The first event in the California ScienCenter’s “Science Matters” series was Religion on the Brain, held on November 4, 2006. It was attended by a thousand people. What an outpouring of interest in the biology of religion! What were these people looking for? Judging from the questions from the audience, some appeared to be scientists, but most were “seekers” in the informal sense—still trying to figure out what all this means. I doubt they were satisfied.

The selection of panelists looked promising: VS Ramachandran, as well as Joan Roughgarden (pictured) from Stanford (author of “Evolution’s Rainbow”), Michael Schermer (Wikipedia) of the Skeptics Society, and Warren Brown (link), a psychologist and writer on science and religion issues.

Unfortunately, this panel ended up generating neither much heat nor light. VS was given a brief 15 minutes to present some basic research on the brain and religion, then Conan Nolan (bio), a reporter who served as the moderator, dove right into a series of unstructured questions.

Schermer, with whom I’m not familiar, is an agnostic, but apparently adopts a very simplified sociological/anthropological view of the origins of religion. The narrator failed to ask him to clarify his views on the differences between a brain-based view of religion and a societally-based one (or, to state the question another way, which aspects of religion might be brain-based and which societally-based).

We never managed to figure out what Joan Roughgarden’s agenda was, since all we heard from her were answers to ad hoc questions. Judging from those, she seems to be missing a few marbles. She claims that neurobiology (I guess she meant neuroimaging) is over-resolving. In other words, it’s seeing stuff that’s not really there? Or the stuff it’s seeing is random, or doesn’t matter? She made the incredibly odd analogy that having a religious experience is like eating a chocolate bar, and of course both affect your brain. Does it really take a PhD to figure out all the ways that eating a piece of chocolate is distinct from thinking you’ve seen God? Then she made the startling asserting that there’s nothing really extraordinary about the relationships between the brain and God. One is left to assume—she never bothered to tell us—that she thinks that God is out there somewhere and we use our brains to perceive Her in the same way we use them to perceive a butterfly. If she believes that, why did she bother to accept the invitation to the panel discussion?

We know from the blurb on her new book “Evolution and Christian Faith” that she’s “an evolutionary biologist and a Christian,” and the book “offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible.” She has “scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony.” In a way I’d sort of like to read this book, but unfortunately I have to draw the line somewhere. Her previous book, “Darwin’s Rainbow,” which discusses evolution and sexual diversity, might be more fun.

Nor was Warren Brown, from Fuller Theological Seminary, given any more of a chance to say what he thought, which is apparently something about of the integration of neuroscience and Christian faith. He has edited a book called Whatever Happened to the Soul, which is said to present a nonreductive physicalist Christian anthropology, whatever that might be.

What was missing at this forum was your basic unapologetic reductionist. Ramachandran doesn’t fill the bill: he resolutely refuses to take a stand on whether God really exists. He even, in answer to a softball question about whether a future God pill would or would not give rise to ethical issues, refused to answer on the grounds that that was not a scientific question.

Perhaps in the future such worthy events can be better planned, better structured, and better executed, perhaps with the participation of a leading blogger about religion and the brain.

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Amazon) is a snappy, readable book about, basically, how God doesn’t exist (or exists only with vanishingly low probability). Greater minds than my own have already reviewed the book (NYT) and pronounced it brilliant or stupid or flawed or whatever. Here I’ll confine myself to neurotheological and Buddhist aspects.

The most basic problem with this book is that it completely fails to take into account the connection between religion and any process of personal development and/or the biological “correlates” of that process. To the extent religion is to some extent a highly corrupted version of meaningful, biologically-based insights about how to be happier, many of Dawkins’ points would need to be modified or recast.

On p. 37 Dawkins claims he will not be “concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems of philosophies of life.” That’s a great distinction to be made, but at the same time Buddhism and Western monotheism are similar in that they are both socially dominant systems of belief and thought, and rather than arbitrarily excluding one, why doesn’t Dawkins incorporate Buddhism into his thinking as a way to better define the topological contours of religion and religious behavior?

Surprisingly for a biologist, Dawkins mentions “neurotheology” only once, in a dismissive tone. On pp. 168-169, he says:

The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain. I shall not pursue the neurological idea os a ‘god centre’ int he brain because I am not concerned here with proximate questions…If neuroscientists find a ‘god centre’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me will still want to understand the natural selection pressure that favoured it.

