How God Tickles Our Brain (Part One)

You’re probably aware that in the last decades brain research has revealed a lot about religious experiences, near death experiences and similar. It’s an area I’m interested in but haven’t looked into much. Recently Bill wrote an article on the AgnosticsInternational forum and he’s kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. I think it’s a particularly clear and useful overview:

The Sensation Known As Religious Experience

I want to look at how the human brain works, and how it processes religious ideas: not to attack religion or theism, nor to support them, just so we can add this new dimension into our debates. I shall take some short cuts and simplifications: if you need fuller and more complex material, I can give you such links. I do not feel that you need to know every nook and cranny of this field of science to gain some benefit from some knowledge of it. Let us look at the human brain itself – it is made of localized areas called lobes, and these lobes “do” things when electrical activity takes place within them. Communication between the lobes is virtually simultaneous, and most of us would like to think that our brains are a seamless whole. However, each lobe has its own specialization. One lobe processes your thinking and reasoning, another handles input from the five senses, another deals with speech and yet another is your short term memory. These lobes are the conscious part of your mind – it is where you see, hear, think and react to the world outside. Although these lobes are part of the integrated whole, just for discussion purposes and not as a definition, it is useful to group these lobes together as a single unit, and call it “the little brain”.

The rest of the brain deals with everything else from controlling your heart rate to providing emotional responses to holding long term memory. Again, purely for discussion, it is useful to call this subconscious area of your brain “the big brain”, for it really is very much larger than the conscious brain.

The technology of fMRI allows doctors to study what is wrong with any one lobe, and researchers to examine what each lobe does. Some of the research simply confirms prior theories, and some gives new insight and explanation.

For example, we now know that the little brain processes about 2,500 bits of data per second, constantly during waking hours, and never varies much from that figure. Big brain processes about 4 billion bits per second, some lobes in constant agitation and others at rest until their functionality is required.

One early discovery explained the experience of deja vu. When a subject loses the short term memory of a sight or sound just after seeing or hearing something, the sound or sight is present in long term memory. That is, the sight or sound entered both short term and long term memory simultaneously, short term dropped it for some reason, and found that long term memory recognized the sight or sound – even though it was being sensed for the very first time. Deja vu really is nothing more than a brain blip.

We now know that the ability to believe in religious ideas is held in three separate lobes, which do other jobs as well. This ability piggy backs on those lobes. That is, there is no special religious belief lobe. (It would have been a very odd god who had the human mind built in such a way that it was impossible to believe in god, and the mechanism neither adds nor subtracts from theology). The first piece is [unfortunately this section is missing. Can anyone help fill in the gap?]

The second piece is the temporal lobe. When this lobe is activated, it gives us the ability to empathise with others. It is normally activated by seeing somebody or something, and we sense whatever it is that the person or thing is experiencing. Sometimes it gets activated when no-one is present, and we then sense the presence of that no-one. One cause of such activity is temporal epilepsy – and such epileptics have so many religious experiences that they are considered to be blessed by some cultures. Another cause of such activity is an experimenter providing the lobe with micro-electronic stimulation, and the subjects consistently report religious experience, consistent with the prior teaching of what a religious experience consists of. Christians report sensing the presence of Christ, jews the presence of God, Muslims the presence of Allah, buddhists a state of nirvarna and so on.

The third piece is the Limbic system – several lobes deep in the lowest reaches of the subconscious that provide, among other things, the ability to get ready to have sex, to fight, to flee in fear and so on. One thing we have learned about this particular area is that it is where all Near Death Experience originates – with its hallucinations, ghosts, and light beckoning from the other side of death’s door. Some brave people have had NDEs invoked upon them in laboratory settings.

However, outside of such experiments, the strength of NDEs produced by the limbic system are so overpowering, that atheists have been known to become theists after such an event.

We need to look at these three pieces in some more detail – but we have gone far enough for an overview.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Before looking at religious belief itself, I’d like to take your time to look at how the belief system works in general.

The events you conscious mind witness pass into your subconscious instantaneously. The subconscious processing of those events causes emotions and memories to be evoked and the results often are passed back to the conscious mind equally instantaneously.

But sometimes the mechanism does not always work properly.

For example, you meet a person and big brain gives you an instant signal that you know this person. May be with some images of shared experience, and so on. Definitely with a signal if this person is friend, foe or an unknown quantity. But the person’s name may escape you. How can that be? Big Brain definitely knows a lot about this person, and must have that name stored somewhere – it is just the ability to get to that memory sometimes stalls. Hypothesis: until modern times, recognizing friend or foe was far more important than remembering names, so our brains are still more geared to the friend/foe recognition than to trivial side issues.

There is a similar effect when you mislay something. Short term memory has no idea where your keys are – someone tells you left them in a particular place – and Big Brain’s instant confirmation makes you slap your head as you say “Doh!” Hypothesis: Big brain sometimes is working to an agenda that does not necessarily match that of little brain. Being at a subconscious level, we have no idea what that agenda is at any one time.

When it comes to what we believe, the sequence is that input to the conscious is processed by the subconscious and the subconscious sends a “true/false/don’t know” sort of signal to the conscious mind.

