Final part of the series

Final part of the series

By Prof Kuldip Sidhu

The Psychological basis for Religion

It is believed that three psychological tendencies which are pronounced in humans, but minimally expressed in other species are necessary for religion and these are: we seek patterns, infer intentions and learn by imitation.These are cognitive adaptations that helped our ancestors surviv

The first prerequisite, pattern seeking, has obvious benefits for finding food, avoiding predators (identifying pug mark of lion for example), predicting weather, etc. We constantly observe the world, trying to derive cause-and-effect relationships. And we demonstrably overdo it: wearing lucky socks to every football game, telling fortunes from palm lines, and seeing the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese as above.

The next prerequisite, inferring intentions, is known to psychologists as Theory of Mind (ToM), the understanding that others have beliefs, desires and goals, influencing their actions. ToM allows us to have sophisticated social relationships and to predict how others will behave.

Our closest primate relative, chimpanzees show some degree of ToM. Humans, on the other hand, show extreme ToM, ascribing minds to inanimate or imagined things. In real life, people apply ToM to forces of nature, ancestor spirits and invisible Gods. And they seem to think about these supernatural actors the same way they conceive of fellow humans. fMRI (functional MRI) studies have found ToM-related regions of the brain activate when people hear statements about God’s emotions and involvement in worldly affairs.

Finally, our natural tendency to over-imitate predisposes us to adopt religious practices. Rather than relying on experience and trial-and-error, humans learn most behaviours and skills from other people. Our success depends on so much cultural knowledge, accumulated over many generations, that figuring things out alone is impossible. Moreover, some of this knowledge contradicts what you would assume from personal observations or intuition. For instance, many cultures have developed methods to make toxic plants edible (like Aboriginal Australians processing poisonous seeds of cycad plants) They’ve passed on these ritualized techniques, without necessarily understanding why the complicated, time-consuming steps are needed. But skipping seemingly unnecessary steps would lead to gradual poisoning. Thus, copying others, even when the reasons are unapparent, can benefit survival. This mentality gets extended to religious practices; if prestigious members of your community sacrificed deer every solstice, you probably would too.

Our propensity to over-imitate is well demonstrated by experiments comparing the problem-solving strategies of human kids and chimps. Researchers performed a series of unnecessary steps to release a prize from a box with a trap door. Kids diligently repeated every step, whereas chimps skipped to the final one, the only action required to get the reward. Probably chimps were thinking, “Why are these stupid Homo sapiens wasting their time?” And by assuming that, here I am, exemplifying extreme ToM, how prone we are to infer the thoughts of others.Evolved features of our brains, such as ToM and over-imitation, likely caused the emergence of religions in human societies. It doesn’t take supernatural beings to explain why so many people believe in them — just natural evolutionary processes.

The Brain, the Mind, the God and their relationship

Is the Human Brain Hardwired for God?

This has remained the most intriguing question of all time and is still elusive for neuroscientists, with big implications on our understanding of consciousness. Recently I was with the Nobel Laureate in neuropsychiatrist,  Eric Kandel and listening who was talking in a conference about ‘reductionistic approach’- the idea that a system can be explained by nothing more than the interactions between its few defined parts — is an extremely successful ‘theory of biology’, but as a “theory of everything,” it fails to provide us with a sufficient explanation of a few basic, fundamental elements that shape human perception and mind.

A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history.Scientists searching for the neural “God spot”, which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief.

The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.

Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis. Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions. Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world. Religion and the belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable.

Why do we care whether or not God exists? And why do so many people believe? A new generation of neuroscientists is addressing those questions directly, with the ambitious goal of measuring what happens to the human brain during spiritual experiences.

The recent study, involved analysing the brains of volunteers, who had been asked to think about religious and moral problems and questions. For the analysis, the researchers used a functional magnetic-resonance imaging machine, which can identify the most energetically-active regions of the brain.They found that people of different religious persuasions and beliefs, as well as atheists, all tended to use the same electrical circuits in the brain to solve a perceived moral conundrum – and the same circuits were used when religiously-inclined people dealt with issues related to God.

