Slashdot Mirror
Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds (cnn.com)
A new study published in the journal Social Neuroscience finds through functional MRI scans that religious and spiritual experiences can trigger reward systems like love and drugs. "These are areas of the brain that seem like they should be involved in religious and spiritual experience. But yet, religious neuroscience is such a young field -- and there are very few studies -- and ours was the first study that showed activation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that processes reward," said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah and lead author of the study. CNN reports: For the study, 19 devout young adult Mormons had their brains scanned in fMRI machines while they completed various tasks. The tasks included resting for six minutes, watching a six-minute church announcement about membership and financial reports, reading quotations from religious leaders for eight minutes, engaging in prayer for six minutes, reading scripture for eight minutes, and watching videos of religious speeches, renderings of biblical scenes and church member testimonials. During the tasks, participants were asked to indicate when they were experiencing spiritual feelings. As the researchers analyzed the fMRI scans taken of the participants, they took a close look at the degree of spiritual feelings each person reported and then which brain regions were simultaneously activated. The researchers found that certain brain regions consistently lit up when the participants reported spiritual feelings. The brain regions included the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with reward; frontal attentional, which is associated with focused attention; and ventromedial prefrontal cortical loci, associated with moral reasoning, Anderson said. Since the study results were seen only in Mormons, Anderson said, more research is needed to determine whether similar findings could be replicated in people of other faiths, such as Catholics or Muslims.
"Religion is a helluva drug." And far more destructive than heroin.
WHy dont they study that people who believe in religion are gullible, stupid or fools for accepting something important as truth without bothering to check the facts.
Except that with drugs you (usually) know you're just tripping (at least pre and post event), whereas religious people seem to think that what they experience/believe is actually real. Think "Oh my god I saw pink talking bunnies" vs "god told me to circumcise my son/daughter".
So we have conclusive proof that religion really is the opiate of the masses.
I grew up an odd mix of RC and evangelical. Very devout. I genuinely believed until my early 20s and then experienced a very abrupt 'loss of faith' that triggered a disintegration of sense of self, so deeply was that belief ingrained and so central was religion to my life.
In attempting to define my self without reference to church or god, I recognised that I had a pattern of thought, a mind-model as you say, that was shaped to fit religion and it was going to take a while before that could change. In the meantime, I didn't want to have it fill with the next thing to come along, or to become a kind of mental abscess, scabbed over but not healed. So I packed it, so to speak with a self-created 'religion'.
A polytheistic belief, to counter the monotheism of Christianity. Fictional characters (Pratchett's the Lady, Gaiman's Death and Eris from the Principia Discordia - although this last is more historic than fictional). Female vs male. Whenever I reflexively prayed, it was to one of those three. My ritualistic behaviour became not mentioning the Lady's name, hot dog buns and the like. I knew, on some level, that I was making this up, but it gave me something for my habits to work with while they wound down and were replaced with different patterns of thought. And for a while, part of me believed. That habit of belief didn't really care what the subject was, it just needed a focus.
It took years, but the habits eventually were replaced by different (better?) ways of thinking and it's been a long time since I can remember reflexively winging off a quick prayer when anxious.
Yeah. Religion. It's a hell of a drug.
If you look at the report, even at the start they state:
and at the end
So, this is stated very carefully in scientific language, but what they are discussing is how religious ideation and the following of religious leaders can bypass rational centers of the brain and create a self-reward loop in which these acts become their own reward.
It doesn't seem to me that it's being a bully to be concerned with why religion leads some people to kill and prompts others to acts of violence and oppression. The study is a start toward an answer. One could connect this study, for example, with the Stanford Prison Experiment, and research whether the same reward mechanisms were activated. Leader-following and an in-group were involved in the Stanford student's behavior. Do self-rewarding loops of religious ideation and leader-following reinforce such behavior?
Bruce Perens.
Actually, Nice logic, but it's not supported by history. Billions have been killed for the sake of land and resources, much more than the mere millions killed by industrialized nations. Worldly conflicts dwarf religious ones in every era. You do correctly point out, though, that people oppress or kill others are usually radicalized to believe they are "doing good", such as their leader being a god. How much more important then that they already know their creator, and that he calls for love and peace? Any good cause is an excuse for a tyrant, but Christianity is a hard one.
I'd call Islam a cult bent bent on world domination. Convert or die.
That's exactly how Christianity became a dominant religion. Convert or die and if anybody thinks that I'm trying to defend Islam here, think again. I dislike all the Abrahamic religions equally since they are all missionary and violent.
Cool story, bro. Any citations?
Sigh.
I never get why we have to overblow this.
Do you know, I drove home last night and have no memory of doing so? Automatic pilot, driven by my brain, while I thought of "higher" things.
I changed gear, negotiated roundabouts, kept to speed limits, stopped for pedestrians and red lights and navigated home without giving it a single conscious thought.
I also know that every night I fall unconscious, hallucinate vividly and then have complete amnesia about the whole event if I'm not interrupted before my brain is finished with it. It's called dreaming.
If I was sitting in a room for six years trying to do something, my brain would hallucinate the same (that's not meant to be an insulting word, it's quite literally what imagination and dreaming are) and believe I was outside my body. Yet, nobody, ever, in any controlled experiment, even when saying they ARE in that "special place" has ever demonstrated knowledge of, say, what's on top of the dresser behind them that they couldn't see from inside their body, or similar. You can even awake completely relaxed, unstressed, energised, without even having an hour's rest if you've had the right dream.
In the same way as out-of-body near-death experiences and suchlike, attributing it to some other existence seems, to me, to be entirely insulting to the capacity of the human mind under normal circumstances.
We have composers who see colours, artists who can paint pictures that don't complete until the final brush stroke but they can see it in their head in vivid detail, and story-writers who live in their heads most of their lives even if they can't write it down to save their life.
When the brain is then deprived of sensory information, and forced to entertain itself, it's no wonder that such experiences happen. To push them to "something else" rather than "Woah, my brain is capable of stupendous feats" is, I feel, condescending.
It doesn't require a supernatural explanation, or even comment. We've probably all done more amazing things in our sleep, or driving home from work.
Hell, I dreamed a "movie" from start to finish in twenty minutes of being asleep one night and still, to this day, I like to fold back into that dream or even write it down (which has taken YEARS of my life to do so). My brain was on-form that night, and I awoke exhilarated and haven't forgotten that experienced in 20+ years.
I really find it annoying when people then - as you just did - write it off as supernatural and, having "mastered" it in what sounds like a repeatable way, then ignore it and never do it again for fear of... what? Discovering some truth? Angering some god?
What if that's the way to escape the Matrix? What if that's the way to gain insight from your own mind on things nobody else has ever managed? What if that is the way to Heaven/Hell or whatever?
As someone of a scientific mind (can't you tell?), it drives me mad that people get near the equivalent of the next level of human existence, then never repeat it, wrap it in crap like "astral projection" and meditation, and basically forget it ever happened.
If it made you not fear death, surely you could do it again and be less scared, and not fear dying in the process?
But, maybe that would then conflict if - actually - it turns out just to have been a particularly vivid dream?