How Religion Hijacks Neurocortical Mechanisms, and Why So Many Believe in a Deity

[InfiniteNow]

Andy Thomson, a practicing psychiatrist, uses his knowledge of the human mind and countless neuropsychological research studies to make the case of how religion and belief in god are by-products of our evolved neural architecture. Below is his talk titled 'Why We Believe in Gods' which he presented at the American Atheist 2009 convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

 

Press play. Use full screen.

 

YouTube - Why We Believe in Gods - Andy Thomson - American Atheists 09 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg

 

 

 

Let us know what you think.

 

 

 

If you understand the psychology of [why we crave] the Big Mac meal, you understand the psychology of religion. We evolved adaptations for things that were crucial and rare... the sugars of ripe fruit... fat of lean game meat... for salt... those were crucial adaptations in our past. And now the modern world creates a novel form of it that comes from those adaptations, but hijacks them with super-normal stimuli... not ripe fruit, but a coca-cola... not lean game meat, but fat hamburger and french fries soaked in meat juice... and it creates these super-normal stimuli, but they're based on ancient adaptations.

 

Let me take you on a bit of a tour of a few of these cognitive mechanisms.

 

The first is Decoupled Cognition... <more at the video>

 

 

He argues how our complex social interactions with unseen others (think visualization and mental rehearsal) are just one step away from communicating with a dead ancestor and one step further to communicating to a god or gods. He also illuminates our susceptibility to optical and other illusions, and how these same "gap filling" tendencies in the brain lend a giant opening for supernatural figures. It's called intuitive reasoning, and it underlines the essence of religious ideas, which are based largely on minimally counterintuitive worlds.

[InfiniteNow]

Here is a book referenced in the video. It relates to the speakers idea of religions representing minimally counterintuitive worlds which present claims and stories which are an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected.

 

 

 

It's called "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought," and was written by Pascal Boyer in 2001:

 

Religion Explained - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Haifa, called it "a milestone on the road to a new behavioral understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology, and pointedly ignoring much work done over the past one hundred years in the behavioral study of religion and in the psychological anthropology of religion."[1] He continues: The clearest virtue of this book is that of dealing with the real thing. Even today, most scholarly work on religion consists of apologetics in one form or another, and we are deluged by offers of grants to study “spirituality” or teach “religion and science”. This all serves to make us forget that religion is a collection of fantasies about spirits, and Boyer indeed aims to teach us about the world of the spirits in the grand tradition of the Enlightenment."

 

A Commentary on "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought" | Serendip's Exchange

Boyer does not make an attempt to take an atheist stance and explain away God as a figment of our imaginations, but rather to explain why we believe what we believe and why some beliefs are so persistent.

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The other problem with this account of the origin of religion—where religion is used as an explanation for natural events—is that religious concepts tend to make things more mysterious and complicated than other types of explanations.

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Boyer discusses specific properties of the human mind, for example, how we produce our inferences, and how they affect our inference systems and our templates to generate different kinds of information about religion. He also discusses which concepts are most likely to be adapted and which ones are not.

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I think one of the most important concepts that Boyer covered was that diversity can rise out of simplicity. Here we have very simple templates about the way the world works, and we have inference systems that help us piece together new bits of information and create new information. Using these inference systems, we are able to build up a more complex body of knowledge about the supernatural, thus creating very complicated religious concepts from very simple beginnings. Just as different varieties of atoms can arise from a few changes in electrons and just as complex macromolecules and organisms can be built from different arrangements, so too can complex ideas and supernatural agents be built from humble templates.

 

I also found Boyers’ explanations of the way the human brain works very revealing.

 

 

Another book referenced relating to the minimally counterintuitive worlds idea is "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion," written by Scott Altran in 2002.

 

Scott Atran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

He has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature, on the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and on the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict. His work has been widely published internationally in the popular press, and in scientific journals in a variety of disciplines.

 

 

David Livingstone Smith reviews In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran

Religion, like other cultural phenomena, ‘results from a confluence of cognitive, behavioral, bodily and ecological constraints that neither reside wholly within minds nor are recognizable in a world without minds’ – the evolutionary landscape of the book’s title – each defining ridge of which is constituted by a set of psychological faculties. One such influence consists of primary and secondary affective programs. Another involves the social intelligence module, which was probably rooted in ancestral experiences of avoiding predators and hunting prey, and received tremendous impetus by the selection pressures exerted by group living. A third lies in the operation of functionally independent evolved cognitive modules such as those devoted to folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology.

