Does your brain have a neuron for recognizing Halle Berry’s face? Or Bill Clinton’s? My brain seems to have one for Reese Witherspoon, but that’s another post.

Research concluding that we do in fact have specialized facial recognition neurons was recently published in Nature and widely reported and commented on in the popular press and blogosphere.

First, I have a technical question. The article says:

The study involved eight patients, all of whom had been temporarily implanted with devices to monitor brain-cell activity as part of their treatment [for epilepsy].

Now how did the scientists determine that a single neuron had been activated? What kind of device is this, and how can it monitor the actvity of a single neuron? How does the data get back out? Can it monitor the activity over time? How many neurons can be watched? What layer of the cortex were these neurons in?

From a neurotheological perspective, what I am really interested in is whether a specific neuron might be mapped to the face of Jesus or other favorite religious figure. If so, perhaps we could then trace neural paths back to other areas involving religious feelings, perceptions, or emotions associated with the figure. Is it too much to ask that the researchers address this in the next stage of their investigations?

My mother once told me about a religious movie she had gone to see and commented that the lead actor “looked just like Jesus must have”. It would be intensely interesting for neurotheologists to understand the mechanisms underlying such an association.

When we talk about computational models of neurotheology, what do we mean?

What first springs to mind is to model an individual brain, or more likely brain/body system, to model the biological processes associated with a religious experience. Modeling transcendance, if you will. But could we tell that in fact what is being simulated is a religious experience? Humans know they are having or had religious experiences by being, at some level, conscious of them. But we can hardly build an entire mechanism of consciousness into our computer model. And even “pure” transcendant religious experiences have historical and social backgrounds, or, to put it another way, occur within the context of certain memories, which even Blue Brain could not model. All in all, a tough problem.

More tractable would be to integrate a coarse statistical model of individual religious experience with a sociological model. In other words, we would model religious experiences, large and small, but at the population level. Some percentage of religious experiences are at the breakthough level that can jumpstart an entire new religion, whereas others might suffice to rejuvenate or sustain a religion, if experienced by enough adherents.

Once a religion has started, we would apply sociological modeling techniques to model its spread and/or decline as the system of doctrines or cermonies that religions inevitably settle into, albeit leavened by periodic awakenings that serve to inject new energy into the religion for some period of time.

The model involves two distinct categories of data. The first relates to the statistical frequency, intensity, and types of human religious experience. I’m not aware of any data on that topic. Our goal would be derive hypotheses for those values, hopefully ones that could be cross-validated, either by working backward through the model from the sociological data mentioned below, or by running multiple scenarios to find one or more that are consistent with the sociological data.

The sociological data I am referring to, which should be relatively easy to capture, is primarily the distribution of sizes of religious groups over time, as well as other peripheral data such as conversion rates.

A flavor of the sociological side of the model can be gained from Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements, a paper which crudely models the formation and growth of religions. I can’t agree with the premise that NRM (new religious movement) founders are “rational agents who obtain various social advantages such as reputation enhancement and increased respect from other utility maximizing rational agents who buy their solutions”, but the seeds of one half of the model I propose—the sociological side—are there.

I hereby name this particular approach computational socioneurotheology™.

Everyone’s talking about Science Magazine and its list of 125 big questions. Personally I like “Why is time different from other dimensions?”, but that’s down around #50. The interesting question, way up at #2, asks what is the biological basis of consciousness. That’s right up our alley, although it’s questionable if “scientists have a good shot at answering the question over the next 25 years”, which is supposed to be one of the criteria.

But the editors completely missed a key point: what is the value of solving these questions? In the absence of other metrics, let’s think in terms of economic value. If Science had adopted this perspective, they certainly would have included our question: what is the biological basis of religion/religious experience/religious behavior? Whether morality is hard-wired into the brain did make it onto the list, but that’s a little different.

The economic value of understanding this neurotheology question can be summed up in just one word: terrorism. Why do people fly airplanes into buildings or strap on explosives to blow up themselves and some people on a street in the name of religion? It must be more than just the 72 doe-eyed virgins whose ministrations await them in heaven. Just a wild guess, but given the money being spent on the “war on terror”, solving this problem should be worth at least a trillion dollars. The consciousness problem is intensely interesting, but what’s the payoff?

With a title like The Sacred Neuron, and the subtitle “Extraordinary new discoveries linking science and religion”, this book would seem to be of potentially crucial importance for our nascent field of neurotheology.

This book does indeed deserve a prize: for the most misleading packaging of the year. The brain is discussed on no more than half-a-dozen pages, and at that is just warmed-over basics from Ledoux, Damasio, and Rolls. Looking up “neuron”, the alleged subject of the book, in the index yields a mere five entries. Bowker’s knowledge of neuroscience could have been obtained from browsing this blog for about five minutes—basic stuff about dual pathways and the amygdala. There are no “extraordinary new discoveries” presented.

