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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.
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.
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.
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?
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?