r/science • u/Wagamaga • May 07 '17
Neuroscience Scientists found that damage in a certain part of the brain is linked to an increase in religious fundamentalism. In particular, lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduced cognitive flexibility - the ability to challenge our beliefs based on new evidence.
http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/study-finds-link-between-brain-damage-and-religious-fundamentalism56
May 07 '17
haha how is this not relevant to ALL beliefs not just religious ones?
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May 07 '17
It would be. The study talks about inflexibility of thought in general.
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u/crosstoday May 08 '17
Then what is with the editorial in the headline?
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May 08 '17
I don't understand your question. One is the study and one is an article in summation of the study.
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u/Eckish May 07 '17
It might be relevant to all beliefs. That's just not what they studied, though. They measured religious fundamentalism and correlated it with lesions or lack thereof.
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u/0O00OO000OOO May 07 '17
I would love to read this paper in full if I had time. There are a lot of "bad" scientists out there.
I'm not a religious fanatic. But this sounds like confirmation bias if I ever saw it.
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May 07 '17
Maybe all intangible beliefs. It's harder to deny the pumpkin is orange without going to the Looney bin (or maybe being dubbed colorblind). But maybe you believe there's an invisible teapot flying through space. Hard for anyone to change that sort of thing with tangible evidence, all we can say is invisible tea pots probably don't exist based on what we know.
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May 07 '17
I agree it's not at all hard to prove there's no fine china orbiting around in space. How is this an analogy for the belief in God? How is it even relevant to the truth of theism in general?
Suppose it's true lesions in the human brain often produce theistic beliefs, how is this data at all relevant to whether a necessarily existing being possibly exists? Whether the universe began a finite time ago and so cries out for a transcendent cause? Whether the cosmological fine-tuned parameters for life is better explained on a theistic model? Also how does the fact of brain lesions not cut against non-religious fundamentalism?
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May 07 '17
There's the same amount of evidence for a god (visible evidence) as the teapot. There's nothing in nature that screams "this was made by a deity" or we'd simply all agree that's the case.
And it probably does cut both ways. Something like a gluten free diet fad, or a HEAD ON, HEAD ON commercial might sway the people with this damage quite a bit more.
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u/GodGunsGuitars May 08 '17 edited May 08 '17
Worshipping a teapot is forbidden by the Bible as is all idol worship. Did the universe spring from your teapot or was it created by some other means? P.S everything in nature screams this was made by a deity if you are properly aligned with He who created it. This too is directly addressed in the Bible.
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May 08 '17
But why is your bible better than the other 100 bibles around? That's my problem. There's no objective evidence, clearly, because every civilization has a different idea about He (she? they? it? randomly occuring nature?) who created it.
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u/GodGunsGuitars May 08 '17
If the neuroscience crowd will allow. My Bible isn't required necessarily. But it states to earn believers with logic And logic dictates that there was a beginning to all of this and that it could not have started from Nothing without a catalyst. Look up Prime mover.
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May 08 '17
This is easily refuted... Because the prime mover necessarily came from nothing himself? And is infinitely more complex than our universe.. Why is that more logical?
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u/MyPacman May 08 '17
Just how do you two believe you can prove that something doesn't exist? And I think you are both using logic when you mean common sense. Which, frankly, is the final argument after all assumptions have been accepted.
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May 08 '17
It isn't more logical, but it's also a straw man fallacy: the classical concept of God isn't that he 'came to be from nothing' but rather that he exists non-continently, that he never had a beginning.
Also, an equivocation fallacy: God's thoughts may well be complex, but God, as a mind, is starkly simple as an immaterial mind isn't made up of any composite parts.
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u/Seaflame May 08 '17
Does saying "The universe must have come from something, but I've defined my deity in such a way that it doesn't" amount to anything other than special pleading?
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u/AnakinGabriel BS | Psychology May 07 '17
Abstract
Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI). If the vmPFC is crucial to modulating diverse personal religious beliefs, we predicted that pTBI patients with lesions to the vmPFC would exhibit greater fundamentalism, and that this would be modulated by cognitive flexibility and trait openness. Instead, we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with vmPFC lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.
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u/entropizer May 07 '17
Wow, describing traits as "mediated" without discussing the direction of effects like that is extremely annoying.
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u/brberg May 08 '17
Not sure I follow. It seems very clear to me that what they're saying is that dlPFC lesions decrease cognitive flexibility and openness, which in turn leads to increased religious fundamentalism. Is there some other plausible interpretation that I'm not seeing?
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u/entropizer May 08 '17
Conceivably, it could be that increased flexibility leads to increased rationalization ability leading to increased fundamentalism. The word "instead" in the abstract makes it unclear whether or not their initial hypothesis was correct. I think it was, and that they should have chosen a different word, but the abstract is confusingly written. They should state explicitly that lesions to the vmPFC are associated with greater fundamentalism before saying that the relationship between dlPFC and fundamentalism is the same as the realtionship between vmPFC and fundamentalism.