This seems like a particular devious way to dodge neurotheological questions. Perhaps the existence of a ‘god centre’ (more accurately, religiously-connected neural circuitry or structures) can be considered a “proximate” issue, but attempting to understanding it, rather than simply ignoring it, could help in grasping the “ultimate” cause, which for Dawkins is the Darwinian one. Would Dawkins focus on the evolutionary reason for the existence of the visual faculty without bothering to learn about the structure of the eye?

The cutest idea in this book, new at least to me, is that religion survives due an evolutionary tendency for children to believe what their parents say. This provides a scenario for a gradual decline over decades and centuries of Bible-thumping religions, as in each generation some percentage of believers, however, small, discard the religion of their parents and produce non-religious kids, as I did—to the extent that one day my oldest son came home from elementary school and asked me, “Daddy, who is this guy they were talking about in class today called ‘Cheeses’?”. Compare this to Dennett in Breaking the Spell, who provides no roadmap other than that people will or should stop believing just because he thinks religion is so stupid.

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Zen-Brain Reflections is James H. Austin’s follow-up to his definitive Zen and the Brain. As always, Austin is learned and thorough. The book has great value. It is almost certainly the best survey of research in the field of neurotheology, or perhaps we should use Davidson’s term “contemplative neuroscience.” But ultimately it’s closer to a set of research notes than a book. It presents tantalizing ideas and intriuging possibilities, but few hypotheses or frameworks. We’re left with a lot of information, but little understanding.

According to the description:

Zen-Brain Reflections takes up where the earlier book left off. It addresses such questions as: can neuroimaging studies localize the sites where our notions of self arise? How can the latest brain imaging methods monitor meditators more effectively? How do long years of meditative training plus brief enlightened states produce pivotal transformations in the physiology of the brain? Austin reviews the latest studies on the amygdala, frontotemporal interactions, and paralimbic extensions of the limbic system. He then explores different states of consciousness, both the early superficial absorptions and the later, major “peak experiences.”

The NYT reported in its Oct. 3 edition that your brain is to blame for out-of-body experiences (article).

According to the article: “Scientists investigating out-of-body experiences and other eerie sensations have found no sign of the supernatural. Instead, they are discovering that the feelings are the product of brain chemicals and nerve cells.”

These guys obviously forgot the Newbergian mantra that “our research in no way proves or disproves the existence of {fill in your favorite supernatural figure or religious experience here}.” They better be careful. If people start saying OBEs are the product of (not just “correlated with”) brain chemicals and nerve cells, what will be next?

The article seems a little light, especially coming from Sandra Blakeslee; maybe she was in a hurry. It fails to distinguish between OBEs, which involve “your own” body, and other presences, including those of important people like God. And it resolutely fails to mention Persinger.

A day when a French writer has been threatened with death for writing that Islam harbors violent tendencies seems appropriate for considering the role played in the propagation of destructive and divisive religous beliefs by the indoctrination of unwilling children.

This is a point that Richard Dawkins makes at great length in his new book The God Delusion, which I’ll have more to say about later from the neurotheological perspective. What interests me here is the connection Dawkins makes between the religious abuse (my term) of children and sexual abuse. His point is that, of the two, religious abuse—scaring children with stories of hell, to name just one example—does more profound damage than sexual abuse. He goes so far as to call the current preoccupation with child sex abuse “hysterical” and to compare it with the Salem witch trials.

Hear hear. As I write this, NBC is running a series on its Dateline “news program” called To Catch a Predator, where an on-line decoy posing as a 14-year-old girl, perhaps, entraps foolish men by offering sex if they come to her house where she will be alone. The level of the scam rises to the decoy reminding the victim to bring condoms and liquor. When the clueless prey actually show up at the house, they are met by a reporter who reads back to them their crude chat room dialog and asks them if they really intended to have sex with a 14-year-old. On leaving the house, the men are thrown to the ground by waiting local police and hauled dramatically off to the police station. This scenario is repeated, with very little variation other than the age and profession of the target of the sting, a dozen times in one program. At the end of the program, experts solemnly aver what a grave danger has been averted by capturing these vicious predators before they could harm innocent children.

Try again, NBC. Given what losers these guys are, the chances they would have ever actually done anything without being actively set up are nil. If they have enough money to get a good lawyer, which they probably don’t exactly because they are such losers, they should be free in a heartbeat. Can you really be convicted of corrupting the morals of a minor when the minor is not a minor or doesn’t exist at all? All this program does is show how stupid the network, the audience, and the entrapped men all are. (See a critique from the journalistic perspective.)

