This post continues our project, which started with this post, of adopting the religiobiological stance in looking at the Landmark Forum.

Therapy. Especially in the earlier periods, the Forum focuses on your human relationships, notably broken ones. It urges you to patch things up now with that estranged father or sister, to the point of calling them on your cell phone during the next break. Participants then volunteer to stand in front of the group and talk about these personal problems, resulting in some riveting Dr. Phil moments, in no small part thanks to the savvy, unyielding, quick-on-the-feet, penetrating probing of the facilitator.

Examples:

• the boy who finally forgave his mother and father for trying to raise him white, even though he was obviously mixed, the product of his mother’s amorous dalliance with a black lover

• the distraught wife who forgave herself for exposing her two small children to the horribly traumatic experience of 30 FBI agents bursting into their house at 6am to arrest her drug-dealing husband, whom she had believed when he said he was going straight

• slightly less tragically, the girl who wondered why her boyfriend wouldn’t commit when all she had done was left him at the altar two years earlier

• finally, the boy whose Hispanic father abandoned him, completely alone, to wander the streets, at the age of 9

These stories are moving to the point of tears.

It is this aspect of Landmark that has led some to categorize it as a form of large-group awareness training. Being in front of a large audience, and getting their feedback, unquestionably raises the efficacy of this therapeutic process. And I personally have no doubt that many of these people underwent genuine transformations, although as with most transformations there is the danger of backsliding and need for consolidation that one hopes some kind of follow-up would address.

From a religiobiological standpoint, to my knowledge no has elucidated the neurological mechanism underlying emotional fixations or constantly revisited past traumas—this was the project, after all, that Sigmund Freud gave up on. At the risk of circularity, it would seem undeniable that there is some such schematic substrate which is altered by emotional catharsis. There is little doubt that such catharsis, and thus such neurological changes, are experienced by some Landmark attendees, although probably just those who take advantage of the opportunity to “share” in front of the group and have the benefit of direct interaction with the leader. (The conclusion for would-be Landmark attendees would to be sure to “share”.)

However, there is more to the process of personal growth than merely breaking through emotional pathologies. The breaking through is better seen as a kind of necessary first step, like removing a tree that’s blocking the road. As I interpret the structure of the three-day Landmark experience, and in light of the fact that the emotional components come earlier in the training, that’s also how Landmark itself positions it. So while we can note the apparent success of these dramatic five-minute metamorphoses for those who participate in them, and hypothesize that they are having some kind of neurobiological effect, this alone is not sufficient to conclude that Landmark’s overall effectieness is religiobiologically plausible.

We will continue our examination of Landmark in one final post. But before we leave the topic, what about the issue mentioned by one reader, that a huge majority of attendees surveyed said that the Forum changed their lives for the better?

These survey results deserve close scrutiny. There is no baseline to compare against, the results are completely self-reported, and there is a built-in bias on the part of the participants towards justifying their own expenditure of time and money. At a minimum, they would need to normalized against results from participants in other programs or religions. For instance, how many Baptists feel that their religion improves their lives?

The study in question was apparently carried out by IMC, Inc., but who paid for it? Like any survey, the results can be spun in a number of ways. For instance, the Yankelovich survey reported that “more than 30% of participants thought the Forum did poorly or only fairly in improving their overall effectiveness” (my wording).

The numbers are also biased to the extent the participants are self-selected. For what it’s worth, the largest percentages are 25-34, some college. Another study revealed that prospective participants were significantly more distressed than than their peers and had a higher level of impact of recent negative life events. I am merely saying that the results should be interpreted in this context.

Finally, a note on the positioning of this entire endeavor. I am not trying to criticize Landmark or praise it or say it is good or bad. The point is simply to examine it to see if there are any obvious aspects which could tie in with a neurologically-based theory of religion or personal development. As a reader rightly pointed out, if we find no such aspects, and we haven’t yet, that could just as easily be interpreted as casting doubt on the religiobiology project as a whole or as indicating that there may be types of religious/developmental phenomenon that do not have neural correlates, as that Landmark is unlikely to actually be as effective as claimed.

Does Landmark Forum seem likely to affect your brain? If so, how? This question is an example of the religiobiological stance , an approach for analyzing phenomena related to religion. (“Religion” here has a broad interpretation which encompasses the personal growth that Landmark claims to enable.) If we can identify ways in which Landmark could affect your brain, that makes it more plausible that it actually does have a long-term impact on behavior or happiness, and of course the converse is true as well.

