Kevin Rhodes Religion

“The Opium of the People”: Sex, Drugs, Rock n Roll, Gambling, and … Religion

dice

Religion shapes the brain as the brain shapes religion. What happens next might surprise you.

Last time, we heard from Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and neurology professor at Northwestern University, who says that religions and their community behavioral codes helped to make the brain what it is today, and vice versa:

“[N]eurotheology is important in part because early religious practices helped develop our brains to begin with. ‘Religion has played an incredibly important role in human evolution. It’s funny, people want to separate the two but in fact they’re intertwined,’ [Dr. Grafman] says.

“Of course, it’s a two-way relationship between the brain and religion. Our brains had to develop the capacity to establish social communities and behaviors, which are the basis of religious societies. But religious practice in turn developed the brain, says Grafman. ‘As these societies became more co-operative, our brains evolved in response to that. Our brain led to behavior and then the behavior fed back to our brain to help sculpt it,’ he adds.”

“The Neuroscience Argument That Religion Shaped The Very Structure Of Our Brains,” Quartz (December 3, 2016)

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, another pioneer of “neurotheology.” agrees that the religion-brain link promotes social cohesiveness and morality.

“‘There’s the argument that religion has benefited human beings by helping to create cohesive societies and morals and help us to determine our behavior and interact with the world more effectively,’ says Newberg. ‘The ability to think about this from a neuroscience perspective is part of that discusson.'”

The Apostle Paul, whose pre-conversion theological training was ultra-legalistic, likened law-based belief to being under the care of a guardian:  we need something to keep us in line until we grow up enough to embrace responsibility along with freedom. Paul’s Letter to the Galations 3:22-24. Until we make that shift, the brain’s religious wiring is equally adept at promoting individual and communal health as their opposites. Dr. Newberg’s website provides a sample of research findings from his book How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist that reflect the implications of this neurological indifference:

  • Not only do prayer and spiritual practice reduce stress and anxiety, but just 12 minutes of meditation per day may slow down the aging process.
  • Contemplating a loving God rather than a punitive God reduces anxiety, depression, and stress, and increases feelings of security, compassion, and love.
  • Fundamentalism, in and of itself, is benign and can be personally beneficial, but the anger and prejudice generated by extreme beliefs can permanently damage your brain.
  • Intense prayer and meditation permanently change numerous structures and functions in the brain—altering your values and the way you perceive reality.

In fact, the brain is equally adept at generating rule-breaking behavior:

“The prefrontal cortex is traditionally thought to be involved in executive control, or willful behavior, as well as decision-making. So, the researchers hypothesize, it would make sense that a practice that centers on relinquishing control would result in decreased activity in this brain area.

“A recent study that Medical News Today reported on found that religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities.

“Researchers led by Dr. Jeff Anderson, Ph.D. — from the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City — examined the brains of 19 young Mormons using a functional MRI scanner.

“When asked whether, and to what degree, the participants were “feeling the spirit,” those who reported the most intense spiritual feelings displayed increased activity in the bilateral nucleus accumbens, as well as the frontal attentional and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci.

“These pleasure and reward-processing brain areas are also active when we engage in sexual activities, listen to music, gamble, and take drugs. The participants also reported feelings of peace and physical warmth.

“’When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded,’ says first study author Michael Ferguson.

“These findings echo those of older studies, which found that engaging in spiritual practices raises levels of serotonin, which is the “happiness” neurotransmitter, and endorphins.

“The latter are euphoria-inducing molecules whose name comes from the phrase ‘endogenous morphine.’

“Such neurophysiological effects of religion seem to give the dictum ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ a new level of meaning”

“What Religion Does To Your Brain,”,: Medical News Today (July 20, 2018)

These findings suggest a fascinating explanation for a wide range of religious behaviors — everything from charitable good deeds, the use of music in worship, and “fellowship” dynamics on one end to clergy sexual crimes and misconduct, cult abuses, and terrorism on the other. Shocking as it may seem, the whole spectrum qualifies for the brain’s addictive feel-good list, along with sex, drugs, music, and gambling.

More from neurotheology next time.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture

Moral Compass:  How We Know Right From Wrong

compass

Our brains are amoral. They need cultural context to give them a moral compass.

Real and Imaginary

It’s a staple of self-help advice and sports and performance psychology that our brains don’t know the difference between real and imagined, therefore we can trick them into getting us what we want. There’s good science to back this up, although recent research suggests that the brain actually does know the difference — that it has specific neurons for that purpose. Science Daily. Plus, although both real and imaginary run over the same neural pathway, they move in opposite directions:  input from the outside world runs bottom up — from lower level sensory to higher level cognitive processing — while imagined input runs top down. Psychology Today, Knowledge Nuts.