 

The book begins with a discussion of evolution and, in particular, cognitive evolution. Although much of this will be ‘old hat’ to anyone with a serious interest in evolutionary psychology there are some gems here (I particularly enjoyed the powerful critique of the use of attachment theory to explain religiosity). We then move on to a discussion of the human tendency to detect agency where none is present. The belief in supernatural agency can in large measure be accounted for by the same cognitive adaptation that caused our remote ancestors to interpret the sound of a breeze rustling a bush as the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. In short, ‘supernatural agency is an evolutionary by-product trip-wired by predator-protector-prey detection schema’. The next two chapters cover the counterintuitive nature of religious thought and the significance of sacrifice. In Chapter Six Atran concentrates on the dynamics of ritual and revelation in the context of the cognitive psychology of memory. Chapter Seven, ‘Waves of Passion’, surveys the burgeoning literature on the neuropsychology of religious experience which includes some fascinating accounts of experimental work and a nice critique of Persinger’s work. Chapter Eight criticizes traditional sociobiological and group-selectionist accounts of cultural evolution on the grounds that these strange bedfellows all neglect the causal significance of the cognitive architecture of the human mind in the generation of culture. They are ‘mindblind’. This chapter contains a rather striking account of group selection as ultimately a notational variant of Hamiltonian kin selection, and incisive critiques of group-selectionist claims made by David Sloan Wilson and Kevin MacDonald. Chapter Nine is a marvelous and highly original critical analysis of memetics. The final chapter - ‘Why Religion is Here to Stay’ - pulls it all together.

[InfiniteNow]

In the video, Thomson references work done in Ireland by Jesse Bering. It was in reference to children, and their beliefs at a young age.

 

There was a puppet show in which an alligator eats a mouse. Then, the children are asked whether or not (after being eaten by the alligator) the mouse still needs to eat or drink. The children respond, "No." Then, the children are asked whether or not the mouse is still moving around, and they again respond, "No."

 

Then, the children are asked if the mouse thinks certain things... or whether or not the mouse wants certain things, and the children say, "Yes."

 

This type of experiment helps us to show our innate division when it comes to applying human mental states and attributions of thoughts and desires to agents with intentions and goals versus physical objects (this division is referred to as "common sense dualism").

 

Basically, even 5 month olds will startle when a box is moving around the room in a specific pattern, but have no issue with the exact same movements being performed by a human... we are innately common sense dualists, and we somehow are born knowing the difference between agents with intentions/goals and physical objects.

 

 

Here's more on the work referenced, work done by Jesse Bering in 2004:

 

 

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/Staff/JesseMBering/FileStore/Filetoupload,39830,en.pdf

Like Evans & Wellman, Harris & Astuti state that their own research programme on the development of afterlife beliefs reveals a set of findings that in many ways contradict the developmental trajectory reported by Bering & Bjorklund (2004), or at least tells a more complicated story with religious testimony and cultural exposure encouraging such beliefs. Again, however, it is difficult to compare findings across these studies. We deliberately avoided eschatological language in our research design because we were wary of biasing children’s answers through the experimenters’ language and behaviours, and in fact our empirical reports list many of the safeguards we used to protect against such biases (Hughes). In contrast, such language was an important manipulated variable for both Harris & Giménez (2005) and Astuti & Harris (2006).

 

Furthermore, the coding procedures used to determine whether children attributed continued psychological functioning to a dead agent meaningfully differed between our studies and those described by Harris & Astuti. Our data were coded on the basis of children’s followup answers to the questions rather than their initial yes or no response. We reasoned that a “no” response is inherently ambiguous and should not be seen as clear evidence for non-continuity judgements after death. Young children in our study often answered “no” to the initial questions about the dead agent’s continued capacities (“Can Brown Mouse still see?”), but upon further questioning it became clear that they were nevertheless reasoning in terms of an afterlife (e.g. “…because it’s too dark in the alligator’s belly”). Harris and Giménez (as well as Astuti & Harris, 2006 and Barrett & Behne, 2005) failed to operationalize children’s “no” answers in this way, instead taking them at face value as evidence of an understanding of the non-functionality of the capacity in question.

 

It is therefore impossible to know whether the findings these authors report is a product of the religious context of the story, as they argue, or is in fact an artefact of their coding procedure. In addition, Harris & Giménez (2005) treated their religious/secular variable as a within-subjects factor, so that all children heard the two death narratives in the same order, first the religious narrative (“Now that Sarah’s grandmother is with God, can she still…”) and then the secular narrative (“Now that Bill’s grandfather is dead and buried, can he still…”). This potential confound of an order effect, where the demand characteristics of the study are so transparent (especially to older children), again makes it difficult to make theoretical inferences based on these data. Finally, the youngest children in the Harris and Giménez study were seven-year-olds, whereas our most robust findings for afterlife beliefs came from the three- and four-year-olds we tested, providing the basis of our nativist claims.

