Are humans hard-wired for faith?

[SevenSeasJim]

Interesting article.

By A. Chris Gajilan

CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) -- "I just know God is with me. I can feel Him always," a young Haitian woman once told me.

"I've meditated and gone to another place I can't describe. Hours felt like mere minutes. It was an indescribable feeling of peace," recalled a CNN colleague.

"I've spoken in languages I've never learned. It was God speaking through me," confided a relative.

The accounts of intense religious and spiritual experiences are topics of fascination for people around the world. It's a mere glimpse into someone's faith and belief system. It's a hint at a person's intense connection with God, an omniscient being or higher plane. Most people would agree the experience of faith is immeasurable.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist and author of "Why We Believe What We Believe," wants to change all that. He's working on ways to track how the human brain processes religion and spirituality. It's all part of new field called neurotheology.

After spending his early medical career studying how the brain works in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, depression and anxiety, Newberg took that brain-scanning technology and turned it toward the spiritual: Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhists, and Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues. His team members at the University of Pennsylvania were surprised by what they found.

"When we think of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, we see a tremendous similarity across practices and across traditions."

The frontal lobe, the area right behind our foreheads, helps us focus our attention in prayer and meditation.

The parietal lobe, located near the backs of our skulls, is the seat of our sensory information. Newberg says it's involved in that feeling of becoming part of something greater than oneself.

The limbic system, nestled deep in the center, regulates our emotions and is responsible for feelings of awe and joy.

Newberg calls religion the great equalizer and points out that similar areas of the brain are affected during prayer and meditation. Newberg suggests that these brain scans may provide proof that our brains are built to believe in God. He says there may be universal features of the human mind that actually make it easier for us to believe in a higher power.

Interestingly enough, devout believers and atheists alike point to the brain scans as proof of their own ideas.

Some nuns and other believers champion the brain scans as proof of an innate, physical conduit between human beings and God. According to them, it would only make sense that God would give humans a way to communicate with the Almighty through their brain functions.

Some atheists saw these brain scans as proof that the emotions attached to religion and God are nothing more than manifestations of brain circuitry.

Scott Atran doesn't consider himself an atheist, but he says the brain scans offer little in terms of understanding why humans believe in God. He is an anthropologist and author of "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion."

Instead of viewing religion and spirituality as an innate quality hardwired by God in the human brain, he sees religion as a mere byproduct of evolution and Darwinian adaptation.

"Just like we're not hardwired for boats, but humans in all cultures make boats in pretty much the same way, Atran explains. "Now, that's a result both of the way the brain works and of the needs of the world, and of trying to traverse a liquid medium and so I think religion is very much like that."

Atran points to the palms of his hands as another example of evolutionary coincidence. He says the creases formed there are a mere byproduct of human beings working with our hands -- stretching back to the ages of striking the first fires, hunting the first prey to building early shelter. Although, the patterns in our palms were coincidentally formed by eons of evolution and survival, he points out that cultures around the world try to find meaning in them through different forms of palm reading.

Anthropologists like Atran say, "Religion is a byproduct of many different evolutionary functions that organized our brains for day-to-day activity."

To be sure, religion has the unparalleled power to bring people into groups. Religion has helped humans survive, adapt and evolve in groups over the ages. It's also helped us learn to cope with death, identify danger and finding mating partners.

Today, scientific images can track our thoughts on God, but it would take a long leap of faith to identify why we think of God in the first place.

Link

[Davey Boy 2.0]

I'd be interested to see what lobes are active during improvisation; i just stumbled across this quote:

"Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget that there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests, they are thinking only of their God."

—Stéphane Grappelli

[paisley]

think we just naturally are aware that there must be more involved in what surrounds us than simply what we see, taste, touch, feel and smell (or can prove mathematically)... we tend to call that god for simplicities sake... "neurotheology" would seem to step away from that simplicity, perhaps that area of the brain is like a radio receiver that gives us a glimpse of the all... maybe its a "CPS" - Cosmos Positioning System... personally, I blame the doses

[SevenSeasJim]

Stop licking frogs!!

[paisley]

is that you god?

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Interesting article - thanks, SSJ. Newberg and his lot are always coming out with engaging stuff (not to mention Persinger and his work with the God helmet (dibs on that for a band name).

It's also nice to see an article that underscores the fact that we don't know just what religion is anyway.