Getting Into Our Bodies

Not that Harold Hill’s “think system” is enough — we still need to practice and rehearse effectively. We need to get our bodies involved. We’re out there in the “real world” taking in sensory input, interacting with people, things, and experiences, meanwhile we’re imagining things, throwing in doses of speculation and making things up. Our brains and bodies need to work together to ground this swirl of information. This article[1] explains how they do that:

“When considering the senses, we tend to think of sight and sound, taste, touch and smell. However, these are classified as exteroceptive senses, that is, they tell us something about the outside world. In contrast, interoception is a sense that informs us about our internal bodily sensations, such as the pounding of our heart, the flutter of butterflies in our stomach or feelings of hunger.

“The brain represents, integrates and prioritises interoceptive information from the internal body. These are communicated through a set of distinct neural and humoural (i.e., blood-borne) pathways. This sensing of internal states of the body is part of the interplay between body and brain: it maintains homeostasis, the physiological stability necessary for survival; it provides key motivational drivers such as hunger and thirst; it explicitly represents bodily sensations, such as bladder distension. But that is not all, and herein lies the beauty of interoception, as our feelings, thoughts and perceptions are also influenced by the dynamic interaction between body and brain.”

University of Sussex cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth lays all this out in his TED2017 talk “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality.”

TED Hallucinating reality

“When we agree about our hallucinations,” he says, “we call that reality.” Those agreements blend external (outside world) and internal (imagined) input into shared belief about what the real world is, and how it works. They also add another key cultural component:  a sense of right and wrong.

Why We Need a Moral Compass, and Where We Get It

Humans need community to survive. Community, in turn, needs a shared behavioral code. Our brains are flexible and amoral on issues of right and wrong — they take their cues from cultural context. Cultural moral coding is therefore evolutionary — motivated by the survival instinct.[2] All of that goes a long way toward explaining why activities honored by one group are despicable to another, and why, when confronted with those differences, each group’s first instinct is to point fingers.

This article reviews three prominent books[3] supporting culturally based morality, and concludes as follows:

“…one must come to the conclusion that inside human beings, as Gazzaniga says, ‘there is a moral compass.’ But ‘we have to be smart enough to figure out how it works.’ Across the realm of human experience—personal, collective, historical, and now neuroscientific—it is abundantly clear that we have the capacity to consciously consider consequences and choose our actions… The mind is a physio-spiritual mechanism built for choice, but it must be given direction. We may be endowed with a moral compass, but it does not arrive with prewired direction. Moral calibration is required.”

The article’s source is “the Church of God, an international community,” which according to its website is a “a nondenominational organization based in Pasadena, California [which] traces its antecedents to Sabbatarian communities in 17th-century Europe, and before that to the first-century apostolic Church at Jerusalem.” Its tool of choice for the brain’s “moral calibration” is the Bible:

“The Bible, too, is unequivocal in the need for [moral calibration] (see, for example, Proverbs 3:31 and Job 34:2–4), adding that there is a spiritual factor responsible for imparting this ability to the human mind (Job 32:8–9)… The Bible serves as the lodestone that sets our compass’s orientation and helps us establish our moral bearings.”

But of course the Church of God didn’t write the article — an individual or collaboration of individuals wrote it, in furtherance of the Church’s culture and institutional belief system. It’s not surprising that the Bible was its cultural choice for moral calibration. Another culture might have chosen a different tool — Mein Kampf, for instance, or the ISIS Manifesto.

The article closes with reservations about the three authors’ neuro-cultural approach to morality:

“As secularists, of course, these authors cannot be expected to pursue [the Bible] in their search for the source of moral standards, especially when, as Gazzaniga notes, so much of what constitutes religious faith is founded on superstition rather than on truth. And so, as researchers improve drug cocktails to ultimately manipulate and control the brain (as Tancredi believes they will), and as society haltingly accepts science as arbiter of good and evil (as Gazzaniga believes it must), it is not too farfetched to imagine that the moral grammar Hauser describes can be refashioned as well. In fact, if history provides any clue, it seems a done deal. The only question that remains is whether our ongoing recalibrations will be for the better or for the worse.”

Yes — whether “for the better or for the worse” remains to be seen…. But according to whose cultural point of view?

[1] “How The Body And Mind Talk To One Another To Understand The World,” Aeon Magazine (Feb. 15, 2019).

[2] Here’s a nice primer on this concept. And here’s another, maybe more grownup version.

[3] Hardwired Behavior:  What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality, by Laurence Tancredi, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, a psychiatrist in private practice, and a lawyer who consults on criminal cases involving psychiatric issues. The Ethical Brain:  The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas, by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology and Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Moral Minds:  How Nature Designed Our Moral Minds, by Marc D. Hauser, Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, where he is director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory and co-director of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture

How Cultural Icons Saved the Super Bowl From Colin Kaepernick

colin k

There were no players kneeling during the National Anthem at the Super Bowl this year. A super-sized iconic double team made sure of that. Here’s how.

First, you need to know that I like NFL football. It’s a standard in my household every fall. I got nothin’ against the game.

Just needed to say that….

As for the protests, they got squelched when a cultural icon was substituted for the issue under protest. The icon used was the American flag. Once the switch was made, the protests were over — to kneel was to desecrate one of the nation’s defining symbols — like the Hippies did in the 60’s.

flag burning

Football field-sized flags have been around awhile, especially since 9-11. By now their place in American culture is fully cemented — along with military honor guards, flyovers, and coaches wearing camo fatigues during the entire month of November, not just around Veteran’s Day.[1]

dallas-cowboys-american-flag

flyover

Remember that, for purposes of this blog, it’s ultimately not about football, flags, and flyovers. Here, we’re about cultural beliefs and institutions — how they’re created, and how they shape our perceptions and behavior. Here’s a quick summary of how that works[2]:

  • Culture is an inside job: it resides in neurological and biological wiring.
  • That wiring is shared from one individual to another by implicit agreements that yes, this is the way things are.
  • That shared wiring generates a shared belief system that promotes a common culture with its own characteristic view of reality and approach to life.
  • Through the principle of emergence, the culture takes on a life of its own — becomes a separate, dynamic entity, fully supported by its insitutions.
  • All of this satisfies the human need to get organized into groups for safety and identity, which in turn prevents life from being, as Thomas Hobbes said, ‘“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
  • Conformity to the cultural belief system promotes individual peace of mind and communal harmony.
  • Nonconformity creates conflict — internally in the brain, and externally in society.

When nonconformists like Kaepernick challenge cultural belief systems, the culture’s icons rise to their defence:

“Conflict between two groups, including war, may be defined as a battle between belief systems.

“Symbols emerge strongly in such conflicts: they may be revered objects as stones, writings, buildings, flags or badges; whatever they may be, they may symbolize the central core of belief system.

“When people become symbols, the real person may become obscured behind the projected symbolic image or person.” [3]

Belief systems at their highest level of development dehumanize and objectify conformists and nonconformists alike. They do so by turning the focus from the internal life of individuals to the external life of the culture, as maintained by its beliefs and institutions. Along the way, people and things become cultural  icons, which then become the issue, replacing the actual point of conflict. Thus Kaepernick became an iconic nonconformist, pitted against an ultimate cultural icon, the U.S. flag.

Cultural leaders in particular carry out this practice, since they are responsible for maintaining the culture’s iconography. As a result, the ultimate conflict is over who has the power to control cultural beliefs and institutions in the first place:

“[P]eople fight not because of differences in religion and other beliefs; they fight to control the opportunity to create external structures that fit with their internal structures, and to prevent others from filling their environment with structures and stimulation that conflict with their internal structures.”[4]

Say all you like about how it’s patriotic to protest, but that’s not going to fly in the face of entrenched cultural-neurology. Protest challenges status quo, and the alarm bells go off. Culture relies on conformity for its peace of mind. When it turns on the game, it wants football, not polarizing socio-political issues. The actual issues that gave rise to the Colin Kaepernick protests can persist if they like, just not on game days.

Of course, Colin Kaepernick wasn’t thinking about any of that when he took a knee. He was exercising his own social conscience during a period of disturbing and seemingly epidemic shootings and brutality of blacks by police officers. That was a big enough problem to tackle. But bring that issue to the NFL, which is a cultural icon in its own right, not to mention a multi-billion dollar growth industry,[5] and then have to face the double-team of the NFL and the Stars and Stripes?

He never had a chance. He picked way too big a fight.

[1] Armistice Day commemorated the end of World War I on November 11, 1918. President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed the name of the holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day in 1954.

[2] See the posts in this blog’s category “How Belief Creates Culture, and How Culture Creates Reality.”

[3] “What Are Belief Systems?” Usó-Doménech and J. Nescolarde-Selva, Department of Applied Mathematics. University of Alicante. Alicante. Spain.

[4] Yale Medical School professor of psychiatry Bruce E. Wexler, in his landmark book Brain and Culture:  Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change.