 

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Several commentaries focussed on the simulation constraint hypothesis (Antony; Cohen & Consoli; Jack & Robbins; Kemmerer & Gupta; Preston et al). To revisit the central thesis of this hypothesis, I claimed that a delimiting phenomenological boundary prevents people from experiencing the absence of certain categories of mental states, such as emotions, desires, and various episteme (the most “ethereal” qualia). Because we can never know what it feels like to be without such states, these natural representational borders encourage afterlife beliefs. When we attempt to reason about what it will be “like” after death—and what it is “like” for those who have already died—we inevitably get ensnared by simulation constraints and reason in terms of a continued consciousness.

 

 

There's a lot more really good information (and references) at the above link. :-)

 

 

 

 

 

I thought I'd take a moment to share another quote, as well as a reference, from the video, as I understand that some people are either unable or unwilling to use video lectures in these online fora.

 

 

From the video (shortly after the discussion of 5-month olds startling when a box is moved around a room using the same motions as a human would make, but does not startle when a human moves in the same way... showing how we are "common sense dualists" from birth):

Children know more than they learn... We come into the world with these systems already in place. It is natural, from very early on, to think of "disembodied minds." Now, you can flip it around and you can understand why this is crucial. If I required a body [to be physically present] to think about [someone elses] mind, that's a real liability... It's burdensome... I need to be able to think about somebody, and think about what's going on inside of them, and what their intentions or goals might be... without them present.

 

 

This ability to deal with disembodied minds, something with an obvious selective advantage, has through time brought with it the emergent property of deity. We have the ability to deal with causal agents not physical present, and we are very biased toward attributing a causal agent were there may be none. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that our belief in some life separate from what is actually experienced inside of us... in our body... is the default setting of the human mind, as this ability to predict and rehearse the actions, goals, and desires of others has conferred significant selective advantage... even if those others are unseen and not immediately present.

 

 

Another thing about children is that they are causal determinists... What does this mean? Well... any mind that is oriented toward seeing intentions... and desires and goals... is gonna "over-read" purpose. If you ask a child, "What are birds for?" [that child will respond with something like,] "To sing." [if you ask a child] "What are rivers for?" [that child will respond with comments such as,] "for boats to float on." [if you ask a child,] "What are rocks for?" [that child will respond with something like,] "for animals to scratch themselves."

 

We over-read causality... we WAY over-read causality and purpose.

 

 

He then references research done by Petrovich and also Boyer, both in 2009. In that work, it's demonstrated that children will spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention. It shows how these mechanisms with which we're born make us all very vulnerable to religious ideas. He suggests that religious ideas are much easier to accept, and that it is disbelief that is cognitively much more challenging.

 

 

 

More on those works referenced:

 

Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

 

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

 

Our predisposition to believe in a supernatural world stays with us as we get older. Kelemen has found that adults are just as inclined to see design and intention where there is none. Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life".

 

 

 

How persistent are intuitive (erroneous) beliefs?

According to developmental psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke or Susan Carey, and cognitive anthropologists like Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber, humans are endowed with inference mechanisms that enable them to acquire knowledge of the world (these inference mechanisms are known by several terms, such as core knowledge, conceptual modules or intuitive ontologies). Sometimes these inference mechanisms are at odds with scientific principles. A well-studied example is impetus physics, the view that inanimate objects, in order to be propelled, have to be laden with a force (impetus) by an agent or another object in order to be set in motion. This impetus physics yields a lot of imprecise predictions: for example, over 50% of adults believe that a ball, being launched by a sling, will continue in a curvilinear path, or that a ball dropped by a running person will fall straight down instead of describing a parabolic path. Newtonian physics, in contrast, predicts a parabolic path, a prediction only consistently made by people with a college training in physics (see McCloskey's 1983 review in Scientific American to get an idea).

 

However, an ingenious experimental procedure by Kohhenikov and Hegarty (2001), Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8) shows that even expert physicists are guided by the intuitive impetus physics under some conditions.

[Galapagos]

I watched this a couple weeks back. I don't recall him referencing Boyer/Atran, but I could tell he was drawing heavily on their work. I posted some neat links about, and my own shot at a summary of these ideas over here, in case anyone didn't catch it.

 

Thomsons presentation was thorough, and much needed as well. This kind of work has been going on for years, yet this is the first good video lecture summary I have seen. Hopefully this medium will help in getting this information to a wider audience.

[InfiniteNow]

I watched this a couple weeks back. I don't recall him referencing Boyer/Atran, but I could tell he was drawing heavily on their work.

Yeah, their names were referenced at the bottom of one of his slides during the presentation.

 

 

Thomsons presentation was thorough, and much needed as well. This kind of work has been going on for years, yet this is the first good video lecture summary I have seen.

Right on. I couldn't agree more, really. It was very clear and accessible, and grounded in some solid research.