The study found that several areas of the brain and its hormonal interactions between noradrenaline (norepinephrine), serotonin, dopamine (see the cartoon, ‘The Lobes &Function of the Brain’modified from the internet) are involved in emotion, cognition, mood, religious belief, one within the frontal lobes of the cortex – which are unique to humans – and another in the more evolutionary-ancient regions deeper inside the brain (Hippocampus, not visible in the cartoon), which humans share with apes and other primates.
“There is nothing unique about religious belief in these brain structures. Religion doesn’t have a ‘God spot’ as such, instead it’s embedded in a whole range of other belief systems in the brain that we use everyday.
The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the brain. An early contender was the brain’s temporal lobe, a large section of the brain that sits over each ear, because temporal-lobe epileptics suffering seizures in these regions frequently report having intense religious experiences. One of the principal exponents of this idea was Vilayanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, who asked several of his patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral words while measuring their levels of arousal and emotional reactions. Religious words elicited an unusually high response in these patients.
This work was followed by a study where scientists tried to stimulate the temporal lobes with a rotating magnetic field produced by a “God helmet”. Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University in Ontario, found that he could artificially create the experience of religious feelings – the helmet’s wearer reports being in the presence of a spirit or having a profound feeling of cosmic bliss.
Dr Persinger said that about eight in every 10 volunteers report quasi-religious feelings when wearing his helmet. However, when Professor Richard Dawkins, an evolutionist and renowned atheist, wore it during the making of a BBC documentary, he famously failed to find God, saying that the helmet only affected his breathing and his limbs.
Other studies of people taking part in Buddhist meditation suggested the parietal lobes at the upper back region of the brain were involved in controlling religious belief, in particular the mystical elements that gave people a feeling of being on a higher plane during prayer.
Andrew Newberg, from the University of Pennsylvania, injected radioactive isotope into Buddhists at the point at which they achieved meditative nirvana. Using a special camera, he captured the distribution of the tracer in the brain, which led the researchers to identify the parietal lobes as playing a key role during this transcendental state.
In another study, Professor Grafman was more interested in how people coped with everyday moral and religious questions. The conclusion from this study “When we have incomplete knowledge of the world around us, it offers us the opportunities to believe in God. When we don’t have a scientific explanation for something, we tend to rely on supernatural explanations,” said Professor Grafman, who believes in God. “Maybe obeying supernatural forces that we had no knowledge of made it easier for religious forms of belief to emerge.”
However, in the current century, several outstanding noble laureate level scientists are working on the intricacy of brain language using computer modelling. One such professor I met few times but listen to his talk first time is,Dr. Theodore W. Berger, who has been the Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. His lecture just followed my talk (see cartoon 1)on the topic (creating mini brain in the Patri dish for developing diagnostics and therapeutics) during the recent G20 Meeting (2019) on neuroscience held in Osaka. However, I was blown away by Ted’s talk,‘Neural Prosthesis for Hippocampal Memory Function’who explained in a simplistic way how our brain waves can be used to interpret and to construct a digital language (biomimetic) to help understand memory in the thinking part of the brain called hippocampus. Based on his research he has developed a chip(see cartoon 2)that can identify memory problem in the hippocampus and by sending relevant signals, the problem can be addressed at the same time. Probably once this model of Ted becomes a reality, we would be able to decipher how our brain thinks about God!

Cartoon 1. Creating a mini brain in the Patri dish using stem cells for developing diagnostics and therapeutics.Signals coming in and getting out can be gauged and interpreted in the Patri dish (from Dr Sidhu’s talk 2019, Osaka)

Cartoon 2.Neural Prosthesis for Hippocampal Memory function
Hippocampal memory prosthesis is a Brain Machine Interface device developed for restoring or enhancing memory functions. It is designed to circumvent damaged hippocampal tissue by re-establishing the ensemble coding of spike trains performed by a normal population of hippocampal neurons (From Ted Berger’s webpage)

Conclusion

To summarise, the origin of religious belief is something of a mystery (God’s gaps), but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. However, in today’s world exploiting human minds by religion in the pretext of curse of God and creating malicious cults is unacceptable. The deterministic hypothesis imposed by some religious beliefs may be an impediment in human development particularly in an era where cutting edge science in this field has started unravelling intricacies in biological system and universe. In the ecological terms this continuous imposition of deterministic approach may be the onset of clock for demise of human as a species!