Right here in California a proposal to crack down hard on these disgusting perverts, the so-called Jessica’s Law, Proposition 83, will be on the ballot in November. Reportedly over 80% of the voting public are in favor of this. It’s being compared to the Three Strikes Law—a great success which allowed prosecutors to put a man in jail for 50 years for stealing some videotapes (the Supreme Court said that was not cruel and unusual punishment).

The proposal is massive draconian overkill. It makes a mockery of due process by allowing people to be kept incarcerated—not in a jail, of course, but a “hospital”—after they complete their sentence, simply on based on the opinion of a psychiatrist, with no appeal process. It brings many more offenses, including misdemeanors, or boys having sex with their girlfriends, into the metastatizing sexual predator frenzy. It will be expensive, not least due to the requirement for all sex offenders to wear ankle bracelets for the rest of their lives. It will crowd the jails with minor offenders. The residential restrictions will drive the offenders away from populated areas with police and counseling facilities. The entire premise—that sex offenders lurk in bushes then jump out to rape and kill our children—is false.

To its credit, the Sacramento Bee came down against this ineffective initiative:

Sex offenders who prey on children are every parent’s nightmare, and understandably so. Unfortunately, the fear they evoke makes them the bogeyman of choice for pandering politicians. What better targets for candidates in search of an easy issue to demagogue? Proposition 83 is a case in point. Despite Proposition 83’s title—the Sex Offenders, Sexually Violent Predators, Punishment, Residence Restrictions and Monitoring Initiative Statute—it would do nothing to protect children.

There is certainly a class of crimes that are despicable and reprehensible and need to be treated with the same severity as any other serious crime. However, a hallmark of the “debate” about juvenile sexual predation is to fail to make any distinction between such crimes and much less serious ones, or ones which should arguably not be crimes at all. It is no accident that this is the same society where a school teacher in Texas is fired for taking her class on a field trip to a museum which happens to include ancient statues with bare breasts or even dangling penises.

If sexual offenders are such evil incarnate, of such a uniquely perverse nature that they should be treated in a way completely different from regular criminals, let’s adopt unique approaches like not letting them of prison even after they’ve finished their time—just keep them locked up forever. Ooops—we’re already doing that in many places, and that’s one of the things Jessica’s laws wants to do. Well then, how about punishing them even before they offend, in a Minority Report sort of way? That’s already being done too, under an Ohio rule that allows judge to categorize people as sexual offenders, put them on the register, and subject them to all the relevant restrictions, even if there is merely a suspicion that they might have done something bad. The next step, which I’m sure somebody will propose soon enough, is to give the entire population MRIs to see if they’re interested in kids and throw them in jail right then and there.

If addition to the disproprortionality of the punishment to the crime in individual states, another problem is the gross inequity in sentencing levels from state to state. The exact same crime committed in one state could result in a sentence ten or more times longer than if committed in another. This hardly seems like the equal treatment under the law promised by the Consitution.

That we think of pedophiles in a frenzied horror, as opposed to say, murderers, who commit crimes every bit as heinous, is a reflection of our natural need for symbols of pure evil in our lives.

The NYT magazine has an extended article on Cheryl Chase, my friend and former business partner, and the incredibly important work she is doing on medical, cultural, and societal aspects of intersex, or ambiguous genitalia.

See also the website for the Intersex Society of North America.

A major milestone: a machine has consistently defeated very strong humans at at the game of “go” (report here). The caveat is that this is on a 7×7 board, which is dozens of orders of magnitude less complex than the full 19×19 game.

Crazy Stone, the program in question, used the so-called Monte Carlo technique. Basically, it plays hundreds of thousands of random games and finds which move leads to the highest winning percentage. An interesting Wired article on this approach is here. A server allows bots to play thousands of games of each other, providing real-time information on the degree of promise of various approaches.

The real question is whether this is a one-trick pony useful only for tiny boards, or whether it can be usefully extended to 19×19. Until 20 years gives us immensely more powerful computers, we need some kind of abstraction to serve as the topic of Monte Carlo simulations. Or, perhaps Monte Carlo can be another trick in the go programmer’s bag of tricks, somehow combined with the opening books and connectivity analysis and pattern matching and heuristics that serve as the basis of today’s strongest 19×19 programs.