We will split this analysis into two posts.

The Landmark Forum is a three-day seminar, put on by Landmark Education, which claims to be specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life. These shifts, it says, will be the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power. 94% of participants surveyed said The Landmark Forum made a profound, lasting difference in the way they live their lives. Nearly a million people are said to have undergone the training. Landmark Education offers a number of other follow-up programs, but here we will confine ourselves to the Forum.

Let’s jump right in and take the religiobiological stance in addressing some of the major aspects of the Landmark Forum.

Talking. Although the Landmark website characterizes the forum as a “conversation” or even a Socratic dialog, rather than a “lecture”, in fact the 45 hours or so are dominated by the facilitator (picture is of Jerry Baden) talking at the 200 or so attendees. It’s actually jarring to some extent, to hear the leader announce that he is going to have a “conversation” and then proceed to talk for the next 15 minutes.

The talking is occasionally interrupted by questions from other attendees, or by quick interludes of sharing with surrounding participants.

In general, mere talking is a very poor bet for causing any meaningful neurostructural changes, even when the person doing the talking is an engaging, charismatic speaker as all Forum leaders are, unless it is talking about something of huge emotional significance. Therefore, Landmark’s focus on one-way oral communication would argue against its potential effectiveness, from the religiobiological stance.

Language . Throughout the Forum new terminology is introduced, such as “get it” for in-depth and/or visceral understanding; “racket” for repetitive, self-defeating behavior patterns; “possibility” for seeds of future potentiality embedded in the present; and “distinguishing” for identifying and highlighting a useful concept.

In my opinion, the centrality of language processing in the higher human brain layers is such that new terminology can, in fact, act as a lens leading to new modes of perception and consequent neurological change. Unfortunately, Landmark’s new terminology is both piecemeal and overused to the point of meaninglessness. For instance, “distinction” is used for any old concept. Taking the religiobiological stance, then, the promise offered by Landmark’s new terminology to correlate to neuroplastic events remains unfulfilled.

Practice. One way to apply the religiobiological stance is to start with known ways to affect neurophysiology and see if the phenomenon being examined might contain anything related. The single most well-known way to change your brain in a religiously meaningful way is some sort of sustained meditation, concentration, or mindfulness.

We see nothing even vaguely reminiscent of such a practice in Landmark, either done within the seminar or taught to participants to do on their own later. The only part of the Forum that has meditational tinges to it is a single exercise involving closing your eyes and experiencing fear. Adopting the religiobiological stance in looking at Landmark, then, we find no ongoing exercises of the type that could be expected to reliably result in structural changes in the brain.

We will continue this discussion in the next post.

Is God an accident? That’s the title of an article by Paul Bloom, a Yale psychology professor, in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Coming from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Bloom points out the “built-in” systems often called “folk physics” and “folk sociology”, which he describes as “two different computers in the brain”. The sociology half of this hard-wired dualism, if you will, permits us to conceive of abstract human-like entities independent of a specific incarnation. The same social engine, one of whose jobs is to infer agency and intent, indiscriminately finds such agency and intent even where it does not exist in reality. Voilà: God and disembodied souls.

I haven’t read anything else by Bloom (he is the author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human). His theory seems compelling as far as it goes, but…

Calling religion or God an “accident” certainly is catchy and looks good on the magazine’s cover. But is it really accurate? In fact, Bloom never uses the term accident again anywhere in the article. A feathery appendage a bird develops to protect itself from the cold turning out to be useful in flying—that’s an accident. That’s different from what’s happening here. The systems are functioning exactly as designed. The anthropomorphization module is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. All detectors yield false positives by their very nature. But they have mechanisms are in place to recover from those false positives. If we see a leaf moving, infer the presence of a predator, we freeze, then look again and finally realize it’s just the wind, and return to normal. The real question is: why does religious anthropomorphization bypass any similar corrective mechanism?

Second, from an evolutionary standpoint, we know there are spandrels, but one which decreases fitness will be selected away. If belief in God is such a spandrel (accident) and is a negative or waste of energy for the species, it should have been deselected, but it wasn’t. Why? Or are there evolutionary advantages to supernatural belief? If so, the story isn’t complete without identifying them.