What the book does do is something some people might be interested in—to adopt a religious perspective in asking why humans form ethical and aesthetic judgments, or why they fight wars. Apprently, it began life as a lecture series given by the author at Oxford on the theme “The Appeal to History as an Integral Part of Christian Apologetic.” Gives you a flavor.

No doubt there is a much larger market for a book on neurons and religion than on English-style musings on ethics and values and history and religion. But that is no excuse for engaging in such gross mislabeling of a book. Shame on the publisher, who presumably suggested this, and the author, who must have agreed with it.

A friend to whom I was explaining neurotheology asked me what the major competing hypotheses or schools of thoughts were in the field. I think there are two: reductionism vs. holism; and direct vs. indirect instrumentalism.

Reductionism (in the scientific sense) says that religious experiences are an entirely physical process we can (eventually) explain scientifically; holism posits there is “something else” there.

The second contrast is between direct instrumentalism, which says that the brain contains evolved structures which directly relate to, or “cause”, religious behavior and experience. Indirect instrumentalism, on the other hand, says that the “hard-wired circuits” in the brain support certain generic human behavioral patterns from which the religious behavior or experience in turn derives.

But today let’s take a look at the reductionist vs. holist dichotomy. Persinger is often cited as an advocate of the former, which, informally, holds that religious behavior/experience is derived from, and explained by, physical characteristics and behaviors of the brain (or entire organism). Newberg, in contrast, represents the holistic viewpoint, which asserts, or at a minimum leaves open the possibility, that “brain scan images are merely detecting the effect of a divine presence or fundamental level of reality on the human brain.”

Of course, philosophers have spent entire careers investigating the meaning of, and types of, reductionism. That’s because it’s complicated. Some of the problems in reductionist explanations include:

• How does an identifying an underlying construct constitute an “explanation”? If we say the construct is the “cause”, then we still need to explicate the meaning of causality.

• The explanation may itself need to be explained. We run the danger of recursing endlessly, or at least down to the subatomic level.

• If the explanation dissects the phenomenon into components, we also run the risk of missing non-compositional (“emergent”) aspects of the overall phenomenon.

• The explanation must demonstrate that it is superior to other, competing explanations.

• The explanation could be successful but not useful. For instance, most people have some degree of existential wonder or doubt, that they feel the need to comprehend or assuage, but a reductionist account of religion might not help them.

• Finally, a reductionist explanation may be perceived as insulting, or belittling value systems that some hold dear. Although this objection is political in nature, to the extent that science itself is political, it may be best not to alienate such people with an overly reductionist standpoint.

In the case of neurotheology, regardless of the abstract merits of a reductionist approach, to which I am sympathetic, Persinger and his fellow reductionists do themselves no favors to the extent they trumpet neuroimaging results of meditators without asking what intermediate explanatory structures might exist or how meditation relates to religious experience and behavior as a whole; they identify “God genes” based on skimpy statistical evidence; and they fail to place religious behavior and experience in a social, historical, and anthropological context that might lead to alternative renditions.

The so-called holists, however, hardly come out looking better. Wrapping themselves in the cloak of religious acceptance, some attempt to make a virtue out of fence-straddling. Typical of this fuzzy-headedness is Newberg’s statement that “whether the brain may be derived from some fundamental or divine level of reality is a question that remains to be clearly answered”, a bizarre assertion given the absence of any clue about what that “fundamental or divine level of reality” could possibly be. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is simply pandering to believers in supernatural beings or unspecified universal forces.

Personally, I believe that as the study of the biology of religion progresses, with more innovative hypotheses and carefully designed experiments, eventually leading to a coherent theoretical framework, generating verifiable predictions such as demonstrably more effective types of meditative practices, we will reach the point where we do understand the physical processes that “explain” religious behavior and experience, probably as mediated or influenced by generic human behavioral structures. At the same time, however deep that scientific understanding is, it will not satisfy the human yearning to understand existence, which, after all, the current depth of scientific knowledge about cosmology or evolution has not managed to satisfy either. Humans will doubtlessly continue to pursue a variety of fruitful, meaningful ways to quench their thirst for existential knowledge.

The picture above is since Matisse’s Joie de Vivre, considered an examplar of reductionism in art, from the way it breaks the underlying scene into its component physical or visual aspects.

Neurotheology is clearly a legitimate scientific enterprise: it seeks out the biological correlates of religious experience. But sometimes it also seems to involve cranks zapping their heads with magic helmets, fringe elements claiming to have been visited by aliens, and oddballs with their own theories of the universe.

Consider the following claims:

• There are specific regions of the brain which allow us to experience the reality of life after death.

• A primitive form of life was deliberately planted on earth by a technologically advanced society from another planet.