Serotonin receptor density in the brain was tied to religious orientation in a 2003 study by a Swedish team (full report and summary).

But what is “religious orientation”, and what does low serotonin receptor density mean?

The metric used for “religious orientation” was the so-called “self-transcendence” component of the Temperament & Character Inventory, defined as “the extent to which individuals conceive themselves as integral parts of the universe as a whole.” Self-transcendance breaks down further into subcomponents; it was the “spiritual acceptance” subscale which was found to correlate (negatively) with serotonin receptor density in various brain areas. People with high spiritual acceptance numbers “tend to endorse extrasensory perception and ideation,” while “low scorers…tend to favor a reductionistic and empirical worldview.” The scale includes yes-or-no questions like, “I have had supernatural experiences” and, “I believe in a common, unifying force.”

It’s anybody’s guess what this bizarre scale is actually measuing. I’m imagining people who believe in UFOs and astral flight would probably score pretty high. On the other hand, there is no shortage of reductionist Zen masters who would score zero.

Andy Newberg weighs in with a weird comment which seems to say that we might be able to use these results to decide which religion people should be. Do a prenatal brain scan to decide whether to raise Baby as a Scientologist, Methodist, or Wiccan? He opines that the research “may be useful in a number of ways, including guiding people to practices that might better suit their disposition by understanding how people are spiritually different.”

The study’s author puts a politically correct spin on his results:

Farde also indicated that understanding the role of the brain in religion and spirituality may create more respect for plurality and the way we are religious beings. While the research does not explain whether a person has a belief system, Farde said, it might indicate why the person may be more attuned to a charismatic church as opposed to one with more order and tranquility.

But how might the serotonin system affect spirituality? “My favorite interpretation,” Farde told Psychiatric News, “is that the serotonin system regulates our perception and the variety of stimuli reaching our awareness. A person with a weak ‘sensory filter’ is used to various perceptions and may be more likely to accept religious world views.”

Before we even get there, we have to figure out what low serotonin receptor density means. As the study’s authors themselves point out, we don’t really know. It could mean the person has a fewer number of receptors that are more efficient, or a fewer number of receptors to counteract higher levels of serotonin, or lower serotonin levels. They don’t know.

The most generous thing that can be said about this study is that it “points the way to more study”.

Mario Beauregard has fMRI’d nuns having semi-mystical states and found that a whole range of brain regions (including the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, left brainstem, and extra-striate visual cortex), demonstrating that mystical experience (or at least the memories of mystical experience these Christian nuns called forth) were involved, thus supposedly disprovnig the “God spot” theory.

Beauregard’s article in Science Direct uses the term “spiritual neuroscience,” which I had never heard before. We’re all eager for good new terms to replace “neurotheology,” but I don’t think this suggestion will fly. It evokes images of scientists in white coats having spiritual experiences as they do their neuroscience research.

I guess political correctness is catching on in the neurotheology biz. Here’s Beauregard’s disclaimer from the article:

With respect to this issue, it is of paramount importance to fully appreciate that elucidating the neural substrates of these experiences does not diminish or depreciate their meaning and value, and that the external reality of “God” can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed by delineating the neural correlates of RSMEs.

Beauregard also uses the term RSME, for “religious/spiritual/mystical experience”. Is this well-known terminology, or something he invented? It seems useful.

The research was supported by Metanexus, an organization which “advances research, education and outreach on the constructive engagement of science and religion.”

WebMD provides a brief overview of the research.

Neuroplasticity is a plausible—some might say obvious—hypothesis for the mechanism by which humans develop spiritually. For instance, the relatively slow speed of neurogenesis would account for the time required under development protocols such as meditation.

Now, Harvard scientists have identified a brain protein that may be responsible for the lack of plasticity in the adult brain—at least in rodents. Mutant mice lacking the protein, even after reaching adulthood, migrated eye function in the brain when the poor animals had one of their eyes sewn shut and light shined into the other, something heretofore seen only in young mice.

As reported in Science Express, the researchers found that mutant mice lacking a protein called PirB have more robust “cortical ocular dominance (OD) plasticity” at all ages. They note that “PirB is also expressed in many other regions of the CNS, suggesting that it may function broadly to stabilize neural circuits.”

Perhaps promotion of neuroplasticity will be one focus of future development of neurotheopharmaceuticals.

See also the press release, and Techorati links.

Image: neurons grown in culture and labeled to measure plasticity in a living system (courtesy of Liu Laboratory, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences)