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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.
You could say it's the opiate of the people.
Only 19 persons were tested. All were from the same religion. There was no control set of non-religious individuals tested to see if the MRI scans were indeed representative of "religious and spiritual experience".
Most important, the Slashdot headline "Religious Experiences Have Similar Effect On Brain As Taking Drugs, Study Finds " differs from the title of the original study report. In the original report, the title is "Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons", clearly limiting the scope of the study to one religion.
Yes, the famous Karl Marx quote.
Keep in mind that, in context, Marx was referring to opiates as something that relieves pain, rather than something that gets you high.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Sounds like Marx was right about that.
...had this nailed decades ago! "I used to be all messed up on drugs, man. Now, I'm all messed up on the Lord!"
Think 60s/70s. Went twice on Sunday, then Wed night. I was 10 or 11 when I started asking questions that got answered by "ya gotta have faith". Um, if I had faith I wouldn't be asking these questions.
Older I got the more I hated church. Not gonna lie, there were a lot of days when I thought about opening the car door and jumping out of the car. On the freeway. To this day I don't dress up, nor do I sing in public.
Then Wizard of Oz was shown on Wednesdays for a few years in a row. I'd heard a lot about it, never seen it, wanted to see it. But no, I had to go to church Wednesday nights, cuz reasons.
Moved out when I was 18. Only time I've been in a church since was when mom died 4 years ago. Dad keeps asking me to go to church with him, I demurr, he doesn't understand why I won't go.
During my 20's and half my 30's, whenever I found someone was religious I'd goad them. Actively tried to piss them off. I grew out of that.
I think if you have a rational, questioning mind, church is either a social thing or pure BS.
So we have conclusive proof that religion really is the opiate of the masses.
Another conclusion is that we shouldn't make all that much out of small functional MRI studies done by random researchers since they're hard to do correctly.
Of course, we could also use a dead fish as a control.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I think you need to cut down on your opiate dosage
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
Or favorite sports teams, or social movements, or fandoms, or whatever else makes people tick.
Yep, exact same regions of the brain in fact:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
So next time somebody talks about how wonderful Steve Jobs was, you can tell them to lay off the drugs, and still mean it both figuratively and sincerely...and hell...probably literally too.
I grew up in a Mormon (LDS) family, and don't remember too many significant feelings of the sort mentioned in the article. I eventually concluded the church was pulling my leg and dropped out.
However, I once was visiting Utah on an informal tour of "important" LDS buildings, and had a strange feeling that brought me back to the days when I did believe. It was sort of euphoric relief that an omnipotent father figure "has our back" and that we, the LDS, are on the good team. It's roughly comparable to your town's sports team winning a big game where the crowd feels a togetherness and collective strength.
I thought to myself, "Why am I having this feeling, I don't believe any of it." After pondering it for a while, I concluded that the tour triggered memories AND feelings of my younger days when I did believe.
There's also negative experiences related to it, the reverse of the above, but they are kind of personal. Religion is a crazy mind-game either way. If you grew up with it, you can never get it out of your head: it shapes your thought process in that your mind-model of the world uses idioms from the religion. These idioms become a kind of meta language of the mind.
For example, when I think of user usage log files, it triggers the concept that "God knows your every move, thought, and action". I don't actually believe that, but my mind uses that as the conceptual idiom for what log files do.
Hierarchical file systems remind me of the church hierarchy. LDS-ers talk a lot about their organizational structure; sticking portraits of leaders on their walls. God is into org hierarchies I guess. I suspect it's actually an fringe ego benefit because most leaders have zero or small salaries from the church: it's largely volunteered "labor". The top leaders are usually wealthy by other means.
The idea of other planets is natural to LDS-ers because of the concepts like planet Kolob (which is not official doctrine actually, long story). Thus, an enjoyment of space sci-fi came natural.
I like to document rules, procedures, and assumptions; which may be traced back to scriptures, commandments, and rule lists like what LDS calls "Words of Wisdom", which the "coffee is bad" concept derives from. It also says oats are bad, but for some reason that's not enforced and barely mentioned. Go figure. (I almost typed "barley mentioned").
You have it backwards. The whole "war on drugs" is an attempt by religion to kill competition from a better product. Organized religion is behind this.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That would be muslin.
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.
Ultimately, the pairing of classical reward responses when hearing music with learning a smattering of music theory may indicate a brain mechanism for greater music appreciation. So what?
That's not "bypassing rational centers of the brain and creating a loop." It's simply "these people had a positive experience and there were ideas that were associated with that positive experience." If anything, the fact that brain regions which are active in moral reasoning were especially active in these people suggests the opposite of "bypassing rational centers."
You've conveniently ignored the actual data and results of their study entirely and instead taken a couple of speculative comments ("here's an idea, please fund us") out of context and twisted them.
The old baloney about religion being a primary cause of violence is a ridiculous urban legend. Ultimately you can trace the exaggerations back to centuries-old partisan tracts. Actual historians (e.g. Encyclopedia of Wars) find religiously motivated wars to be roughly 2% of the total death count.
If what you get out of the Shoah is that Hitler was right on both counts - Judaism is a disease, as is Christianity - there's something fundamentally wrong, not just with your understanding of history but with you.
The Inquisition killed about 3,000 people over the course of 350 years. (Secular courts, of course, killed people at a much faster rate.) For some perspective, the Great Leap Forward killed 30,000,000 people in 3 years.
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.
Don't ALL subjectively enjoyable experiences have the same effect on the brain, releasing dopamine and serotonin, and activating particular pathways? Not only religion and drugs, but also sex and chocolate and cat videos and the election of your preferred candidate?
So they discovered that participating in what they have been brought up to rejoice and be in awe of actually causes them joy. I'd be more surprised if the result were the opposite.
That's why people sign up and most never get rid of these delusions because it makes them feel good about themselves. They realize that santa and the easter bunny are not real, somehow they can't do the same thing with their deity and it's prophets.
In my teens I praticed meditation in general and, more specifically, what is called "astral projection", basically inducing out-of-body-experiences. I practiced it for six years just about every evening. In the end I finally made it, achieving that higher state of mind, where you experience the buzzing and humming, your body shrinking and your soul expanding and see "the tunnel" and such. It's the most intense state of being I've ever experienced and I doubt any drug can push you further. You're basically hyper-awake while it happens. And it's scary. Turns out we don't like to leave our body most of the time. :-)
The difference in state of mind and awareness compared to normal as normal compares to vivid, semi-lucent dreaming. I stopped it after this event, but one effect is that I don't fear death as much as I used to.
I cant say for sure that we are still around after death, like the mystics like to point out, but it sure felt like it.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ok, ok, among the things you technically enjoy are such compounds as ....
Wanna buy a shirt?
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I'd call Islam a cult bent bent on world domination. Convert or die.
Yup, just like Christianity was, back when it could get away with lopping your head off on a whim.
Christians would still love to be able to do that kind of thing, and they're jealous as hell that Islam is so upfront about it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...