• The human genome contains programming for all man’s future evolution in the “introns”.

• Advanced beings from other planets have additional cortical layers—eight or even twelve.

• Specialized neurons in the brain respond to the shape of the cross.

These are just a few of the assertions made by “neuroscientist” Rhawn Joseph (picture) in a jumbled compendium of articles he put together under the name NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality, Religious Experience.

For unknown reasons, some reputable researchers apparently agreed to have papers included in this volume. One wonders if Joseph even read the papers, since some authors, such as Scott Atran, are scathingly critical of Joseph, accusing him of basing his his claims on “sparse and controversial data”, “straying way beyond the facts”, “crucially ignoring or contradicting much recent work”, and limiting himself arbitrarily to a single variety of religous experience.

What Joseph says is not just wrong or outlandish, but also completely incoherent. Judge for yourself:

Because genes are activated by experience and complex genetic mechanisms, and as the brain has also evolved in response to environmental demands and experience, it would appear that humans evolved the capacity to have religous and spiritual experiences, because these experiences acted on gene selection, thereby enabling humans to evolve specific brain structures which allowed them to more fully participate in and experience the spiritually sublime.

Normally I would not worry about such goofballs. But they have the potential to discredit the entire field. As neurotheology gains in visibility, those involved in the area must concern themselves with its image as well as its content. If kooks like Joseph succeed in hijacking the term “neurotheology” to refer to their crackpot theories, it may be time to take the plunge and come up with a new name, such as “biology of religion”.

[The picture of Dr. Joseph in this post prior to July 17, 2005 was incorrect. Our apologies. His site is here.]

Pascal Boyer is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, and a pre-eminent scholar of human religious behaviors.

Boyer is an anthropologist and it is therefore unsurprising that he adopts an anthropological focus in his book; what is startling is its utterly unremitting nature, often of nosebleed-inducing intensity.

Boyer debunks most existing theories of religion, and proposes that religions exist because they successfully recruit a variety of low-level systems in the human brain, such as for agent detection, social exchange, knowledge attribution, death management, and attention to the unusual. He views religion not as a source of morality, but rather a convenient canvas on which people project their own folk morality.

This is the most interesting book I have read in some time, and I recommend it highly. What the author has to say is important and well worth examining, hence this rather long post. However, I can’t agree with the author’s thoughts on neurotheology, of which, predictably, he is scathingly critical.

Deep religious experience

I first thought Boyer was never going to get around to talking about deep religious experience. Not until the final chapter, “Why Belief?”, does he address what he calls “exceptional mental events” and “extreme episodes that people usually interpret in religious terms”, bringing in William James’ theory that the everyday religion of the masses is a degraded form of the special experience of mystics and visionaries, which he wastes no time poking fun at:

In this view, the notion of an invisible supernatural agent, or of a soul being around after the body is dead, or of unconscious zombies remote controlled by witches, or of extra organs flying about on banana leaves, all this was first created by some gifted individuals with intense experience.

Neurotheology

He then begins an anti-neurotheology rant, condescendingly attributing the interest in the neuroimaging of religious experience to the fact that scientists find it more “exciting” to measure what’s happening in a meditator’s brain than some other, more pedestrian, cognitive process. He criticizes the approach of neuroimaging advanced practitioners, whom he derides as “religious specialists” and “virtuosos”, claiming unconvincingly that this is a fixation resulting from “creeping Jamesian assumptions” and based on unvalidated suppositions that “there is some religious center in the brain” or that religious experiences are “special”.

Well, no. If I want to study mathematical reasoning and the brain, it makes perfect sense to take mathematicians as my subjects. And neurotheology researchers do not insist in advance of their experiments that there is a “God circuit” in the brain (OK, maybe some do, or maybe some have that as a hypothesis, but having hypotheses is what science is about).

But after gleefully picking apart his straw-man versions of both advanced religious experience and the field of neurotheology, he suddenly changes gears on us:

That people can experience a sudden feeling of peace, of communion with tthe entire-world…can be to some extent correlated with particular brain activity…it is plausible that such experience stems from a particular activiation of cortical areas that handle thoughts about other people’s thoughts and those that create emotional responses to people’s presence.

But that is exactly what people studying neurotheology are trying to find out.

What’s missing

There is another major missing piece, however. Boyer’s worldview completely lacks any notion of “development” in the individual, notably development which brings improved behaviors that are more successful for that individual. Such development, although admittedly hard to define, is by definition associated with certain changes in brain structure. Certain types of religious experiences or practices, which also by definition involve neural modifications, can be reasonably judged to promote individual development in the sense above. We thus have perhaps the primary hypothesis in the budding field of neurotheology: religious experience or practice and the evolution of the individual are connected by means of the associated neural changes. Our job is to find the nature of that connection.