I get increasingly tired of the word "faith" the more I see or hear it. All it does is indicate that we're not omniscient - i.e. that we're not (whatever we take to be) God. So what? I have faith that the sun's going to come up tomorrow, or that family or friends think of me in certain ways, or that the new version of some bit of software I've just downloaded isn't going to screw up my computer. If I really need to know, I'll do whatever is in my abilities to find out until I hit a wall where no more can possibly be learned. The "faith" that really bugs me is where people surrender those abilities and rely on others to direct their actions (under the aegis, typically, and of course, of some hopelessly overdetermined bit of sacred writing).

So I guess in answer to the rhetorical question up top, we're not only hard-wired for faith, but we have, categorically, no other option. Are we hard-wired for authoritarianism, though? That would make an interesting study too. It seems to me that this study, and others like it, are really trying to answer questions about the human capacity to experience mystery, in the strongest sense of the word; words like "religion" and "faith" just muddy the waters.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Being inclined to disbelieve in reincarnation, I find this interesting too.

Belief in Reincarnation Tied to Memory Errors

Special to LiveScience

LiveScience.com Fri Apr 6, 9:25 AM ET

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Power of suggestion

People who are likely to make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren’t true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands. When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea—like a past life—they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

This is because they can’t distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them, Peters told LiveScience.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

Creative minds

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

“It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you’d generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw,†he said in a telephone interview.

Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes.

And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. “It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses,†he said. “We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death.â€

[allison]

I suppose the above two articles could be integrated within the concept of the noosphere, or transhuman consciousness.

Meaning the human animal is biologically hardwired to perceive and communicate with "other"-whatever you may want to call it.Historically that "other" has been conceptualized as gods and goddesses,or spiritual planes etc-usually always as a form of cultural theatre.That is the perception of the "other" is always similiar, and the affect upon the human consciousness is also similiar, but the costumes,scripts ,actors and audience are determined by secular forces at play-from physical surroundings to socio economic factors and everything in between.

So if we are biologically given the tools for this connection, then all spiritual or religious doctrines or methods can be seen as an evolutionary process to properly and fully access the other.An evolution that is hardly complete.

Reincarnation, or people thinking that they are or have been, could be seen as people randomly linking to the noopshere through the hardwiring,and trying to explain and integrate it into their daily understanding of self and life with what conceptualizations are undertstandable to them, without in anyway realizing what they are really doing.

Perhaps the most base human instinct is not to God, but a frantic knitting of all sensory input into some sort of (to us) explicable arrangement, irregardless of the original input.

Wow its early for this.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Perhaps the most base human instinct is not to God, but a frantic knitting of all sensory input into some sort of (to us) explicable arrangement, irregardless of the original input.

I think that's spot on - all thinking, all synaptic organisation, seems to be all about discerning and compiling patterns (or probabilities), which are reliable, which are, I guess, all about faith (once again). This is what struck me way back when in the threads here on synchronicity (which I'm too lazy right now to look up and link to) - are we stuck by coincidences because they're somehow supernatural, or is it just because our brains have gone ahead and linked random things together outside of any conscious decision to have done so? Maybe we are just born pattern-makers.

I'm sympathetic to the last point in the reincarnation article above; the concept speaks an awful lot about our fear of death, our fear that when we die and our brains, our synapses, disintegrate, so disappear all of our associations, memories, identity - unless we trick ourselves into believing that we have memories from some time before our physical brains were there and developed enough to actually make memories or identity.

We're such funny animals.

[Tricky]

People have this uncanny need to stay focused primarily on themselves. Having a constant focus on the self forces us to see ourselves as separate entities than our surroundings, which is a falsity as well as a conundrum of sorts. Because we hold this intense focus on the self we begin to feel there is a larger picture, another being, a God. It seems to me that this feeling of "God" is merely an emotional connection with the infinite that has been disassociated. It's like we have created an identity, in regards to the self, and in the process of making that self forgot that the idea of the self is just a representation and expression of the universe. This forgetting aspect is labeled 'God'...it's like a split personality.

[SevenSeasJim]

I wish I could believe in something

[Tricky]

sounds like you believe in wishing...

[SevenSeasJim]

lol that;s the 1st wish i've made

[allison]

Tricky I agree that there is often a conflict between "self" and the "infinite" on anyones spiritual path, but I don't think that that conflict creates the idea of God.The idea of God is just an intellectual construct that can actually be wrestled with, a construct to feebly explain an awareness of the unexplicable or infinite.

While watching my son (2 1/2 ) play with a puzzle today at dinner I started playing with the idea of a puzzle as a metaphor for how we instinctually look at life,how we learn to look at life, and fundamentally at the end I guess-how we have to unlearn to actually discover truth.

