On a lark, I googled the phrase “cognitive neuroscience of religion”. I’m not really sure what I expected to find; maybe a few press articles on Michael Persinger’s “God machine” (a fancy name for TMS applied over the temporal lobes). As it turns out, Google returns only 3 hits for the phrase, which surprised me, given that these days there seems to be a cognitive neuroscience of just about everything (go on, google your favorite subfield–you know you want to). Ironically, one of the three hits is a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses on the (allegedly) increasing interest in religion and spirituality among neuroscientists.
The “cognitive neuroscience of religion” phrase is used early on in the piece:
“This is a new science that’s emerging,” says Patrick McNamara, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. “You might call it the cognitive neuroscience of religion. This is definitely a new discipline, and it’s poised to make some major new discoveries.”
The article itself alternates haphazardly between covering genuinely interesting developments in the neuroscience of belief and spirituality (e.g., the recent focus on Buddhist meditation) and focusing on the beliefs of neuroscientists who happen to harbor religious or mystic worldviews themselves. The author, Richard Monastersky, doesn’t acknowledge anywhere in the piece that there’s a big difference between trying to understand the neural bases of religious belief and trying to justify one’s beliefs via neuroscience. Plenty of people are interested in the former; relatively few are interested in the latter. Yet Monastersky allocates the majority of time to the latter group. Some choice quotes:
Mr. Price also questions the reigning materialist concept of the mind, asking, “Why say that consciousness exists only inside a body?” Regarding subjective experience, he wonders, “Are we talking about some organ inside our skull, or are we talking about our connection with something outside ourselves? That connection outside ourselves can include a spiritual connection.”
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Other scientists are asking similarly heretical questions. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a research professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been treating people with obsessive-compulsive disorders to counter their urges through focused attention of the mind. Scans of his patients’ brains reveal that such mental therapy can alter the behavior of their brains, something that could not happen if the mind emerged entirely from the brain, he says.
“It is a tragedy of history that materialism became the regnant paradigm,” says Dr. Schwartz, who rails against the contemporary norms that divide science and religion (see related story, Page A18). There are a growing number of scientists, he says, who “believe that this separation of science from religion is a cultural artifice.”
In Monastersky’s defense, he does give some airtime to opposing (and sensible) views from some of the field’s luminaries:
Stephen F. Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience and a professor in the molecular-neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, Calif., echoed many scientists’ reactions when he said in an e-mail message, “I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd.”
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Michael S. Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a leading neuroscientist who serves on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, says that essentially all brain biologists accept the materialist view of the mind. “I would say that 98 or 99 percent of people in the business think that,” he says.
You’d think 98 or 99 percent would come across as a pretty big number, yet somehow the article still left me with the same uncomfortable sense of ambiguity found in much of the pro-ID literature (though I’m certainly not suggesting Monastersky, a widely-acclaimed science writer, is pro-ID): the sense that somehow, somewhere, there’s a genuine controversy, and researchers need to give equal time to both sides. Which of course they don’t, as the Gazzaniga quote makes abundantly clear.
One would expect that the brain sciences would be among the last places deeply religious people would venture. To my mind it seems it would be very difficult for most people to continue to hold non-materialist views of the mind after a year or two of staring at images of localized activation increases or dealing with patients with focal lesions and equally selective behavioral deficits. When I look around at my colleagues, I don’t see the “growing numbers of religious and nonreligious researchers who support” the view of a non-material mind. What I do see is a growing number of researchers who want to understand why it is that so many people around them maintain religious beliefs, and for the first time feel they have the tools to do it at the level of the brain.
McNamara has an edited book coming out in October on the subject, so I suppose he has a strong motivation to make it sound like this is a hot new area of research.
It is a hot new area of research in cog psy and cog anthro, emphasis on new.
I get the sense that there is interesting research about brain states in conflict going on at DARPA. Misconceptions of religion seem to be at the heart of conflict these days. I’m interested in the coincidence of research that investigates religious sense in a peaceful mode, in a conflict mode, and in the general context of distinguishing global perception from specific attention. But what is the eventual application? Is there a goal besides development of weapons and/or medication? If the study is simply an appreciation of the brain’s abstract beauty, it strikes me as somewhat narcissistic. Could such study be used to develop interactive strategies that peacefully calm an individual who is about to become psychotically violent while in a religious fervor? That could be really useful.
very good questions posed by this post. I came to appreciate the amount of research done on the subject by three of our contemporary eminent atheists: Sam Harris (working on his PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford), Richard Dawkins who has a flair for explaining complex science from his perspective as a biologist, and Dennis Dennett, who does a superb job of amalgamating it all together. Sam is required reading. His eloquence and insight are extraordinary. Dawkins is a legend, his books are a must on any shelf. And Dennett as a true scholar, points to the errors of his colleagues, but moreover, if you take for instance “Breaking the Spell”, he cites other authors so richly, you can get suggestions on building the most amazing library on the study of religion and how it fits in with neuroscience, anthropology, evolution, and about a dozen other sciences. I am personally on a “time perception” quest at the moment, and pleasantly surprised to see what others who tackled the subject came up with. Again, great post – keep it up!