Peter Watts - Echopraxia

It’s not all food taboos and slashed foreskins, though. Far more relevant to the current discussion is the fact that religious minds exhibit certain characteristic neurological traits. [50] Sam Harris et al., “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 10 (October 1, 2009): e7272, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272. Believers, for example, are better than nonbelievers at finding patterns in visual data. [51] Lorenza S. Colzato, Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg, and Bernhard Hommel, “Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 11 (November 12, 2008): e3679, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003679. Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing). [52] Sara W. Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,” Neuroreport 16, no. 17 (November 28, 2005): 1893–1897. There’s even circumstantial evidence that Christians are less ruled by their emotions than are nonbelievers [53] Laura Saslow, “My Brother’s Keeper?: Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 31–38. (although whether the rules they follow instead are any more rational is another question). Certain religious rituals are so effective at focusing the mind and relieving stress that some have suggested coopting them into a sort of “religion for atheists.” [54] Graham Lawton, “The God Issue: Religion for Atheists,” New Scientist 213, no. 2856 (March 17, 2012): 48–49, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(12)60708-8.

An obvious significant down side is that most religious beliefs—gods, souls, Space Disneyland—are held at best in the complete absence of empirical evidence (and are more frequently held in the face of opposing evidence). While it remains impossible to disprove the negative, for most practical purposes it’s reasonable to describe such beliefs as simply wrong .

It was only during the writing this book that it occurred to me to wonder if one couldn’t say the same about science.

Lutterodt’s comparison of religious faith with the physiology of vision came to me while I was reading Inzlicht et al, [55] Michael Inzlicht, Alexa M. Tullett, and Marie Good, “The Need to Believe: a Neuroscience Account of Religion as a Motivated Process,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 1, no. 3 (2011): 192–212, doi:10.1080/2153599X.2011.647849. a paper that describes religion as an internal model of reality that confers benefits even though it’s wrong. While that idea is nothing new, the way it was phrased was so reminiscent of the way our brains work—the old survival-engines-not-truth-detectors shtick—that I had to wonder if the whole right/wrong distinction might be off the table the moment any worldview passes through a Human nervous system. And the next paper [56] George Ellis, “Cosmology: Patchy Solutions,” Nature 452, no. 7184 (March 13, 2008): 158–161, doi:10.1038/452158a. I read suggested that certain cosmic mysteries might not be a function of dark energy so much as inconstancies in the laws of physics—and if that were case, there’d really be no way to tell…

Of course, there’s absolutely no denying the functional utility of the scientific method, especially when you compare it to the beads and rattles of those guys with the funny hats. Still, I have to admit: not entirely comfy with where that seemed to be heading for a bit.

The Bicameral Order did not begin as a hive. They began as a fortunate juxtaposition of adaptive malfunctions and sloppy fitness.

The name does not derive from Julian Jaynes. [57] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston,: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976). Rather, both Jaynes and the Order recall a time when paired hemispheres were the only option: the right a pragmatic and unimaginative note-taker, the left a pattern-matcher. [58] Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,” Scientific American Special Edition 12, no. 1 (August 2, 2002): 27–31. Think of “gene duplication,” that process by which genetic replication occasionally goes off the rails to serve up multiple copies of a gene where only one had existed before; these become “spares” available for evolutionary experimentation. Hemispheric lateralization was a little like that. A pragmatist core; a philosopher core.

The left hemisphere is on a quest for meaning, even when there isn’t any. False memories, pareidolia—the stress-induced perception of pattern in noise [59] Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322, no. 5898 (October 3, 2008): 115–117, doi:10.1126/science.1159845. —these are Lefty’s doing. When there are no data, or no meaning, Lefty may find it anyway. Lefty gets religion.

But sometimes patterns are subtle. Sometimes, noise is almost all there is: a kind of noise anyway, at least to classically evolved senses. Smeared probabilities, waves that obscure the location or momentum of whatever you’re squinting at. Virtual particles that elude detection anywhere past the edges of black holes. Maybe, when you move a few orders of magnitude away from the world our senses evolved to parse, a touch of pareidolia can take up the slack. Like the feather that evolved for thermoregulation and then got press-ganged, fully formed, into flight duty, perhaps the brain’s bogus-purpose-seeking wetware might be repurposed to finding patterns it once had to invent . Maybe the future is a fusion of the religious and the empirical.

Maybe all Lefty needs is a little help.

Malfunctions and breakdowns showed them the way. Certain kinds of brain damage result in massive increases in certain types of creativity.16 Strokes provoke bursts of artistic creativity, [60] Helen Thomson, “Mindscapes: Stroke Turned Ex-con into Rhyming Painter - Health - 10 May 2013 - New Scientist,” 2013, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23523-mindscapes-stroke-turned-excon-into-rhyming-painter.html . frontotemporal dementia supercharges some parts of the brain even as it compromises others. [61] Sandra Blakeslee, “A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity,” New York Times , April 8, 2008, sec. Health, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/health/08brai.html . Some autistics possess visual hyperacuity comparable to that of birds of prey, even though they’re stuck with the same human eyes as the rest of us. [62] Emma Ashwin et al., “Eagle-Eyed Visual Acuity: An Experimental Investigation of Enhanced Perception in Autism,” Biological Psychiatry 65, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 17–21, doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.06.012. Schizophrenics are immune to certain optical illusions. [63] Danai Dima et al., “Understanding Why Patients with Schizophrenia Do Not Perceive the Hollow-mask Illusion Using Dynamic Causal Modelling,” NeuroImage 46, no. 4 (July 15, 2009): 1180–1186, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.03.033. At least some kinds of synesthesia confer cognitive advantages [64] Heather Mann et al., “Time-space Synaesthesia–a Cognitive Advantage?,” Consciousness and Cognition 18, no. 3 (September 2009): 619–627, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2009.06.005. (people who literally see time, arrayed about them in multicolored splendor, are twice as good as the rest of us at recalling events from their own personal timelines [65] Victoria Gill, “Can You See Time?,” BBC , September 11, 2009, sec. Science & Environment, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8248589.stm . ). And—as Daniel Brüks reflects—brain damage is actually a prerequisite for basic rationality in certain types of decision-making. [66] Michael Koenigs et al., “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements,” Nature 446, no. 7138 (April 19, 2007): 908–911, doi:10.1038/nature05631.