A subset of this problem—probably impossible to ever answer—is why the dualistic body/mind model was selected for humans. Could there be fitness-decreasing aspects to an integrated body/mind model? If not, why wasn’t it selected? Or is evolution simply taking its time getting us there?

Finally, where do meditation or other spiritual practices—which, like Boyer (previous post) and Atran (previous post ), Bloom completely ignores—fit into this picture? Presumably, in terms of his folk physics vs. folk sociology dichotomy, practice has the effect of unifying the two engines. To borrow Dogen’s words: “cast off the gap between body and mind.” This raises the intriguing question of what kind of neurological implementation of the dual model might be amenable to such unification.

Bill O’Reilly (picture; website) is the talking head on Fox News that everyone loves to hate. Now—unlikely as it may seem—he turns out to be the latest advocate for neurotheology! On his Wednesday show, he took up the controversy about the Dalai Lama’s planned speech on the neuroscience of meditation at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience next month in Washington. 544 researchers have signed a petition against his appearance (NYT ), which seems odd, because he’s appearing not as a scientist, of course, but as part of a new “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society” track “featuring leaders from fields outside of neuroscience whose work relates to subjects of interest to neuroscientists”.

Bill’s guest was Dr. Stuart Dryer, a neuroscientist from the University of Houston who studies such things as embyronic neuronal development in vertebrates, and is opposed to the Dalai Lama’s speech. Bill took him to task in typical O’Reilly-esque fashion, accusing him as coming off as “anti-spiritual”, adding, “The Dalai Lama’s a good guy.”

Somebody should have warned Dryer what he was getting into going onto O’Reilly’s show. I like Bill, but he’s a bully (and pervert) who doesn’t invite guests to hear their opinions, but to lecture them:

The Dalai Lama is being asked to talk about meditation. He claims that you can train the brain to be more compassionate and more positive. That seems to be pretty fascinating and something you might want to hear about.

Bill opined that next year they might want to invite someone to talk about the neurophysiology of prayer as well, since he hears that makes people more loving too.

I’m a little bit conflicted about Bill giving neurotheology such high visibility in the popular culture, especially in his largely right-wing demographic. Before you know it Bush will be pushing more faith-based initiatives claiming that they are good for the brain, or something like that. At the same time, exposure to the basic concept of neurotheology—which, after all, states that physical processes in the brain are a key element in religious experience—could only be helpful. On the other hand, we should not lose sight of one of the scientists’ points: that the research on meditation and the brain is still in its infancy.

In any case, I do think Carol Barnes, who is president of the neuroscience society and responsible for the invitation, had it right:

The practice of meditation is a human behavior, and the Dalai Lama is extraordinarily skilled at it and at promoting qualities of peace and compassion that I thought could bring us together. That’s not the way it’s gone so far.

The religiobiological stance is a framework for peering into phenomena that lie at the boundary of religion and biology, or are suspected to. This stance is at the heart of Numenware. The religiobiological stance is an approach which starts with the assumption that there are biological underpinnings to religious experience, and analyzes issues based on that assumption.

The analogy with Dennett’s “intentional stance” is, well, intentional. Like the intentional stance, the religiobiological stance is a mechanism designed to break through layers of relationships to see what a particular perspective yields.

Take issues as diverse as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), or the Landmark Forum, both arguably religious in nature. There is no direct evidence tying either to biological processes. So we address them from the religiobiological stance to see what light this casts on them.

Why not call this the “neurotheological stance”? For the same reason that “neurotheology” is a defective coinage. First, we know that the brain is an integral part of the body as a whole, and existing knowledge tells us that more than just the brain is involved in religious experience. So we need to widen the “neuro” to “bio”. Taken alone, this would yield the existing, alternative term “biotheology”.

But this term is also misleading. “Theology” is widely understood to refer to the study of a particular type of God . It is not a term that would generally be used in the context of native religions, for example, or even Buddhism. The more general term is “religion”. At least one etymology of “religion” is return to the divine, an arguably more general concept than “theology”. “Religion” does have overtones of organized religion and dogma and ceremony, but we will stipulate that we interpret this to explicitly include pesonal development and transcendant experience (until someone suggests a better word).

But why “religiobiology” instead of “bioreligion”? The latter, like “neurotheology”, would imply that religion or theology is at the heart of our field of study, that we are looking at a specialized subfield of religion. In other words, we start with theology or religion, then examine its biological aspects. In my view, however, that is backwards: we need to start with biology, and see what religoius phenomena it generates. If the terms were untangled, “bioreligion” would be “religion of biology”, whereas “religiobiology” would be “biology of religion”—which is clearly what we are interested in.

Of course, “neurotheology” is widely entrenched as the name for this field, and that terminology will not disappear. Over time, however, I hope we can shift towards “religiobiology”.

In future posts, I will apply the religiobiological stance to the two particular topics I mentioned, glossolalia and the Landmark Forum.

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.

Are high altitudes conducive to revelations and other spiritual experiences, and if so, why? That’s the topic of a recent article in Medical Hypotheses by Swiss and Israeli neuroscientists.

According to the authors, mountaineers have described the experience of feeling or hearing presences, autoscopic phenomenon (seeing an image of yourself externally), hallucinations, and other manifestations, especially when alone on the mountain.

Why? The authors note that “brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences”.

It may not just be the thin air up there; it could also be the climb. The authors point to research that “stressful events, physically and emotionally, while climbing mountains, cause release
of endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which, in turn, may evoke revelation-like experiences”.

There is no new research here, just ideas. But these ideas lead to some fairly straightforward experimental designs—researching the results of meditating in a hyperbaric chamber immediately comes to mind.

Every neuroscience undergraduate learns about the Penfield map, a correspondence between locations on the stripe across the middle of the top of the brain (somatosensory cortex) to a sequence of locations on the body. This map was discovered by Wilder Penfield in the course of applying electrical stimulation to the brains of hundreds of epilepsy patients he was treating. The size of each area on the map corresponds to the degree of sensitivity we have in that area: areas for the tongue, or the hands, for example, are proportionally larger.

An odd aspect of the map is its placement of the human genitals right next to the feet. This is believed to account for the bizarre phenomenon that people with amputated feet feel orgasms in their phantom foot. It may also lie behind foot fetishes.

My theory is that the Penfield map is related to desirable sitting positions for meditation. In other words, meditation is more effective if body parts which are mapped to nearby brain areas are brought together physically—such as bringing the feet near the genitals in the full-lotus position. The fingers are brought together directly below the eyes, which they are positioned next to on the Penfield map.

Penfield was the exact opposite of a reductionist or physicalist. With his experience in electrical stimulation of the brain, he viewed the key question as: is there any electrical stimulation could make a patient decide or will or believe? His answer was no. He attributed these phenomena not to the brain, but to the “soul”.

Towards the end of his career, Penfield captured his thoughts on the neurological basis for the philosophical belief in the human soul in his book The Mystery of the Mind.

As an aside, Penfield was interested in bilingual children, and felt strongly that early exposure to a second language was highly beneficial to the child’s overall development.

A new course at the University of Florida, Neurotheology: The Interface between the Brain and the Divine , may be the only university course in neurotheology taught anywhere in the world—does anyone know of others?

The course has been developed by Dr. Lou Ritz, an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the university. According to his biography, his research interests are concerned with spinal cord injury and repair. One paper he’s written involves watching how cats balance themselves with their tails, then shows how breaking their tails (called sacrocaudal transection; ouch!) leads them to lose their balance and fall more often. He’s also a co-director of the Center for Spirituality and Health at UF.

From the syllabus:

Are religious and spiritual experiences brain-based? If they are, what are the implications to understanding brain circuitry? If they are not, what are the implications to our understanding of who we are? Our course – Neurotheology -will investigate the neural correlates of religious and spiritual experiences and the implications of such relationships.

Topics to be explored include: organization of higher cortical function in the human brain; effects of cortical brain lesions on our perception of reality; the variety of religious experiences; modern brain imaging; meditation and spiritual experiences; brain correlates of meditation; eastern and western views of the mind; how the brain constructs reality; attention and awareness; mind-body medicine; psychedelics and mystical experiences; the neurobiology of emotions; the God gene – the genetic basis of spiritual experiences.

I’d like to see the detailed syllabus for this course, including the reading materials. And it would be great if Dr. Ritz could turn the course into a book providing a balanced overview of the field—in spite of all that’s been written, such an overview still does not exist.

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.