[5] According to this analysis, NFL annual revenues rose from $4.28 Billion in 2001 to $13.68 Billion in 2017.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture

It’s An Inside Job

In Brain and Culture:  Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change, Yale Medical School professor of psychiatry Bruce E. Wexler declared that “concordance between internal structure and external reality is a fundamental human neurobiological imperative.” “Concordance” is peace of mind, which we all know is an inside job.

peace of mind

But the concordance Wexler is talking about is not the kind reserved for the enlightened few, it’s the kind that’s a brain health necessity. Our brains work unceasingly to maintain harmony between us and our surroundings, including our cultural setting. When internal and external are out of sync, the result is cognitive dissonance which, when left unresolved, leads to physical, mental, and social disease, distress and disorder. Neurological concordance is therefore a surviving and thriving skill, and can be traced to the corresponding part of the brain:

“Thanks to advances in imaging methods, especially functional MRI, researchers have recently identified key brain regions linked to cognitive dissonance. The area implicated most consistently is the posterior part of the medial frontal cortex (pMFC), known to play an important role in avoiding aversive outcomes, a powerful built-in survival instinct. In fMRI studies, when subjects lie to a peer despite knowing that lying is wrong—a task that puts their actions and beliefs in conflict—the pMFC lights up.”[1]

cognitive dissonance

The straightest  path to concordance is conformity. Nonconformity, on the other hand, generates both intracultural and intercultural neurological conflict. [2] This potential for conflict was the context for Wexler’s peace of mind declaration — let’s hear it again, the full quote this time:

“This book argues that differences in belief systems can themselves occasion intercultural violence, since concordance between internal structure and external reality is a fundamental human neurobiological imperative.” (Emphasis added.)

Peace of mind therefore requires the alignment of inner and outer belief systems. This article[3] defines the term:

“Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of Reality. Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually ‘make sense’ of the world around us.

 “The species Homo sapiens developed so-called belief systems. These are sets of beliefs reinforced by culture, theology, and experience and training as to how the world works cultural values, stereotypes, political viewpoints, etc.”

In order for personal (internal) and shared (external) belief systems to align, the culture’s members must share comparable neural pathways, consciousness, perceptions, sensory tastes, physiology, and the like.[4] When they do, the culture becomes recognizable in its members. Think of the Olympics’ opening ceremony parade of athletes:  the Yanks are obviously the Yanks — nobody else has quite their swashbuckling sense of derring-do. Or think of professional cultures — lawyers, accountants, engineers, physicians — meet one, and you can just tell. Or remember what it’s like to visit a foreign culture — it’s not just the signage but it’s… well, everything —  how people look, sound, act, their customs and values….

All of that is the result of biological, chemical, environmental, and other influences, all stored in individual brains and bodies. But how is cultural patterning transmitted from one individual to another? John R. Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, wanted to know, and finding out led to his seminal book The Construction of Social Reality:

“This book is about a problem that has puzzled me for a long time:  there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking about things like money, property, governments, and marriage.

“If everybody thinks that this sort of thing is money, and they use it as money and treat it as money, then it is money. If nobody ever thinks this sort of thing is money, then it is not money. And what goes for money goes for elections, private property, wars, voting, promises, marriages, buying and selling, political offices, and so on.”

“How can there be an objective world of money, property, marriage, governments, elections, football games, cocktail parties and law courts in a world that consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force, and in which some of these particles are organized into systems that are conscious biological beasts, such as ourselves?”

This article[5] provides this summary answer to Searle’s questions:

“Because mental states cannot be transferred physically, they must be transferred by being re-created in the mind of the receiving individual.

“[W]hat is transmitted is some state of mind that produces behavior.

“[The transmitted state of mind includes] a myriad of… beliefs, values, desires, definitions, attitudes, and emotional states such as fear, regret, or pride.”

Vastly simplified, the process of enculturation looks like this:

  • New members enter via an entry point such as birth, naturalization, initiation, etc.
  • They observe the culture’s members thinking and behaving in the culture’s characteristic ways.
  • Through observation and imitation, they take on the culture’s mindset and become habituated into its belief and behavioral norms.
  • In time, they become recognizable as members of the culture along with its other members.
  • Then, an organizing principle called “emergence” asserts itself, so that the whole culture takes on a life of its own that is bigger than the sum of its individual members.

We’ll talk about emergence next time.

[1] “What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?” Scientific American Mind (Nov. 2015).

[2] There’s been a lot of research on conformity and nonconformity in the past ten years. If you’re interested in digging deeper, searching “neuroscience of conformity” and “neuroscience of nonconformity” will turn up several scholarly studies.

[3] “What Are Belief Systems?” Usó-Doménech and J. Nescolarde-Selva, Department of Applied Mathematics. University of Alicante. Alicante. Spain.

[4] See the prior post, Microbes of Meaning.

[5] “Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture”, Philip G. Chase, former Senior Research Scientist and Consulting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania,