Philosophy of mind today is, regrettably, infested with materialist nonsense and unlikely to lead to any meaningful insight in its present state of impairment. Meaningful insight must come not from neuroscience (which is a scientific, rather than metaphysical, discipline) but rather from disciplines such as philosophy of mind. But the issue of causation is devilishly more difficult. Of course in a very general and crude way it is obviously true that normal brain states are necessary for normal mind states. In both cases scientists infer that material states of the brain account for mental states. “Activation of the left frontal gyrus causes religious experience” is less obvious nonsense than “the bump on the skull corresponding to the left frontal gyrus tells us about religious experience”. High-tech phrenology is much worse than the old-fashioned low-tech phrenology, The nonsensical nature of the research is more difficult to understand when it is laden with impressive sounding technological advances and neuroscientific jargon. Phrenology used bumps on the skull to determine mental states. It would seem to me that such research at this point amounts to little more than high tech phrenology.

Until we have a coherent sense of how physical and mental causation occur and interact there is little we can say that would be meaningful about measurements of brain states and their correspondence to mental states. The fundamental reason is that our metaphysical understanding of the relationship between the brain and the mind is a conceptual mess. does a region of brain activation while contemplating religion represent suppression of atheist belief so as to allow emergence of religious belief)?Īs you can see, even a cursory examination of the conceptual complexities involved in this kind of research shows that examining changes in brain states associated with changes in mental states is an enormously hazardous research undertaking. Or does it mean that the mental state and the brain state are both caused by something else? Or could it even mean that the brain activation is the suppression of an interfering mental state that would preclude the mental state being studied - which itself is not associated with any brain activation (e.g. Or does it mean that the mental state causes the increase in brain activity (rather than being caused by it)? What does it mean when a region of the brain is more active during a particular mental state – does it mean that that the brain region is causing the mental state, or does it mean that activity in that region correlates with the mental state without inferring cause. But this approach is fraught with difficulties in interpretation. Some researchers have looked for activation of specific brain regions using functional MRI brain imaging. Emma Yasinski, “ Religion on the Brain” at The Scientist (Jul 13, 2021)įerguson is careful to emphasize that he is not trying to disprove the reality of religious experience: In June, Ferguson and his team published a study in Biological Psychiatryshowing that brain lesions that connect to the periaqueductal gray (PAG), an area deep in the brain involved in processes such as pain modulation, fear conditioning, and altruism, seem to be associated with religiosity and spirituality. Ferguson seems not to have considered this explanation, but instead seeks answers through neuroscience. There’s nothing like communion with God to enrich and deepen life.

Emma Yasinski, “ Religion on the Brain” at The Scientist (Jul 13, 2021) The paper covered requires a subscription.Īn obvious answer would be that religious experiences are rich and profound because they are true. That’s probably fairly common at Harvard –- there is a pervasive and palpable bias against serious religious beliefs in many of our leading universities.Īs a scientist, I can’t help but wonder what it is about these types of experiences that made them feel so rich and so profound. But, he reports, his beliefs have changed.

$thebrain and religion$

He grew up as a Mormon and was quite religious. Michael Ferguson is a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. Share Facebook Twitter Print arroba EmailĪ recent article about a Harvard neuroscientist’s research on the correlates of religious experience in the brain raises many familiar questions about the relevance of neuroscience to religious experience.

Thebrain and religion