Dr Evil Mouse,tricky and Seven Seas Jim please bear with me here-it may be kind of garbled,as I'm just sort of wading in it and throwing it out there.

A child is born with an instinctive access to knowledge and abilities that are attributed to base animal survival instincts and located in the brain stem OR an ability to draw on a cumulative body of knowledge and experience belonging to the collective human consciousness-depends which camp you are in. Irregardless of the source, a child freely accepts these pieces of knowledge and creates perceptions that don’t analyse source nor logic-just assimilates and remains open to new stimulus. All stimulus and information can seamlessly integrate because the child is not questioning incongruities or focusing on differences to a larger conceptual plan. In the puzzle metaphor, the child is playing with puzzle pieces whose edges all interlock-the pieces do not have unique edges, and the effort is not to match the patterns and create the conceptual whole puzzle, but to examine each piece and see what it does. Making the puzzle is fairly effortless because all pieces are seen as themselves and as part of the game-they don’t have to fit a “big pictureâ€. In fact, a child often doesn’t care at all what the picture on the puzzle box is, they will just deal with the pieces that appear.

As the child grows older, societal dictates-family, environment, cultural, socio economic factors impose a growing dictate to integrate knowledge and experience into a system of thought, a guiding framework to function from. We are asked less to concentrate on the individuality of life elements and impelled to knit all information together into a logical and acceptable framework. With our puzzle this is when we concentrate on what we see in the actual piece in hand, try and match it with others, and find it much more difficult to proceed unless we see the picture on the box. We start to need references, an orientation ,to proceed. The puzzle becomes more of a test of observation and pattern making skills.Further,if we don't understand the big picture,we find it very hard to deal with the pieces.

Throughout most of our lives we invest a great amount of our stability and knowledge in knowing what the pieces are, what the picture we are creating is and working to fill the spaces in the picture with pieces that come to hand. Pieces from the same puzzle that don’t follow the same pattern, nor offer us a clue to its references or context or pieces from another puzzle will greatly thwart us, as we become assured that everything will fit together in the logic we have assigned it.We stake our lives on presuming we know something about the big picture.

If the “big picture†is read to be a cosmological,theological or spiritual view(the puzzle model could be used for more secular views) than maybe this is how it would break down...

Some will deemphasize the big picture by focusing on the miniatuie of the puzzle piece(puzzle atheists).

Some will overly focus on the big picture and force all the pieces into place without regard to their actual shape or connectivity (puzzle fundamentalists)

Some will half complete the puzzle but invest the empty spaces with a connective tissue that still lets them see a big picture(puzzle faith)

Some others will see that the puzzle pieces aren’t pieces at all, will only see the connections,that the connections are all possible and arbitrarily arranged and subject to great variations,and that the big picture is not at all contained by the artificially sized puzzle pieces(puzzle mystics,visionaries,enlightened ones).

Does that make any sense?

[SaggyBalls]

Humans are hard-wired to interpret divinity, not faith - is that essentially the verdict?

Did I call it before I saw it or what...is that really what this all boils down to from where you've gone so far?

Each day I find something that intrigues or challenges me if it's something as simple as the pattern of flooring samples on my desk and how the shadows hit it to the view of the mountains through my kitchen window in the morning, reflecting a sunrise on a clear norning...

I believe that it is only ourselves that creates a short in the circuit in either ourselves or other people, essentially destroying innocense and holding ourselves back.

What a heady day...first a discussion about theology this morning on MSN with my seventh day adventist cousin, to chats about passover with my jewish friend and his parents at an easter dinner in Langley, to coming home to an enormous purging sit on the crapper as I rushed in from the road...now to this.

All in all my day was filled with moving experiences.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Does that make any sense?

Yes - even to my flu-addled mind this morning. Great metaphor.

It seems to me too that in addition to the matter of personal development (childhood onward), there's the problem of historical and cultural context, which, if all the postmodernist jargon can be got past, is terrifically important - thinking here of the end of Grand Narratives (Biblical, e.g.) in societies given for just a couple hundred years to radical experimentation in self-organisation (i.e. being modern, playing around with democratic structures, finding new ways to construct personal and social identities meaning, and so on).

Each day I find something that intrigues or challenges me if it's something as simple as the pattern of flooring samples on my desk and how the shadows hit it to the view of the mountains through my kitchen window in the morning, reflecting a sunrise on a clear norning...

Some mountains would be nice over here, but the sunrise right now has certainly been worth the pause to take in. My favourite things in the world are the ones that make analysis superfluous. Meditation really is key to letting the brain (memory, identity, interpretation, and so on) just shut up already.

Edited April 9, 2007 by Guest
finicky html

[allison]

Humans are hard-wired to interpret divinity, not faith - is that essentially the verdict?

No not really-but it may just be the way you put that.I think humans are hardwired to perceive something that we then are conditioned to label divinity.Once we label it divinity we are further conditioned to accept those concepts on faith-and leave the experience of it marginalized.

I personally suck at meditation.But all those free and beautiful pure simple moments in life when I can be in the "now"-without reference to anything else-are the rejuvenating,reenergizing soul moments.

[SevenSeasJim]

Oddly enough, as an athiest, I always emphasize the "big picture".

[Tricky]

I've always viewed the infinite as "God". Since we are an aspect of the infinite it seems logical, (and simplistic), for me to assume "God".

I have always thought that the further we are from understanding and feeling the infinite within, the further we are from understanding "God".

It does appear that as we age and become detached from this aspect of understanding the infinite, the more we form the identity, the self.

Forming the identity from selected experiences, opinions, emotions, etc., usually furthers us from a reality outlining much more tan we can understand.

We just had a baby, just one week ago, and I think that if I raise this child to understand that they are an intricate aspect of the infinite, their identity, or self, will naturally relate to the infinite rather than feeling separated from it. Normally we from identities based upon roles at work, as siblings, fathers, sisters, etc., but these are too limited, although real.

Most of our struggles in life are due to not 'seeing the bigger picture' or trying to see through the clouded vision of the identity we have made for ourselves and look straight into absolute reality.

This is the idea of 'God' that I have, although I am more agnostic than anything else. 'God' is the infinite, we are the infinite, we are usually clouded by matters that distract us from are true nature because of social, political, cultural, and media facets of living. Possibly looking past these whilst still acknowledging them will lead to a fundamental understanding of spirituality...in the least it could lead to more patient and loving/caring individuals with a larger picture of reality in mind.

Either way I truly don't have a clue.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I've always viewed the infinite as "God". Since we are an aspect of the infinite it seems logical, (and simplistic), for me to assume "God".

That's the route I tend to go, though given that the infinite also comprises the finite, there's right ground for all sorts of interesting brain-rattlers, given that we are finite, conditioned creatures who are painted against that backdrop of the infinite, and so share in it.

Either way I truly don't have a clue.

Phew, me neither .

It's an important thing to underline, imo, given how many people there are in so many contexts who will insist precisely the opposite, that they do have a lock on it (insert quote from Lao Tzu here).

[allison]

Either way I truly don't have a clue.

I think that that statement IS spiritual evolution.

To live ones life,investing each moment and day with what you can, acknowleding that you have no idea what the infinite is.

To stand in awareness of the rapture,with all the religions,ego,concepts,philosophies,facts,portents,talismans and dogma shed at your feet,to find it incomprehensible and to still watch and not grow fearful,cold or mad.

'Course I'm not there yet,and poking it with sticks and playing dress up with different spiritual cloaks has it's pleasures.

[geomouse]

Seems that many of us seek some sort of connectivity, whether spiritual or physical. I think I've found some here. Makes me also think of the ancient religions where semi-closed groups would relish their surroundings and the awe that a sunrise instills. Who ever came up with the idea that one system of faith is more true than another is the one who started war. That and easy access to stealing what others had saved for the winter. Just reading a book about the history of war and its incredible how conventional war had not changed much from 1500BC to 1500AD. Three thousand years of sword and shield, basically and before that not much record of any large scale battle. Now in the last 500 years we are able to distance ourselves from the raw emotion and still get the job done effectively. These motivations seem directly tied to religious inspiration however misguided.

K now, you have me lifting my head from the puddle

[MarcO]

The human brain evolved just like our limbs, our features, our other physical attributes, of which it is nothing more or less. As has been stated before, the concept of God - and the resulting inventing and organizing of "religions" - is a byproduct of this ongoing development, not the source of it. While it's hard to fathom very many good reasons to explain the positive uses of hard-wired "faith" - it is after all, inherently wasteful of our limited resources - it does seem that aggressive behaviours in early religious societies, the tendency to procreate among their own communities, the removal of fear of death and the applications of invented purpose to our fleeting lives made evolutionary impacts on our brains, as they developed (and continue to develop). Ergo, today we have rather dubious but numerous people feeling that their saviour of choice is with them at crucial points in their lives, unwilling or unable to acknowledge that is a process of the mysteries of their very brain at play, not personal proof of the presence of God.

Anyway, that's just me.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Not just you at all .