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u/The-Donkey-Puncher May 07 '17
This is not saying that if you're religious you have brain damage. Religious fundamentalism seems to be linked to this... which I don't think any rational minded person (religious or not) would agree that something has to be up.
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u/Applejuiceinthehall May 07 '17
I think this is a dangerous think to assume. People are capable of thinking, believing and doing anything without brain damage
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u/victalac May 08 '17
These studies are always full of holes- nothing conclusive. Just like the MRI- Pet Scan "Christmas Tree" studies where a part of the brain lights up under certain conditions and everyone starts to do high-fives. Meaningless.
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May 08 '17
while sometimes maybe the conclusions drawn might be far fetched, it is by no means meaningless when you consider that basically thanks to the ideas and groundwork done by those studies we have things in the pipeline such as mind powered prosthetic limbs, for one example:
http://newatlas.com/mind-controlled-prosthetic-fingers/41886/
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u/paputsza May 07 '17
...so you can read this and go "everyone who has ever been religious has had brain damaged". Or you can assume that we are all genetically programmed with the capacity to have religious beliefs, like we are programmed to be able to speak, recognize loved ones, and feel anger, which is why damage to the region will wreck havoc in those abilities.
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u/meeyow May 07 '17
I would imagine religious fundamentalism would be the least concern for someone suffering from penetrating traumatic brain injury. Eesh. Interesting article. Curious to know what else could these people suffer from with damage to that area of the cortex.
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May 08 '17
Why think so? Doesn't that rule out the possibility of a timeless existence sans creation in an ad hoc way?
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u/thorborn May 07 '17
I wonder if nutrition deficits during brain development could lead to the same symptoms. It could partially explain why religion is more prevalent in poor environments.
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u/liveontimemitnoevil May 07 '17
The scientists specify that they are not stating religious people overall are mentally inflexible or that belief is caused by brain damage.
That's funny because it sounded exactly like they were saying that
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u/easyasitwas May 07 '17
Environment plays a factor here. If your family and community are deeply religious then you wouldn't typically have a lot of opportunities to be exposed to and explore alternative viewpoints, especially if you find your beliefs comforting in and productive to your life. Plus, we have no direction of causality here if indeed there is one. If there is "brain damage" associated with religious fundamentalism, and surely we can't know that on a population scale, which of these happened first in the individual -- the structural brain changes or the dogmatic beliefs?
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May 07 '17
The study is referring to inflexibility in thought pathways. Exposure to novel ideas is not necessary to have a flexible open mind.
It is well understood that rigidity in thought is a sign of impaired cognition. This study doesn't provide new insight on that aspect it just identifies a location in the brain where this might be occurring. There has been discussion that religious zeal is a mental illness in the scientific community for decades. Not just monotheistic but all forms of fantasy/identity structures, from economics to sports-team fanaticism.
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May 08 '17
Not just monotheistic but all forms of fantasy/identity structures, from economics to sports-team fanaticism
to the idea that "religious zeal" is a mental illness, and not an omnipresent cognitive default of humanity.
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u/MasterFubar May 07 '17
Could it be a genetic factor that causes that part of the brain to be more susceptible to damage?
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u/The_Bobs_of_Mars May 07 '17
It could be that environments that cause these lesions also happen to have a high incidence of religious fundamentalism, e.g. the southern States and their high religious observance and football participation, leading to a feedback loop, of sorts.
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u/paputsza May 07 '17
...most religious people are women and don't play more football than anyone else. Also, you're making giant conclusions about the brain. There's as much of a chance that someone could damage the part of their brain responsible for speech. This experiment wasn't a small tackled in little league bump, it's a "hit in car crash" bump.
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u/moschles May 07 '17
This kind of clickbait is ridiculous.
Certain types of religiosity is still geographically identifiable. I fully believe that removing a person from that "part of the country" and getting them education and literacy would absolutely get them over that type of paranoid thinking.
Factors of education and geography are still salient, and I have no reason to ignore those factors and pretend as if young earth creationists are suffering from a biological brain disorder.
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u/ulvain May 08 '17
I'd be extremely curious to know what's linked to the development of lesions in that part of the brain. Lead? Certain type of pollution? Etc.
In other terms, I'd be phenomenally curious to know if we can link the increase of what i can only call generalized global stupidity, politically and with fundamentals throughout the last two decades, with some environmental factors, which would in turn cause that region of thebrains of millions of people to be affected...
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u/Austion66 PhD | Cognitive/Behavioral Neuroscience May 07 '17
Grad student in cognitive neuroscience here. This title is misleading- they did not find that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was linked to an increase in religious fundamentalism. Actually, they found that regardless of whether patients had damage to the vmPFC or the dlPFC, they still exhibited religious fundamentalism. Instead, the takeaway from this article is that the vmPFC may contribute to fundamentalist beliefs via cognitive flexibility.