[Galapagos]

Just found this new video, on 'The Evolution of Religious Belief' with a discussion including evolutionary biologists Randy Thornhill(coauthor of "A Natural History of Rape") and David Sloan Wilson(author of Darwin's Cathedral and Unto Others).

I haven't watched it enough to give a review yet, but thought I would share first anyway:

YouTube - The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9VFmiMI49Y

[InfiniteNow]

Outstanding. Thanks for the link! I haven't had the opportunity to check it out yet, but it's now at the top of my queued list of "must watch soon" items. I'll try to come back and comment once I'm through it.

 

 

 

As per the OP, referenced also in the video is the work done by John Bowlby on attachment mechanisms. More on that here:

 

 

Attachment theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Attachment theory, originating in the work of John Bowlby, is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings. Attachment theorists consider children to have a need for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without which normal social and emotional development will not occur.

 

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Within attachment theory, attachment means a bond or tie between an individual and an attachment figure. Between two adults, such bonds may be reciprocal and mutual; however, as felt by children toward a parental or caregiving figure, such bonds are likely to be asymmetric. The reason for this is inherent in the theory: it proposes that the need for safety and protection, which is paramount in infancy and childhood, is the basis of the bond. The theory posits that children attach to carers instinctively,[8] with respect to ways of achieving security, survival and, ultimately, genetic replication.

 

 

The speaker goes on to illustrate how religion and the group experience of belief... of care-takers in the religious domain, as well as the connection with a presumed deity as an "ultimate care-taker" all leverage this attachment mechanism.

[Kriminal99]

I have always said that God is like someone's big brother.

 

Tribal one: If you wrong me, my big brother will whoop you.

 

Tribal two: Oh yeah? Well, my big brother is bigger and will whoop your big brother.

 

Tribal one: Nuh uh, cause my brother is OMNIPOTENT. He can beat anyone at anything.

 

Tribal two: So, my brother will sneak up and surprise him.

 

Tribal one: Impossible, because my brother is OMNISCIENT too. No one can sneak up on him. So you better not do anything wrong, or hell get you.

 

Tribal two: If so, then he would know that you are wrong because you did not tell the TRUTH. My brother is all of those things and knows this.

 

Tribal one: So what, he knows I am right because it is more important to have FUN than worry about what is true.

 

etc..

[InfiniteNow]

Alright. Well, thanks for the bump. Your idea is parallel in a few ways to the "god as first parent" concept I've raised before. We see all life as coming from previous life... we have our parents, they had their parents, and they had theirs. If you follow it back far enough, the "first parent" is god.

 

It still doesn't explain where god came from, but is interesting in terms of the psychology and neurophysiology of belief.

 

 

 

Since there hasn't been a tremendous amount of participation in this thread, I'll try a slightly different approach and offer you a new video.

 

 

19 March 2009. World famous philosopher and humanist Daniel Dennett speaks at Conway Hall, providing "A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future".

 

 

YouTube - Dan Dennett Lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCgUJdsliEM

[HydrogenBond]

The parent figure connection to the gods extrapolates the parent figure way beyond the limits of sensory reality. For example, when they go into battle, it is not just for physical dad, but they are doing it for the Gipper (larger then life winning football coach who could motivate). The imagination boosts the motivation octane

 

Gods, because they can do things, beyond the limits of mere mortals, helped to exercise the early imagination, which is the matrix of invention. If humans had evolved without gods, and had stayed purely sensory, like advanced animals, we would be very practical, but less inventive.

 

For example, if my god flies in a chariot, and I want to be more like my god (parent), I might believe humans, by getting closer to this god, might be able to fly. The pure sensory person, will never see these outrageous things, because none of this imaginary hogwash exists in reality to see.

 

The person with his god, helping to fuel his imagination and providing motivation octane boost, may continue to believe man will fly like the gods. Both beliefs are as irrational as the other, since there is no sensory data for either. The advanced ancient artifacts attributed to aliens was the imagination under the influence of a god.

[InfiniteNow]

Gods, because they can do things, beyond the limits of mere mortals

 

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if my god flies in a chariot, and I want to be more like my god (parent), I might believe humans, by getting closer to this god, might be able to fly.

 

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The advanced ancient artifacts attributed to aliens was the imagination under the influence of a god.

Well, thank you for the interesting contribution to the thread, HydrogenBond, but your post is rather tangential and misses the central point/theme of the discussion.

 

The idea I am exploring here is how religion and belief in deity very strongly appear to be emergent properties of our evolved mechanisms and tendencies... A result of the solutions we've evolved to solve very specific evolutionary problems... solutions which, when coupled together, ultimately result in the commonality of belief and religious practice among humans which we see today.

 

Thanks again, though. It's always fascinating for me to get such unhindered visibility into the contents your mind. :cup: