27 replies to this topic

[Great Ape]

No 'God Spot' In Brain, Spirituality Linked To Right Parietal Lobe

Huffington Post | April 20, 2012

Scientists have speculated that the human brain features a “God spot,” one distinct area of the brain responsible for spirituality. Now, University of Missouri researchers have completed research that indicates spirituality is a complex phenomenon, and multiple areas of the brain are responsible for the many aspects of spiritual experiences.

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.”

In the most recent study, Johnstone studied 20 people with traumatic brain injuries affecting the right parietal lobe, the area of the brain situated a few inches above the right ear. He surveyed participants on characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan. He found that the participants with more significant injury to their right parietal lobe showed an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power.

“Neuropsychology researchers consistently have shown that impairment on the right side of the brain decreases one’s focus on the self,” Johnstone said. “Since our research shows that people with this impairment are more spiritual, this suggests spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self. This is consistent with many religious texts that suggest people should concentrate on the well-being of others rather than on themselves.”

Johnstone says the right side of the brain is associated with self-orientation, whereas the left side is associated with how individuals relate to others. Although Johnstone studied people with brain injury, previous studies of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns with normal brain function have shown that people can learn to minimize the functioning of the right side of their brains to increase their spiritual connections during meditation and prayer.

Johnstone makes the comparison to other kinds of disciplines; "It is like playing the piano, the more you train your brain, the more the brain becomes predisposed to piano playing. Practice makes perfect."

While researchers have been focused on finding a 'God spot' in the brain, the new research suggests that it might be better to focus on the neuropsychological questions of self focus vs selfless focus. As Prof. Johnstone explains: "when the brain focuses less on the the self (by decreased activity in the right lobe) it is by definition a moment of self-transcendence and can be understood as being connected to God or Nirvana. It is the sensation of feeling like you are part of a bigger thing."

The research does not make claims about spiritual truths but demonstrates the way that the brain allows for different kinds of spiritual experiences that Christians might name God, Buddhists it could be Nirvana, and for atheists it might be the feeling of being connected to the earth.

On the other end of the spectrum, Professor Johnstone admits that for him it is the music of Led Zeppelin that helps him transcend himself: "When I put on my headphones and listen to "Stairway to Heaven" I just get lost."

[Source]

It seems pretty clear to me, that with all the other research results claiming that the belief in God is a function of our brains, God resides only in our own minds. Maybe each of us are God. You grok ?

Edited by Great Ape, 04 May 2012 - 09:03 AM.

[Joe Bloe]

Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns with normal brain function.

Normal brain function? Among those two groups? Sitting on their arse all day, with eyes closed, and begging for enlightenment --- that's not normal, that's batshit crazy.

[Ungodly]

It seems pretty clear to me, that with all the other research results claiming that the belief in God is a function of our brains, God resides only in our own minds. Maybe each of us are God. You grok ?

I grok in fullness, if the brain shuts down the person is no longer present.

Normal brain function? Among those two groups? Sitting on their arse all day, with eyes closed, and begging for enlightenment --- that's not normal, that's batshit crazy.

I'm not going to ask if that is your final answer

Normal is defined by a majority, so in that sense fervently religious minds are normal. But I do agree with your sentiment.

[Great Ape]

This study brings to mind, research done by Michael Persinger, in the field of neurotheology. He used a device called a God Helmet to elicit spiritual experiences.

The "God Helmet" refers to an experimental apparatus originally called the "Koren helmet" after its inventor Stanley Koren. It was conceived by Koren and neuroscientist Michael Persinger to study creativity and the effects of subtle stimulation of the temporal lobes. Reports by participants of a "sensed presence" while wearing the God helmet brought public attention and resulted in several TV documentaries.

The device has been used in Persinger's research in the field of neurotheology, the study of the neural correlates of religion and spirituality. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, generates very weak fluctuating magnetic fields, that Persinger refers to as "complex." These fields are approximately as strong as those generated by a land line telephone handset or an ordinary hair dryer, but far weaker than that of an ordinary fridge magnet and approximately a million times weaker than transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Persinger reports that many subjects have reported "mystical experiences and altered states" while wearing the God Helmet.

[Source]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW16Jy1HnH4

Perhaps the God Helmet helps to grok God.

Edited by Great Ape, 11 May 2012 - 03:50 PM.

[Cousin Ricky]

The "God Helmet" refers to an experimental apparatus originally called the "Koren helmet" after its inventor Stanley Koren.

Once again, the god people try to co-opt science by relabeling things, just like they did when they declared Einstein a theist and when they unilaterally renamed the Higgs boson the "God particle."

[Great Ape]

Instead of making God responsible for our actions, in taking total responsibility for our own actions, we are subject to every consequence that comes from them, the good and the bad. Taking such committed responsibility compels us to become our choice and to live it fully.

In grokking this Truth so completely, we are not burdened by the weight of choices. We are instead opened to the full possibility of our lives. When you can grok and knowingly take responsibility for your actions, you are unlimited in your potential.

There is no need to fear the consequences of an action. They simply are. You own the grokking, the choice and the action that you take.

The integrity of the self is inviolable when you take responsibility for your choices. When we take responsibility, we are taking our lives into our own control.

“Thou art God, and all that groks is God.”

[Great Ape]

Does The Eternal Soul Exist?

Huffington Post | Sept. 19, 2011

Neuroscientists understand, at least in general, how the biological machinery of the brain can compute information. But how does a brain become aware of information? What is sentience itself? When a specific part of the brain is damaged, does the patient lose only a specific category of knowledge, such as vision or language, or can the patient ever lose some of the essence of awareness?

A clinical syndrome called hemispatial neglect may help to answer the question. It is one of the most fascinating, and horrible, syndromes in the medical literature. Neglect was first described early in the 20th century, and over the years much has been learned about it.

Imagine waking up in the hospital after a stroke to find that half your world is gone. The left side of space and everything in it has been erased from your consciousness. You can talk to the people who stand to the right side of your hospital bed, but when they walk to the left side they disappear from your mind. You dress the right side of your body but forget to dress the left. You think you've eaten everything on your plate, but have eaten only the food on the right side. You can't even conceive of a left side of the plate. When someone rotates the plate, food that you didn't acknowledge before suddenly appears. When you draw a clock, you crush all 12 numbers into the right side of the drawing and don't notice that anything is wrong. You have no insight into your own condition because, lacking any awareness of a left side of space, you can't realize what is missing.

This bizarre and crippling syndrome is not simple blindness. After all, blind people and sighted people who close their eyes know about the objects around them. Instead it is a mental blindness. It covers vision, touch, hearing, memory and concept.

Over the years, different varieties of neglect have been described and associated with damage to different brain regions. But the most dense, profound loss of awareness is associated with a region of the cerebral cortex roughly just above the ear on the right side of the brain. Much more rarely, neglect of the right side of space is caused by damage to the same general area on the left side of the brain.

Neglect is a peculiar syndrome. It suggests that awareness is not a unified item, but like many constructs of the brain it can be knocked apart into a right and a left half. It suggests that awareness is constructed at least partially by a specific region of the brain. It suggests a close relationship between awareness and attention.

The findings are controversial. That same general region of the brain has been found to play a role in social thinking -- in understanding the minds of other people. Why would a brain area involved in social intelligence also participate in one's own basic awareness? Which of the rival accounts is correct? I have argued in my scientific writing that the two functions are not rivals, and instead are closely related. Awareness, sentience itself, may be part of the toolkit we use to understand ourselves and each other. It may be a function of our social brain.

In my view, there really is such a thing as a spirit, a soul, but it is not as people have imagined it in the past. The soul is information of a special kind, wrapped up into a complex structure, instantiated in the circuitry of the brain. It is quirky and individual to each of us, and is precious because it is not eternal.

[Source]

Everything that makes us uniquely human is contained within the human brain. As scientists discover more about how the human mind actually works, this will be more fully understood. It isn't God that makes us who we are, on the contrary, it is man that dictates the characteristics of God.

Edited by Great Ape, 17 May 2012 - 11:25 AM.

[Ungodly]

So we sort of kinda think in stereo, normally. I knew there was a reason why I considered 5.1 surround sound systems to be an abomination, it's because they are an attempt to destroy the Sanctity of Binaural Grokking.

Going back to the question about the "immortal soul" it is an utterly preposterous question that merits a sneer with a twitching grimace and optionally abrupt walking away.

Yes, after you die your soul is transported telekinetically to the planet Krypton, where you witness the Baby Jesus being sent in a rocket shaped like a sperm to the primitive desert dwelling of a young virgin girl. But then Xenu attacks in an effort to unseat John Travolta from the Office of the President of the United States, but Revolta is off visiting his veep Mike Huckleberrybee who has taken up residence at the Vatican where the HRCC and the US government are in merger talks. This is the moment that you realize your soul went down instead of up - and just at that very instant the rotting corpse of Jerry Falwell appears singing church music off key and wearing a skimpy outfit once seen on Lindsay Lohan, who, it might be noted, is considerably more slender than the zombie in question.

Of course, Great Ape, I realize you were only reposting the question, and you know the correct answer.

[Great Ape]

So we sort of kinda think in stereo, normally. I knew there was a reason why I considered 5.1 surround sound systems to be an abomination, it's because they are an attempt to destroy the Sanctity of Binaural Grokking.

Freaking hell, you've hit the proverbial nail on the head! Way to go.

Going back to the question about the "immortal soul" it is an utterly preposterous question that merits a sneer with a twitching grimace and optionally abrupt walking away.

Yes, after you die your soul is transported telekinetically to the planet Krypton, where you witness the Baby Jesus being sent in a rocket shaped like a sperm to the primitive desert dwelling of a young virgin girl. But then Xenu attacks in an effort to unseat John Travolta from the Office of the President of the United States, but Revolta is off visiting his veep Mike Huckleberrybee who has taken up residence at the Vatican where the HRCC and the US government are in merger talks. This is the moment that you realize your soul went down instead of up - and just at that very instant the rotting corpse of Jerry Falwell appears singing church music off key and wearing a skimpy outfit once seen on Lindsay Lohan, who, it might be noted, is considerably more slender than the zombie in question.

Wow, that is a cool story bro. Needs more dragons though.

Of course, Great Ape, I realize you were only reposting the question, and you know the correct answer.

We are all ambulated, sentient, split brained, soulless, godless, meat bags with expiration dates?

[Ungodly]

We are all ambulated, sentient, split brained, soulless, godless, meat bags with expiration dates?

Yes, exactly. I woke up in a good mood this morning because I have not reached my expiration date quite yet.

[Joe Bloe]

Yes, exactly. I woke up in a good mood this morning because I have not reached my expiration date quite yet.

Never forget that life is a fatal disease.

[Ungodly]

Never forget that life is a fatal disease.

And the cure is a real killer too.

[Great Ape]

And the cure is a real killer too.

[Ungodly]

Somehow this reminded me of my days in Catholic school. It's got that dire, all hope is gone feel that is very useful in controlling large numbers of sheeple.

"Your lives are misery, and after that is eternal torture. But wait! If you call now we'll give you eternal bliss. But that's not all, If you call in the next 5 minutes we'll also throw in a virgin mommy you can ask to intercede with her malevolent Son who already forgives you. Remember, your life is miserable, but we can help (Cash, VISA MasterCard, American Express and PayPal)."

Contact your local HRCC sales representative for more lies.

[Joe Bloe]

"Your lives are misery, and after that is eternal torture. But wait! If you call now we'll give you eternal bliss. But that's not all, If you call in the next 5 minutes we'll also throw in a virgin mommy you can ask to intercede with her malevolent Son who already forgives you. Remember, your life is miserable, but we can help (Cash, VISA MasterCard, American Express and PayPal)."

Contact your local HRCC sales representative for more lies.

So painfully true.



(Saved to my hard drive for future use.)

[Great Ape]

There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.

Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc. The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.

Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.

Yet another view is that the behaviour of people who participate in a religion makes them feel better and this improves their fitness, so that there is a genetic selection in favor of people who are willing to believe in religion. Specifically, rituals, beliefs, and the social contact typical of religious groups may serve to calm the mind (for example by reducing ambiguity and the uncertainty due to complexity) and allow it to function better when under stress.

Main article: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Edited by Great Ape, 22 May 2012 - 09:42 AM.

[Cousin Ricky]

Another view is based on the concept of the triune brain: the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex, proposed by Paul D. MacLean.

According to another Wikipedia article, the triune brain model has fallen out of scientific favor. In particular, the so-called reptilian brain is a smaller part of a sauropsid’s^[1] brain than previously thought; the reptilian brain is found in fish; and the limbic system, thought to have evolved in mammals, is present in sauropsids. Part of the article suggests that this model is useful for some purposes, but that section has insufficient citations.

 ^[1]Sauropsida is the clade consisting of birds and reptiles. Note that “reptile,” like “fish,” “invertebrate,” “monkey,” and “heathen,” is a paraphyletic term.

[Great Ape]

According to another Wikipedia article, the triune brain model has fallen out of scientific favor.

You're right. Comparative evolutionary neuroanatomists, currently regard the triune brain model's claims, about brain evolution to be outdated. In fact, the model never won wide acceptance among comparative neurobiologists and neurophysiologists.

Information is worthless if it is in error. I think it best to remove that section from the post to avoid misinformation. Thank you for pointing that out Cousin Ricky.

Edited by Great Ape, 22 May 2012 - 09:41 AM.

[Great Ape]

Are Atheists More Autistic Than Believers?

Belief in God depends on theory of mind.

Psychology Today | May 30, 2012

In most religions, and arguably anything worth being called a religion, God is not just an impersonal force or creator. He has a mind that humans can relate to. Maybe you’re not gossiping on the phone with him late at night, but he has personality traits, thoughts, moods, and ways of communicating with you. If you didn’t know what a mind was or how it worked, not only would you not understand people, you would not understand God, and you would not be religious.

That’s the theory, anyway. Scientists who study religion have come to agree that belief in God (or gods) relies on everyday social cognition: our ability—and propensity—to think about minds.

Which means if you are autistic, and unable to “mentalize,” you would be an atheist. New research published today in PLoS ONE provides fresh evidence for this claim.

But first, the existing evidence.

Jesse Bering, in a 2002 paper, noted that in autobiographical accounts written by people with high-functioning autism, God is more a principle than a person. He/it provides order but isn’t much concerned with human affairs—the idea of him satisfies the intellect rather than the emotions. Temple Grandin, for example, described God as the entanglement of millions of interacting particles.

In line with such a conception of the divine, Simon Baron-Cohen, who proposed the mindblindness theory of autism, told me that “sometimes I meet people with autism who are religious, but their motivation is driven more by the rules (the system) in theology rather than the anthropomorphizing.”

One outcome of the ability to mentalize is the ability to think teleologically—to see the purpose of objects or events. (Rocks and rainstorms have no purpose, but shovels and showering do.) I found one blog post by a woman with Asperger’s syndrome who wrote that as a child, “The world I perceived was a random, self-sufficient system. It wasn’t built; it grew. (When I was little, I thought houses and roads were some kind of large plant that grew out of the ground; if you had told me people made them I would’ve been thunderstruck).” She didn’t get that some things were created for a reason.

