neurotheology

indexing page into all the articles

the article that got me thinking again on the topic

this has been in my must finish TBR pile for as long as 10 years. i really really have to finish it. from page 1 it is an extraordinary adventure.

zen and the brain

are mirror neurons the same thing as Pollack's sensing the sensors in _to build a human_?

sympathetic article on mirror neurons. not technical

background on hebbian "cells that fire together, wire together,"

a new word for me. i think i've seen it in reference to scientology however.

Synaptic Plasticity, part of an online book:
Spiking Neuron Models. Single Neurons, Populations, Plasticity

Can "neurotheology" bridge the gap between religion and science? the most interesting article in the bunch, so far.

Depending on your predisposition, you can interpret all these experiments in two different ways. The believers take them as scientific evidence for the reality of their visions, while the atheists claim more proof that God is all in your head

neurotheologists tend to play down the most direct implication of their research—that religious ecstasy is an illusion

So it goes, round and round. Either the brain naturally or through a malfunction manufactures religious delusions, or some otherworldly presence speaks to homo sapiens through the language of neurological pulses. Hot in pursuit of this undecidable proposition, neurotheology will keep on churning out data—but when it comes to the biggest questions, it will never have much to say.

The endeavor is controversial, stretching science to its limits. Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.

Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York, is in the explain-it-away camp of researchers. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, many with minds and emotions similar to our own, Guthrie argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds.

Science cannot tell us if God exists only in our imaginations or as an entity beyond our comprehension. So why do some scientists continue the search for the roots of religious experience? Shouldn't such claims of oneness with a God be judged by their fruits, rather than their roots, as William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience? Researchers may persist at these efforts because such studies offer the potential to alter our lives. In principle, these findings could lead to methods—call them "mystical technologies"—that reliably induce the state of spiritual insight that Christians call grace and Buddhists, enlightenment.

Four years ago, I joined a Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and reading books by) intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism. Eventually, and regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism's moral and metaphysical worldview cannot easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern humanistic values.

The insights imputed to meditation are questionable, too. Meditation, the brain researcher Francisco Varela told me before he died in 2001, confirms the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. Varela contended that anatta has also been corroborated by cognitive science, which has discovered that our perception of our minds as discrete, unified entities is an illusion foisted upon us by our clever brains. In fact, all that cognitive science has revealed is that the mind is an emergent phenomenon, which is difficult to explain or predict in terms of its parts; few scientists would equate the property of emergence with nonexistence, as anatta does.

But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. Buddha's first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual. From this perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

Faith-Boosting Genes A search for the genetic basis of spirituality By Carl Zimmer
save it, sci am ages out their archives to pay for.

the point of this short review:
Whatever you want to call it, this is a frustrating book. The role that genes play in religion is a fascinating question that's ripe for the asking. Psychologists, neurologists and even evolutionary biologists have offered insights about how spiritual behaviors and beliefs emerge from the brain. It is reasonable to ask, as Hamer does, whether certain genes play a significant role in faith. But he is a long way from providing an answer.

this is an excellent reading list. reads like the who's who for the field. i could do worse than just sit down and work through these books and authors.

Welcome to the age of neuroplasticity: the notion that adult brains are more adaptable, capable of reprogramming themselves, than was once thought. As a host of popularizers have begun to argue, neuroplasticity has enormous implications not only for our physical health but for our mental health. One recent example, Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential To Transform Ourselves, aims to harness the self-improving yen of aging baby boomers while couching the desire in highbrow guise (offering up a dash of Buddhism, a short history of Tibet, a little biology). Even more than evolutionary psychology—yesterday's brain cause du jour—neuroplasticity has become fundamental to how we try to understand the brain, and ourselves.