Established Link Brain Damage & Religious Fundamentalism

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Established Link Brain Damage & Religious Fundamentalism

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:16 pm

Scientists Have Established a Link Between Brain Damage and Religious Fundamentalism


Photo Credit: Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock
A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/sci ... amentalism
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They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Established Link Brain Damage & Religious Fundamentalism

Postby norton ash » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:41 pm

I've finally stopped beating my head against the wall and accepted Jesus.
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Re: Established Link Brain Damage & Religious Fundamentalism

Postby 0_0 » Wed Mar 14, 2018 4:34 pm

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed
to say who made this remark because we were asked
to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked
not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked
for government agencies pleaded that their comments
especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK
election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling
state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech
are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why
the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution?
Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and
reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome
Trust in London last week—touched on one of the
most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that
something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of
our greatest human creations.
*
The case against science is straightforward: much of the
scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects,
invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts
of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing
fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has
taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put
it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical
Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put
their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent
endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their
quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often
sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they
retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve
their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst
behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels
an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few
journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature
with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important
confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants.
Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and
talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as
high-impact publication. National assessment procedures,
such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise
bad practices. And individual scientists, including their
most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that
occasionally veers close to misconduct.
*
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the
problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right.
Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive
and innovative. Would a Hippocratic Oath for science
help? Certainly don’t add more layers of research redtape.
Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could
remove incentives altogether. Or insist on replicability
statements in grant applications and research papers.
Or emphasise collaboration, not competition. Or insist
on preregistration of protocols. Or reward better pre and
post publication peer review. Or improve research training
and mentorship. Or implement the recommendations
from our Series on increasing research value, published
last year. One of the most convincing proposals came
from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg
is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following
several high-profile errors, the particle physics community
now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking
of data prior to publication. By filtering results
through independent working groups, physicists are
encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The
goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists
are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set
the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle
physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10–7
or 1 in 3·5 million (if the result is not true, this is the
probability that the data would have been as extreme
as they are). The conclusion of the symposium was that
something must be done. Indeed, all seemed to agree
that it was within our power to do that something. But
as to precisely what to do or how to do it, there were no
firm answers. Those who have the power to act seem to
think somebody else should act first. And every positive
action (eg, funding well-powered replications) has a
counterargument (science will become less creative). The
good news is that science is beginning to take some of its
worst failings very seriously. The bad news is that nobody
is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.

- Richard Horton


http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/ ... 0696-1.pdf
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Re: Established Link Brain Damage & Religious Fundamentalism

Postby Sounder » Wed Mar 14, 2018 6:08 pm

Thanks 0-0 for that article, because as I was reading the first article I could not help but think; gee there must be a lot of people running around with damaged per-frontal cortex given the wide array of fundamentalists popping up, and they are not all religious.

It's all about who's gonna give me a dollar if I paint a picture they like.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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