What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith

["Mad" Miles]

What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith
From: A Friend and Colleague of "Mad" Miles
Sent: Mon 12/24/07 10:15 AM


What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith

By David Van Biema, TIME Newsletter, Dec. 14, 2007
[accessed Dec.24/07]

Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004
attack on religion, The End of Faith, which spent 33
weeks on the New York Times best-seller List. The
book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also came
out in editions totalling [sic] hundreds of thousands.
Last Monday, however, the combative Californian
produced a shorter (seven pages) and seemingly calmer
publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000
readers: "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief
and Uncertainty." It appears in the respected journal
Annals of Neurology. And Harris, 40, claims it has
little if any connection to his two popular books.
Believers, however, may draw their own conclusions —
and may want to read his subsequent neurological
studies even more carefully.

The current paper recovers Harris's identity as a
doctoral candidate in neuroscience at UCLA, his
occupation before he commenced what he calls his
"extramural affair jumping into trenches in the
culture wars." It is an addition to the growing field
of brain scan trials, and Harris thinks it may be the
first to detail how the brain processes belief. At
first read, it seems less dangerous to Christianity
than to another cherished pillar of Western thought —
that "objective" beliefs like "2 + 2 = 4" and
"subjective" beliefs like "torture is bad" belong to
entirely separate categories of thought.

Harris and two co-authors ran 360 statements by 14
adult subjects whose brain activities were then
scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) devices. It suggests that within the brain pan,
at least, the distinction between objective and
subjective is not so clear-cut. Although more complex
assertions may get analyzed in so-called "higher"
areas of the brain, all seem to get their final stamp
of "belief" or disbelief in "primitive" locales
traditionally associated with emotions or taste and
odor. Even "2 + 2 = 4," on some level, is a question
of taste. Thus, the statement "that just doesn't smell
right to me" may be more literal than we thought.

Harris tested how the brain responded to assertions in
seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic,
factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. All
seven provided some useful data, but only the ones
relating to math and ethics produced results clear
enough to give a vivid picture of the way the simple
and the complex, the subjective and the objective
intertwine. Regardless of their content, statements
that the subjects believed lit up the ventral medial
prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a location in the brain best
known for processing reward, emotion and taste.
Equally "primitive" areas associated with taste, pain
perception and disgust determined disbelief.

"False propositions may actually disgust us," Harris
writes.

Is there a practical application here? He speculates
that if belief brain scanning were sufficiently
refined it could act as an accurate lie detector and
help control for the placebo effect in drug design.

Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden
somewhere in his brief paper. But his next
neurological enterprise may be another matter. He is
planning an fMRI run that will concentrate
specifically on religious faith, which Harris thinks
he now knows how to plumb more deeply. He also plans
to set up two different subject groups — the faithful
and non-believers. "That way," among other things, he
says, "you can ask, 'Do believers believe that Jesus
was born of a virgin the same way that nonbelievers
believe that Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may
turn out that the brain treats religious faith as its
own special category of belief unlike ethics and math.

But that is not what Harris expects to find. He
suspects the machines will show that "belief is belief
is belief." And that conclusion, he admits, may put
him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one, he
says, could accuse him or anyone else of trying to
disprove God's existence on the basis of an fMRI. But
faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel that
religious faith is a singular operation of the brain —
if they admit that it's an operation of the brain at
all — would object to what I'm doing, since it may
show that faith is essentially the same as other kinds
of knowing or thinking. The whole thing will seem
fishy to anyone who thinks we have immaterial souls
running around in our bodies."

Which, of course, a lot of people do. And despite the
fact that, as Harris puts it, his current literary
mode "is not beach reading," they may find that they
are keeping up with his academic writings more avidly
— and nervously — than they do his bestsellers.


URL:
https://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1694723,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly

[decterlove]

Yeah but how does that article relate to this article, Miles?

https://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2...h.neuroscience

["Mad" Miles]

Yeah but how does that article relate to this article, Miles?

https://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2...h.neuroscience

Dunno,

I jest fo'wad's 'em, if'n they look iner'estin.

Because of the debates about belief, science and epistemology on this board, I thought the article about brain scans and faith was apropos.

I glanced at the precis above. Doan see no contradickshun. Mebbe ya shud aisk Gawd?

It's late for me, I've the rest of the new posts on this board to clear. I'm particularly interested in what my old friend Fred Dolan has been up to as a new contributor.

Saw "Predator vs. Alien: Requiem" today, might write about it tomorrow.

"Mad" Muddled Miles