If I say “Madagascar is a large island in the Indian Ocean” you probably get a “true” signal – even if you have never been to that place in your life. Your subconscious measures the statement, finds it consistent with everything you have been previously been told, and you get the “true” signal.

If I say “Frenchmen live on a large island called France in the middle of the Atlantic” you could get a “false” signal. If the person making the statement is someone you trust, you might get a momentary “don’t know” to see if there is some special meaning, or joke, tied up in a statement clearly at odds with everything you have previously been told about Frenchman and France.

The signal for true/false comes as early in receiving input as possible, and then affects everything that follows thereafter. (This really is very recent research, and may need further work to get it clarified into a predictive phenomena). But it has been shown that if someone makes an early statement that the recipient holds to be false, all the following statements made are scrutinized purely to see where they also fail to be true.

The mechanism is very powerful: a professor of English found that he could dismiss a 27 page essay showing that William Shakespeare might not have been the “real” author of the plays and poems ascribed to him. The professor had published a paper supporting the opposing view – that Shakespeare was the real author. He dismissed his student’s essay out of hand, without further comment, because the wrong year was given in it for King James’ coronation. It mattered not how trivial the error was, it gave his Big Brain all it needed to satisfy its agenda that the submitted essay was wrong.

The sub-conscious acquires its stock of what is true and what is false over a relatively long period of time. Once something is held to be true or false, the belief mechanism is designed to keep that belief intact. When something is moved from being true to being false, or vice versa, the emotion involved with such a switch is very strong. We call it an epiphany.

Once a belief is established, it is very hard to get it changed to something different.

Which is why we will consider next the Jesuit truism “give me the child before he is 7 years old, and I will give you the man”

Click here for Part Two. You can also

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DJ Jan & X Santo | Reaching Into My Brain (1995)

There Is No Pain, You Are Receding

This is not a post about going bald. It’s part two of a short series on suffering and spirituality. Here I mention a common Christian “literalist” objection to theistic evolution:

Doesn’t Genesis teach there was no pain and suffering until the fall, and therefore evolution cannot have been the mechanism? Christians, Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims, all take their origin story from Genesis. At a particular point in the tale the human race is flourishing and then everything goes wrong. Humans make Promethean choices that separate them from God, and like all choices there are consequences, much like choosing to jump from a cliff. Christians call this “the fall”. If you’re not familiar, here’s the whole passage. Among other things, in verse 16, To the woman God said, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. ~ Gen 3:16

In a literal interpretation— the approach anti-evolutionists normally favour— this clearly implies pain before the fall. Note the phrase “greatly increase”. In other words, there was pain before the human representatives made their choice, it just wasn’t so bad. On a literal interpretation, pain was around even in Eden.

And that’s really the only point I want to make today.

By the way, according to Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion from my public library, the church did NOT oppose anesthesia in childbirth based on passages like these. I also noticed that male domination (the husband ruling over the woman) only came in AFTER the fall. Take that, “women must submit to men” theology. Gee, maybe literalist interpretations of the Torah aren’t so bad after all? (Noting my post suggesting this whole section, like much of early Genesis, appears to be poetic in form, and reading those sections ‘literally’ is probably a mistake.)

There are some people who rather enjoy a bit of pain (see below).
More on the problem of pain tomorrow 🙂
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What Do You Think?

Depeche Mode sing Strange Love:
I give in, to sin…
Will you take the pain… I give to you?
Pain, will you return it?

Also check out the great
Pain and Suffering remix (Replicant tribute)

Anyone like to guess the where the title of today’s post comes from? 😉
How do you think about physical pain and the meaning of life?

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Evolution, Creation and Christianity

I had to laugh at this genuine tweet from today, “The Theory of Evaluation is a lie that is passed off as TRUTH.” A comment on a YouTube video also amused me: “Brian, do you realise how creationist your idea is?” Oh noes – A new insult!

Do you groan when the so-called creation versus evolution debate comes up? I do. What pushes my buttons most is the popular impression there is only one Christian perspective on science and the Bible.

This post is a plea for charity, and a plea for awareness that there are multiple views of how God might have generated the world, held by genuine people of faith[1], and by genuine scientists. I’m tired of having the alternatives shouted down. Hopefully it’s only a minority who proclaim that if you’re not with them, you’re not a true believer ™ .

While I often call myself an open agnostic, today I’m wearing my “Let’s assume Christianity is true” hat. If you’re not really interested, just stop reading here and enjoy the music:

La Roux | In For The Kill (Skream remix)

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I’ve never accepted the earth is young. There is a grandeur to the thought of the Spirit brooding over the eons of Earth, patiently coaxing her into life, exulting in each step and life form. Billions of years for God’s work of art to coalesce. Mainstream science teaches an ancient universe, but there are also many deeply committed Christians who agree.

Evangelical theologian Bernard Ramm wrote of his “conviction that the fundamental problem of Christianity in biology is not really evolution but a philosophy of biology” [2]. I suspect many secular biologists could also do with a good philosophy of biology, an area too easily neglected in the grinding process of long lab hours while earning one’s PhD. While now over fifty years old, Ramm’s “epochal work” is still worth a read as a foundation to thinking in this area.

So what are some Christian views on science and scripture? Years ago, I concluded there are about seven major approaches that are held, depending on how we categorise and name them. Each have theological views about how to interpret Genesis and scientific views about how the natural world came to be.

However, after much wrestling with this post, I decided to abandon any attempt to create the Mother of All Summaries, and concentrate on a few ideas that interest me right now. There’s a useful comparison table here which unfortunately still neglects some views. Here’s another useful summary.

Let’s start with
Old Earth Views
Putting it simply, the evidence from geology and a number of other sources for dating the universe is overwhelming. For the purposes of this post I’m going to take this as a given. One of these Old-Earth creation views is:

Theistic Evolution
There are plenty of Christians who accept biological evolution in some form, and reconcile it with their faith. Even Bible-believing born-again types. See for example, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have To Choose?, Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin, many of the eminent scientists in this book and an increasing number of other books. There are some common responses concerned with the outcomes of theistic evolution – for example, Does it destroy belief in a literal Adam and Eve?, and Doesn’t Genesis teach there was no pain and suffering until the fall, and therefore evolution cannot have been the mechanism? I don’t think these need be problems (see here), and I was skeptical about evolution for many years. I’m sure you want to know whether I’m still skeptical now, right? Let me know if you want me to post about this. Keepin’ this short, remember?

Some will immediately demonise anyone who even suggests theistic evolution, and argue for some kind of atheist conspiracy theory. I’m not an atheist, remember? A few of these people are probably in the Intelligent Design movement. I hesitate to mention Intelligent Design as I’m out of touch with it. It may be better categorized as a social-political movement rather than a distinct new interpretation. Broadly speaking, Intelligent Design proponents believe in an old Earth and may not require literal interpretations of Genesis, which is at least a step in the right direction, in my view. Speaking of which, …

Non-Literal Interpretations
I once hosted a talk by a friend who is both a working scientist with a PhD in chemistry and a Pentecostal minister. He proposed that a good look at the literary forms in Genesis reveals interesting things. These approaches can be loosely lumped together as the Literary Framework view.

This view says that Genesis Chapters 1 and 2 give a figurative framework— a topical and non-sequential account of creation—but not necessarily an historical account of the order of the creative process. And so it tells us we have structure— we have order in the account of Genesis Chapter One, but the structure does not correspond to the historical order. We are not to take the structure literally, yet we are not to hear a non-literal or a mythological reading of the text.” from Dr Guy Waters’ Four Prominent Interpretations .

I want to mention UK physicist Alan Hayward‘s “Fiat creation” idea because it hasn’t had enough attention in my view [2]. I’d prefer to use another name as “Fiat creation” is also used by other viewpoints. Also, I can’t help thinking about Italian cars.

Maybe we could call it
Spoken Word Creation?
I’m writing this from memory and summarising Hayward’s more elegant prose. As I recall, Hayward notes that the original Hebrew of Genesis doesn’t have punctuation (and certainly not verse numbers) and so scholars infer where to put punctuation as a part of the translation process. This also includes deciding where poetic or liturgic language appears. Modern translations usually lay out poetry in a slightly different format to indicate this – see the Psalms, for example.

Hayward suggests it is conceptually possible to read Genesis 1 as if it includes parentheses. For example:

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
(God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. )
And there was evening, and there was morning— the first day.

And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.
(So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse sky. )
And there was evening, and there was morning— the second day.

And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so.
(God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good.)
Then God said, Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so.
(The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.)
And there was evening, and there was morning— the third day.

The phrases in bold above are what God spoke over the six day period. The passages I’ve put in parentheses are a comment on the fiats, so to speak. There are much more elegant treatments of the poetry in Genesis 1, but hopefully you get the point.

This interpretation focuses on the idea that what God speaks, will inevitably happen. It does not require the outcome to occur immediately. In other words, the Genesis account is focused on God’s speaking (“fiats”), not on how the results of God’s spoken will are worked out through history. Interestingly, this view allows a believer to affirm that God created in a literal six days. It is the six days of God speaking that is the focus, the details of how it actually came to be can be left to science.

In the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I got to say about that”.

***

This post is a plea for charity, and a plea for awareness that there are multiple views of how God might have generated the world, held by genuine Christians, and by genuine scientists[4]. I’d like to hear your opinion. Here’s my comment guidelines.

Notes
1. My apologies to Jews, Muslims and other theists, I’m limiting myself to Christian creation views here. Many of the theistic creation views held by Jews and Muslims seem to be comfortable with an old earth and evolution. All three faiths have Genesis in common, although it’s reported many Muslims regard Genesis as a corrupted version of God’s message.
2. Ramm p 179
3.Alan Hayward | Creation and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from Science and the Bible (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005) seems to be a reprint of Hayward’s 1995 work which I understand did not receive the attention it deserved in the USA because he heavily criticises young earth creation theories. Though slightly out of date now, I still believe it’s one of the best books written about this topic.
4. You could look at the UK Christians in Science Association and the far-too-short Wikipedia list.