The Academy for Neuroscience and Architecture has as its mission to “build intellectual bridges between research on the brain and those who design places for human use”. That sounds promising.

In addition to the architecture of K-12 learning spaces (less-cluttered, better-lit classrooms promote learning) and hospitals (green walls help healing), the group is focusing on a topic of interest to Numenware readers: religious spaces. If this research succeeds, then as their web page says:

future generations of school children, hospital patients, office workers, and worshippers in sacred places will have their environments more carefully tuned to their needs and desires.

One wishes this group all the best. As Alison Whitelaw, one of its founders, wrote: “The prospect of designing rooms, buildings and public spaces that are in tune with human biology could have far-reaching social, personal and economic benefits.”

Current priorities for the group apparently include doing research (neuro-imaging of people looking at buildings) and doing databases. What seems to be missing is any hypotheses about the potential relationship between neuroscience and architecture, whether sacred or profane. One section of the group’s website does include some “hypotheses” but they are limited to the circular, such as “the sequence of brain activations as one processes a place of worship may bring about a spiritual feeling”, or “a [religious] space may evoke a spiritual feeling, resulting from the mystery or surprise of the arrival, that becomes a meaningful religious experience.”

I must admit to some doubts about this enterprise. I have visited the new Cathedral here in Los Angeles and it is a competent, pleasant building. But I can’t imagine the building itself stimulating some kind of spiritual experience. A spire points to the sky—reminding us of God. But this begs the question of what we think God is or why he is in an “upward” direction. The experiences of people attending masses in that building, I would think, are dominated by the music, the words, the rituals, the symbols, and the religious authority figures, not the shape of the building.

Remember that church buildings as we think of them are specific to the types of large-scale organized religions that evolved in the political and economic environment in the West. Wide swaths of world-wide religious behavior do not involve buildings at all, other than perhap the shaman’s hut. So any neurotheological theory of architecture would first have to explain what’s different about the brains of billions of people who do just fine without any architects around to design big buildings for them to worship in.

Timur’s astonishingly beautiful Registan buildings in Samarkand include mosques, but were mainly about him strutting his wealth and power (as is the case, indeed, with many other “religious” buildings). Pachacuti, the legendary Incan ruler, built the fabulous gold-encrusted Coricancha temple in his capital Cuzco, but it was not a place of worship per se; instead, the mummies of the dead rulers were kept there. Thailand’s Emerald Buddha is housed in a temple of moderate architectural interest, but the main focus, it goes without saying, is the statue itself.

Meditation can stabilize your perception. In a new study, Tibetan monks donned special helmets which fed conflicting images into the left and right eyes (“binocular rivalry”). Normally the brain fluctuates back and forth between the images. But during and after meditation, the monks were able to stabilize on one image or the other, or a combination.

This was the result reported by J. D. Pettigrew of the University of Queensland and other researchers in Meditation alters perceptual rivalry in Tibetan Buddhist monks, in correspondence recently published in Current Biology.

The light blue and dark blue bars in the graph above indicate the percentage of subjects where the “rivalry switch rate” either slowed down or stopped after (middle bar) and during (right bar) meditation.

This is intriguing research, but raises many additional questions which I hope the scientists will address in future research:

1. Only 50% of the monks reported this phenomenon. Why?
2. What governed which of the conflicting images the monks stabilized on? Some monks stablized on one, some on the other, and some on some combination.
3. Why did the effect occur only with “one-point” meditation, focusing on a single object, and not with so-called “compassionate” meditation?
4. What is the hypothesized mechanism? The authors merely note that focused styles of meditation have been associated with changes in neuroal activity in prefrontal regions of the cortex, which in turn have been implicated in sustained attentional rivalty.

The writers conclude:

This study offers an initial contribution towards increased understanding of the biological processes underlying meditation and rivalry, while additionally highlighting the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness.

Investigating the Mind 2005 is an exciting conference scheduled for November in DC, the theme being “The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation.” It is sponsored by the Mind & Life Institute, founded by the Dalai Lama and a neuroscientist to “create a rigorous dialogue and research collaboration between modern science, and Buddhism,” and co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Georgetown University Medical Center.

This is the 13th conference. The 12th was held last year in Dharamsala, India, under the theme “Neuroplasticity: the Neural Substrates of Learning and Transformation.” The 11th conference , which was the first open to the public, was held in conjunction with the MIT McGovern Institute of Brain Research.

From the announcement:

Recent studies are showing that meditation can result in stable brain patterns and changes over both short and long-term intervals that have not been seen before in human beings and that suggest the potential for the systematic driving of positive neuroplastic changes via such intentional practices cultivated over time. These investigations may offer opportunities for understanding the basic unifying mechanisms of the brain, mind and body that underlie awareness and our capacity for effective adaptation to stressful and uncertain conditions.