Least and most religious nations

[leo9]

You are aware that the article you are quoting from is headlined "Selective Brain Damage Modulates Human Spirituality, Research Reveals" - or put more simply, as the authors explicitly say in the text, brain damage makes us religious? I don't think that was the message you wanted to convey!

According to reaserchers in California:

"Is humankind hardwired to be spiritual? Recent research suggests that we just might be

Maybe some research does, but this doesn't, except inasmuch as having colour vision and depth perception "hardwires" us to perceive beauty in a sunset. There is a world of difference between having the neural hardware to do something, and having the emotional and intellectual software to do it.

To take a safely materialistic example: it was believed for centuries (on the basis of the same sort of symptom-lesion studies as this) that the organ called Brocca's Area was key to human speech, to the point where paleologists used it as the test of whether a newly found species could talk. Then more careful research found that most of the activity associated with speech took place in quite different places. It's now suspected that Brocca's Area may be some sort of motor control: without it you can't form words, but you can have it and still be incapable of speech.

I am even more suspicious of using lesion studies to track down something as fuzzy and ill defined as spirituality. But even if they could find which areas are active in those mental processes we call spiritual, that would tell us exactly as much as identifying Brocca's Area told us about how we can deliver speeches that make people angry or poetry that makes people weep.

Though spirituality in many ways is seen as separate from religion, both incorporate a complex of attitudes and behaviors relating to a transcendent human condition. Religious beliefs and practices have been a source of succor and conflict for nearly all of recorded human history, making this study significant in that it paves the path for future investigation that can advance our understanding of the neurobiological reasoning behind disparate outlooks on spirituality. While some experts discourage comparing the neural mechanisms involved in spirituality with those of religious practices, the causative link between brain functioning level and state of transcendence should be further pursued as it may lead to answers of why humans are religious, and potentially reveal our genetic predisposition for belief."

There are so many contradictions and unexamined assumptions in that passage that I'm surprised it made it into a scientific journal: probably because it was peer-reviewed by doctors, not by philosophers. They start by recognising that spirituality and religion are apples and oranges, then go right ahead and add them up and get the answer in pears.

"Previous reports confirm the relationship between spirituality and frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes. In particular, the brain's right parietal lobe defines the aspect of "me." According to Brick Johnstone, a neuropsychologist at University of Missouri, this region assesses the body's position and location in space. Any modifications to the area would disrupt this awareness and feelings of individuality would fade. In essence, the sensation of transcendence would be heightened. By comparing imaging of damaged brains and the subjects self-described spirituality, one study, published in the journal Zygon in 2008, provides evidence that people with less active parietal lobes (i.e., "Me-Definers") are more likely to be spiritual.

That is actually an interesting point, and there's been some fascinating research into this using magnetic effects to temporarily disrupt parietal function. But there's a big unanswered question about whether the level of activity in a particular brain area is physically caused ("hard-wired") or simply indicates that the way that particular personality works is currently making less use of that area.

When I'm using this PC, the graphics card has much less activity than when my game-playing son does. The PC's physical ability to do fast high-res graphics is the same, I just don't use it. Is someone with a less active parietal area less "me-defined" because they don't have the hardware for it, or is their personality just using the "me-definer" less? The answer you get may depend on whether you're a neurologist or a psychologist.

His team surveyed the spirituality of a person by scoring their level of self-transcendence, which is an allegedly unvarying personality trait that abstractedly reflects a decreased ability to sense individual self and largely identify oneself as incorporated with the universe.

Emphasis added! That's the first time I've seen a scientist use "allegedly" like a tabloid journalist. Maybe he hoped nobody would notice it in all that high-level waffle.

In order to gauge self-transcendence (or ST), patients underwent formal interviews focusing on their level of religiosity, report of personal mystical experiences or extrasensorial consciousness (including the presence of God),

None of which are the things which he claims to have a mechanism for linking to parietal fucntion, so he's out on a limb already. In particular, experiences of the presence of God(s) by definition don't involve loss of awareness of self, because there must be a self to be meeting God: self-transcenders don't meet God, they become one with God. I doubt if this researcher groks the difference; the full text of the article clearly implies that he's a hardcore materialist trying to prove that religious experiences are just brain malfunctions. In the hope of curing them? Thorne, you should sponsor this research!

[thir]

Thorne, you should sponsor this research!

Except it isn't very scientific!

[Thorne]

Thorne, you should sponsor this research!

If I only had the money!

But then, I think I'd rather buy an island in the middle of the Pacific, far away from anyone. Just me and my harem.

The problem I have with this kind of research, and this kind of discussion actually, is the tossing about of the terms 'spirituality' and 'transcendence' as if they were real, measurable effects. I'm not so sure that they are. Place three people in a room and you're liable to get four different descriptions of spirituality. What one person might consider a spiritual, or transcendent, experience, another will consider to be a pretty good high. Almost every description of such an experience which I have ever heard could have come just as easily from a drug or alcohol abuser. Could this tie in with the implication that such things are a construct of a damaged brain? Or, like you on the PC, from someone who is not using the full potential of their brain? I don't know that I'd want to go quite that far, but it does tend to imply that any such spiritual experiences are constructs of the mind, and not of some outside, supernatural origin.

[thir]

The problem I have with this kind of research, and this kind of discussion actually, is the tossing about of the terms 'spirituality' and 'transcendence' as if they were real, measurable effects. I'm not so sure that they are. Place three people in a room and you're liable to get four different descriptions of spirituality. What one person might consider a spiritual, or transcendent, experience, another will consider to be a pretty good high. Almost every description of such an experience which I have ever heard could have come just as easily from a drug or alcohol abuser.

Which is why the debated research with Urgesi is out the window!