When people see an event as divine intervention, or a result of intelligent design, they’re just letting their teleological bias run amok. They’re attributing purpose where there is none. Bethany Heywood, in collaboration with Jesse Bering, found in her Ph.D. research that even atheists tend to say that certain things happened to them “for a reason,” e.g., to teach them a lesson. But subjects with Asperger’s gave significantly fewer teleological responses than a control group did, and several even expressed confusion regarding the questions about purpose. One, misinterpreting a prompt for “a coincidence you saw meaning in,” wrote, “in practical application, I wear nice clothes and make my hair presentable. Coincidentally people are more friendly towards me.”

The strongest connection between atheism and autism before now was a paper presented at a conference last year by Catherine Caldwell-Harris and collaborators at Boston University. Survey respondents with high-functioning autism were more likely than control subjects to be atheists and less likely to belong to an organized religion. (They were also more likely to have religious ideas of their own construction, perhaps something similar to Temple Grandin’s.) And atheists were higher on the autistic spectrum than Christians and Jews. But the researchers were not able to demonstrate that mentalizing deficits were responsible for the connection.

That’s where the new paper comes in. Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais of the University of British Columbia and Kali Trzesniewski of UC Davis report on four studies. The first study replicates the finding of the BU research: 12 autistic and 13 neurotypical adolescents took part, and the neurotypical subjects were 10 times as likely to strongly endorse God.

The other three studies went further. They included hundreds of participants from a variety of demographics in the US and Canada and used various measures of belief in God and of mentalizing abilities. The results of all three followed the same pattern.

First, people with higher scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (items included “I am fascinated by numbers,” and “I find social situations [difficult]”) had weaker belief in a personal God. Second, reduced ability to mentalize mediated this correlation. (Mentalizing was measured with the Empathy Quotient, which assesses self-reported ability to recognize and react to others’ emotions, and with a task that requires identifying what’s being expressed in pictures of eyes. Systematizing—interest in and aptitude for mechanical and abstract systems—was correlated with autism but was not a mediator.) Third, men were much less likely than women to say they strongly believed in a personal God (even controlling for autism), and this correlation was also mediated by reduced mentalizing.

“It’s hard to have an experience of God in your life unless you think of him as a person, with mental states, who you can pray to, who will answer your prayers, who cares about you,” Norenzayan told me a couple years ago, when he was conducting this research.

He and his collaborators point out that mentalizing deficits are of course not the only path to atheism. There are also cultural and educational influences—exposure to other skeptics, say—and cognitive style—some people are more likely to use rationality to second-guess superstition.

But the finding that religion and mentalizing are so tightly bound emphasizes an argument I make in my book: magical thinking is just a natural extension of the everyday thinking that makes us (neurotypically) human. As far as the brain is concerned, God is one of us.

[Source]

This study shows that people who have difficulty imagining what others are thinking are less likely to believe in God. The ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people is called "mentalizing" and it appears to play an important role in religious belief, according to researcher Ara Norenzayan. When people are thinking about God or praying to God, they are trying to understand God's mind, his wishes and beliefs.

"When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds," the study authors wrote. Religious believers have an idea of God as an intentional being who responds to human beliefs and desires.

The researchers found that people who rate highest on the autistic spectrum — those with an inability to respond accurately to the mental states of other people — are least likely to believe in God.

Men typically are not as good as women at reasoning about other people's states of mind and are more likely than women to score high on the autism spectrum, which may help explain why men are less likely to believe in God than women.

"(Mentalizing) is not the only factor, just one of a combination of factors that explain who is likely to be a believer and who isn't," Norenzayan wrote. A previous study by Norenzayan and his co-author, UBC's Will Gervais, found that a tendency toward analytical thinking is also more common among disbelievers.

If someone is less able to imagine what God is thinking, then belief in God is less intuitive and a personal deity is less believabletendency toward analytical thinking

[Source]

Edited by Great Ape, 31 May 2012 - 05:55 PM.

[Ungodly]

UBC's Will Gervais, found that a tendency toward analytical thinking is also more common among disbelievers.

So people that think about things are less likely to be theists. Hmm. Why might that be the case?