behind ideas such as natural selection, it was too fuzzy and vague for me to understand properly.

So it was a certain amount of delight that I watched Channel 4's 'The Genius of Charles Darwin', a 3-parter to commemorate nearly 150 years of Darwin's famous work 'On The Origin of Species'. Needless to say, this series of documentaries would provide a clear account of evolution and also some fair discussion of controversy. And to top it all off, it was presented by none other than Richard Dawkins, one of the astoundingly clear science writers of our time, to say the least!

Dawkins is often criticised for his strident pro-atheism tone - and when you get past this to view his credentials as an evolutionary biologist, you find that he is unfairly criticised as a "PR man for evolution" as was said recently by Tom Wolfe. I disagree, because more people pay attention to Dawkins' atheist critique than they do to his science tomes and it isn't difficult to see that he is actually in a position to know what he's talking about. I think there is an undercurrent of envy where Dawkins is concerned as it's quite a feat to have your first book still in print 32 years after it was first published and still as popular as ever, selling over a million copies and being translated into 25 languages. What to speak of the fact that it was required reading for me as a psychology undergraduate. So no, after having read his works (and criticised some of them too) I do have an enduring respect for Dawkins as a voice of authority in his field.

The first programme was more or less a biography of Darwin and described his travels to the Galapagos Islands whereby he embarked on a scientific voyage of discovery in terms of his evolutionary findings. It was a delight to follow his incredulity as discovering two slightly different types of rhea and wondering why, according to the paradigm of his day, God had created these types and indeed why different variations are found among all types of species. It became clear that as Darwin found more and more examples of variation amongst species, they counted as evidence piling up to discount the Biblical account of creation. And furthermore, these variations become specialised (natural selection) due to the influence of the environment. Eventually with slow progress (over millions of years), these variations may become so specialised that the entity can be considered an entirely different species. Conversely, species who do not develop crucial survival skills are driven extinct by natural processes. Dawkins gave a fascinating example during his narrative that was graphically illustrated with footage: Imagine a world where predators, over several generations, improve and enhance their hunting capabilities by means of sharper teeth, faster legs and general all-round improvement in order to catch their prey, yet also the prey develops with faster legs in order to run away from said predator! Dawkins described it as an escalation, even as a type of "arms race". Fascinating.

But what was even more fascinating than that is when he avoided the 'simian ---> man' paradigm that religionists have a major problem with by discussing how man is involved in a similar arms race with viruses, observing how the majority of the current European population are the descendants of those who fortunately survived medieval plagues which gives support to the natural selection idea. While there are an abundance of lethal and potentially lethal viruses around, one of the biggest ones today is HIV/AIDS. Dawkins broached the topic of reports of human resistance to the HIV-virus, even visiting a Kenyan sex worker to briefly interview her about her supposed resistance. The implications of this are astounding and were outlined clearly: As some individuals have an in-built resistance to HIV locked away in their genotypes they will survive and pass their genes to the next generation to bring about 'stronger' and HIV-resistant humans, whereas unfortunate individuals who contract HIV that develops into AIDS will be driven extinct by such natural processes. Natural selection is a cruel mechanism indeed.

OK, I'm aware that I'm discussing all of this in very brief terms but, what else can be done? This all goes to show how biological evolution is the driving mechanism of life. More exciting issues are certain to be raised in the next two parts of this series. A small example of this was given in the form of a brief interview with Craig Venter, one of those who mapped the human genome. This stupendous piece of scientific achievement is enough evidence to prove that evolution is a fact, as it shows a significantly large amount of genes is shared by all forms of life.

Almost predictably, opposition to evolution was represented by 15-year-old children in a school science class that Dawkins attended to lecture. I felt it was an attempt at poignancy in the sense of educating the next generation. But it was definitely embarrassing trying to watch a bunch of 15-year-olds tangle with an Oxford professor. Their scepticism and criticisms of evolution were horribly ignorant, weak with foundations in religious beliefs and upbringing, and were terrible and cringeworthy to watch. But rather than spend too much time directly discrediting these beliefs Dawkins chose to make the topic of atheism an implied conclusion of evolution and also of the programme as a 'sub plot', with various types of digs made throughout the programme. I think that the programme was spoilt by this as it wasn't terribly necessary to discuss or even critique the idea of creation as "God's handiwork" except just to mention how Darwin himself realised this, which was already done earlier in the programme. It seems symptomatic of Dawkins that every time he gets a chance to take the floor he takes the opportunity to have a jab at religion and this gets tiring after a while. It wouldn't matter so much in a documentary that specifically discusses religion and religious issues (like his own 'Root of All Evil' series) but I would have thought that a science documentary would have focused almost entirely on the mechanics of evolution. Either way, the anti-religion jabs weren't too bad and were only indulged in to show the schoolkids how wrong they were by taking them to a beach and inviting them to find their own mini-fossils and unusual rock formations that point to a history of the earth longer than that delineated in old scriptures. Although this little outing succeeded in making the kids think a bit more deeply about their beliefs, none of them gave them up on television. As Dawkins put it, spending a few hours with these kids is no competition for a lifetime of religious indoctrination.

All in all, a good programme and a breath of fresh air. Plenty of whoa to keep me interested. I'll be looking forward to the next installments.

The Neural Buddhists

Index - Article - One - Two - Three - Four

Some time ago I engaged in a discussion about the existence of the soul with members of a Net forum that I hang out at, which is a place that is generally spiritual in its outlook and topics of discussion. While some discussion occasionally takes place on scientific subjects, I do not think that these are covered in much depth. In any case when one member posted The Neural Buddhists article from the New York Times, which happened to be the most emailed article that day, I posted my thoughts on it.

What follows is that article interspersed with my thoughts. This led to an interesting discussion about the existence of a soul between myself and several forum members, which I would like to outline in forthcoming posts on this blog. Some details will be changed in order to make the points clear and coherent for this blog audience but the verve will remain the same. So without further ado:

"In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,' in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

"To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are 'hard-wired' to do this or that. Religion is an accident. In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

"Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and 'the soul is dead.' He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists. Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

Comment: I have to admit that the question of whether the soul exists or not is one of my current muses. Just a couple of days ago I read a transcript of a 1999 debate (actually a discussion) between Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker who more or less presented the "hardcore materialism" and "cognitive neuroscience" viewpoints respectively. Perhaps I need to read through it again to refamiliarise myself with his points but I found Pinker's candour refreshing: the soul can't exist because the brain is essentially modular; there is a module for "this" and a module for "that", if a module stops functioning through brain injury or whatever then that part of the person is gone. The person may lose their ability to see, think or feel in a certain way, or in cases like Phineas Gage they undergo a complete personality transformation. This and other examples provide evidence of a sort that shows that the mind is an entity in the physical world as much of its functioning is due to the proper functioning of neural correlates.

Incidentally, this started me thinking about the institutional belief in the the eternal existence and indivisibility of the soul which is a hallmark of Hindu/Buddhist religions that generally proclaim the view that "Consciousness is the symptom of the soul". So then, what about paraplegics and quadriplegics? They are paralysed from the waist or neck down, so those parts of the body are now soul-less since they are no longer conscious? The soul is divisible after all?

"The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as 'The Origin of Species' reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world. And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible."

Comment: I would prefer it if faith in God was undermined or completely eradicated altogether, but this is utopian and probably will never happen. We as a race will probably kill ourselves over religion instead of living long enough to intellectually evolve to the state of realising the utter redundancy of religion in an organic manner. Such a bitter irony.

"Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

"Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real."

Comment: I'm not too well-read on the capabilities of the parietal lobe, but it doesn't strike as sensible to say that a module primarily concerned with spatial orientation can "transcend itself" to feel things that are essentially emotional in content, a characteristic of the temporal lobes or general limbic system. I'd be interested in reading Newberg's papers though, I'll have a root around on PubMed when I get a chance.

In any case, I find that a good dose of chocolate helps me feel transcendent and aware of a larger presence. Forget about soma and LSD, Cadbury's Dairy Milk is where it's at! ;-)

"This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion."

Comments: Good tips. I especially like Gazzaniga and Damasio.

"First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

Comment: I don't see how No. 4 follows from No. 3, neither do I agree with this guy's definition of "sacred". People can have moments of elevated experience from viewing a wonderful piece of art or a nice example of architecture, or even a great book, which can overwhelm one to the point of ecstasy and fill one with a boundless sense of appreciation for the amount of work that has gone into producing such an example of beauty. Standards are variable. I suppose this is "sacred" in some way, when one's heart is touched in this way, but trying to extrapolate that into some kind of definition of God (how nice and ambiguous his definition is, it may as well not exist at all!) is a bit much if you ask me.

Besides, this guy is skirting over at least 6000 years of human history. People haven't gone to war throughout the centuries over some feelgood feeling.

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate."

Comment: Hmmm, I don't really think there was any "debate" at all. How exactly is one supposed to "debate" the contention that something doesn't exist? Prove that it exists? Where is this proof then?

"The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."

Comment: I think that most intelligent people have already figured out that religions are a huge mess of constructs and shaky scaffolding ostensibly based on some original emotions and feelgood feelings that really were as feelgood as it was possible to be then. Except for Islam and Mormonism I'd say. This is not an out-of-this-world observation.

I do find it rather interesting how some prominent neuroscientists have Buddhist interests. I wonder why? I'd like to do some reading on that. Or if somebody with greater access to PubMed or PsycInfo than I could send me an article from a journal that I don't have access to, I'd really appreciate it. Here's the reference for you lovely people willing to do me this favour:

Mikulas, W. (2007). Buddhism & Western Psychology: Fundamentals of Integration. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14:4, 4-49.

If you have an ATHENS login, you can get it from here. I downloaded this article a while back when I had a better login but carelessly deleted it. Now my current login is insufficient for this journal.

"In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."

Comment: Sure, but I don't think science and mysticism are joining hands. They might do so in very small ways such as OXSCOM's attempt to understand pain, but not in terms of the bigger picture. Just because Stephen Jay Gould tried to butter both sides of the debate up with his ideas of separate magisteria (see his 'Rock of Ages') doesn't mean that these magisteria exist, and certainly doesn't mean that these magisteria can overlap or unite.

"Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day."

Comment: What does he mean "going to"? Every dog has its day and, in my opinion, religion's day ended back in the 19th Century or so. As far as I'm concerned, religion and religious people have nothing substantial to contribute to any such "debate". Instead of defending the idea of a personal God, perhaps they should set about proving that one exists in the first place. Then there would be no need of any such defence. Hahaha, this one line shows the redundancy of this argument.

"I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects."

Comment: It is indeed a most wondrous and fascinating journey.

Index - Article - One - Two - Three - Four