Brain Buys (27 page)
Authors: Dean Buonomano
In the political domain, the quote at the beginning of this chapter serves as a chilling reminder of the extent to which people can be controlled via propaganda. Hitler, through his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, conjured nonexistent enemies, and persuaded many Germans that the Jews represented a threat to their way of life. Hitler used movies, newspapers, speeches, and posters to portray the Jews as an inferior race; in some Nazi propaganda posters Jews were compared to lice.
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Today, in the Internet age, one would like to believe that manipulation on such a grand scale applied toward the most evil of purposes would not be possible. Whether this is true or false, simple-minded—yet embarrassingly effective—political advertisements continue to saturate the airwaves, helping those undeserving of our trust to obtain it.
But my goal is not to naively brand advertising and propaganda as harmful. To the contrary, the marketing of products, ideas, or political candidates is an essential ingredient of human culture, capitalism, and democracy. My point is that we want to ensure that our choices reflect our actual goals and desires, and that we can distinguish between the dissemination of information for our own good and manipulation for the benefit of others. Like a child who suddenly figures out that her parents have been using reverse-psychology on her, we must develop an awareness and understanding of our own brain bugs, and how they are exploited. This will allow us to optimize the day-to-day decisions we make, as well as the views and political choices that ultimately shape our own lives and the world around us.
The Supernatural Bug
The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs.
—Charles Darwin
After dinner on a Thursday evening in April 1986, Robyn Twitchell, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who lived near Boston, started vomiting and crying. His pain and inability to hold down food continued through Friday and Saturday. Robyn’s parents convened a prayer group; for days they prayed and sang hymns around Robyn. During much of this time he was crying and writhing in pain. Toward the end he was listless and vomiting “a brown, foul-smelling substance.” Robyn died on Tuesday. During the five-day period of Robyn’s illness, neither Robyn’s parents nor any of the others who prayed for him contacted a doctor. An autopsy revealed that Robyn died of a surgically correctable obstructed bowel.
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Robyn’s parents were Christian Scientists—a religion founded on the principle that the physical world is essentially illusory because we are living in the spiritual world. Under this belief system sickness and disease are viewed as problems in the spiritual realm and, as such, Christian Science eschews conventional medicine and relies on the power of prayer for healing. Robyn’s parents were subsequently convicted of involuntary manslaughter; the conviction was later overturned on a legal technicality.
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Whether in the form of spirits, witches, telepathy, ghosts, clairvoyance, angels, demons, or the thousands of different gods we have worshipped over the millennia, supernatural beliefs come naturally to humans. For our ancestors disease and natural disasters were but a few of the events that were attributed to mystical causes. Today supernatural beliefs of many different flavors remain omnipresent, and often slip by unnoticed. For example, as the psychologist Bruce Hood points out, even the most rational materialist is often averse to wearing a sweater that once belonged to a serial killer—as if it has some curse. And who among us is not superstitiously attached to a lucky object or ritual.
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But it is in the context of religion that supernatural beliefs are most common and enduring. Professed supernatural manifestations are the foundation for most religions. The philosopher Daniel Dennett defines religions as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”
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It is within the religious domain, with its attendant supernatural manifestations and divinely given moral imperatives, that supernatural beliefs have the most impact on our behavior as individuals and our worldview as a society.
Throughout history religion has been a wellspring of compassion and benevolence. Today, religious organizations sponsor humanitarian efforts and continue to foster unparalleled acts of altruism—thousands upon thousands of faithful work tirelessly in the most remote corners of the globe to feed and educate parentless children and others in need. Religion has nurtured the arts and sciences alike; countless scholars and scientists were priests, including Gregor Mendel whom many consider the father of modern genetics. And, of course, religion’s most precious offering may be that it has served as a permanent oasis of hope and consolation in the face of often harsh realities.
Yet, when reviewing the vast database of irrational behaviors and repulsive acts that human beings have engaged in throughout history, religion has often stood in the foreground: from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, through the Crusades and Inquisition, to suicide bombings and religiously motivated terrorism. Past and present religious beliefs have postponed scientific and technological progress, including the acceptance of heliocentrism, evolution, and stem-cell research. Additionally, lives continue to be lost to poverty and disease exacerbated by economic and health policies in which religion trumps reason. For example, because the Catholic Church views premarital sex and birth control as running against God’s will, it opposes the use of condoms which could prevent sexually transmitted diseases; this position has misshapen educational and public health policies throughout the world.
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Religion has undeniably been the source of both great good and of great harm. This book, however, is about the brain’s bugs, so our goal is to understand the reasons why supernatural and religious beliefs can lead us astray.
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Reason is arguably the highest achievement of the human brain; the feature that best distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom. Yet, supernatural beliefs and blind faith in divine forces that we cannot see, observe, or study, by definition, require that we turn a blind eye to reason. The story of Robyn Twitchell provides but one example of the potential consequences of turning off reason. And Robyn’s case was not a singular one. A study published in the journal
Pediatrics
in 1998 analyzed instances in which children in the United States died as medical care was withheld because of religious beliefs. The authors concluded that of the 172 cases examined, that in all likelihood 80 percent of the children would have survived if they had received medical care. One of the authors of this study, Rita Swan, was herself a Christian Scientist who years before had lost her baby to bacterial meningitis. Christian Scientist “practitioners” spent two weeks attempting to heal Rita’s son through prayer before the Swans brought him to the hospital, at which point it was too late. Upon understanding that in all likelihood her son would still be alive if she had acted in accordance with modern medicine rather than her religious beliefs, Rita Swan went on to found an organization to protect children from abusive religious and cultural practices.
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While religious-based medical neglect may seem like an extreme and rare example of the consequences of religious beliefs, at the root it is fundamentally no different from the much more common practice of relying on supernatural beliefs to guide decisions about whether evolution should be taught in school or embryonic cells should be used for stem-cell research.
It is enlightening to contrast supernatural and religious beliefs to another often-irrational trait, one that has been programmed into the neural circuits of animals for hundreds of millions of years: fear. Fear was not designed to be rational, but to ensure that threat levels are always set multiple shades higher than reality warrants. As we have seen, it is no secret as to why fear has elite membership status when it comes to vetoing reason. But why can religious beliefs so effortlessly overpower reason? Why do so many humans subscribe so tenaciously to specific sets of rules and beliefs despite the absence of any palpable, reproducible, empirical evidence? There is, of course, no single answer to these questions. But the answers lie somewhere within the brain.
Compared to the topics discussed in the previous chapters little is known about the psychology and neuroscience of supernatural and religious beliefs. So the topic covered in this chapter will be much more speculative in nature, but no less vital to understanding ourselves and the societies we have created.
THE BY-PRODUCT HYPOTHESIS
Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists are increasingly attempting to understand religion from the perspective of natural selection and the brain. Toward this goal an evolutionary biologist might ask: did religion emerge because those who engaged in religious beliefs were more likely to thrive and reproduce? A neuroscientist might frame the question differently: do the neural circuits that underlie religious beliefs benefit from a “special” neural status, one that sometimes enables religion to override reason?
A number of hypotheses have been put forth regarding the biological origins of supernatural beliefs and religion. The two main hypotheses revolve around whether religiosity was selected for, through the process of evolution, or whether it is an indirect by-product of the architecture of the brain.
To understand the by-product hypothesis let’s first consider other social phenomena that are omnipresent throughout human cultures. These include appreciation of art, attention to fashion, and our fascination with competitions based on physical prowess. Why would a social activity, such as observing sporting events, be common to virtually all cultures? The propensity to participate in physical activities likely sharpened physical and mental skills, improving performance for when survival was actually on the line. We probably like participating in sports for the same reasons lion cubs instinctively play with each other, to hone their physical and mental abilities. Even today, many sports are clearly tied to skills that reflect hunting or warfare (javelin, archery, boxing, wrestling, and biathlon). But this does not explain why we like watching sports from the comfort of our couches. By the fifth century B.C.—the time of the Ancient Greek Olympics—sports were a popular spectator event. And today the Olympics and World Cup are among the most watched events in the world. Much like religion, people can be unwaveringly faithful in their support of their teams. Winning can lead to shared national bliss, but losing to agony and despair.
Perhaps we enjoy watching sports because for some reason we were selected to do so; it is in our genes. Or, much more likely, spectator sports could be a by-product of other cognitive traits in place for entirely unrelated purposes. As an exercise we can speculate as to what those traits could be:
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One common element of sporting events is that they tend to involve moving objects—whether that object is a human, a ball, or both. Humans, like many visual animals, are reflexively attracted to moving objects. This is called the
orienting response
, and it is probably why many human males, myself in particular, seem to be neurologically incapable of carrying on a serious conversation if there is a TV on in front of them. Whether an animal falls into the predator or prey category, the biological function of attention being captured by movement needs no explanation. One factor contributing to the worldwide adherence to sports could be that watching rapidly moving objects is simply inherently captivating (which might also solve the mystery of why chess championships are not televised.
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Another ubiquitous component of spectator sports is the rooting; the true fan supports his team independently of opponent or odds of pulling off a victory. Mutual support and encouragement in a social group would likely have contributed to cooperation in that group. When some members of a group were incapable of engaging in activities central to survival of the community, such as hunting or fighting off enemy tribes, it may have been adaptive to “support the troops,” to show gratitude for their efforts and sacrifices. Sporting events could naturally tap into a tendency to support those representing us in battle. Given that the collective mood of a nation can depend so strongly on the outcome of which colored shirts get a ball into the net more often, one cannot help but wonder if cheering does reflect something much more profound at the biological level.
If either or both of these arguments were correct—and I’m not suggesting they are—it would imply that billions of people around the world watch sports today not because at any point in human evolution it increased genetic fitness, but rather that the worldwide multi-billion-dollar sports business is a by-product of features of the human brain in place for entirely different reasons.
Many thinkers on the topic of the origin of religion believe that it likewise emerged as a by-product of other cognitive abilities.
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In the words of the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, “Religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources.”
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One feature of the human mind that may have been co-opted by religion is referred to as
agency
. For the most part we are inherently comfortable assigning a mind to other entities. Whether the other entity is your brother, a cat, or a malfunctioning computer, we are not averse to engaging it in conversation, or endowing it with its own intentions. The ability to attribute a mind and intentions to some things but not others was likely a critical step in brain evolution, but it was imperative that the agency detection system be hyperactive rather than hypoactive, even if that led us to imagine intentional agents where there were none. Suppose you are walking though the jungle at night and are suddenly startled by the sound from behind a tree; is it the wind, a falling branch, a leopard? In doubt, you have to assume it is a leopard and proceed accordingly. As anybody with a dog has probably noticed, a hyperactive agency detection device is not unique to humans, which not surprisingly, did not slip by Darwin:
The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory.
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Pascal Boyer and many others believe that the ease with which we confer agency was likely co-opted by religion, which often endows a mind, will, and intentions to inanimate objects, animals, and the ethereal constructs we call gods.
In addition to our propensity to assign thought and intent to virtually anything, many other features of the human mind could have been co-opted by early folk religions.
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For example, it has been proposed that an affinity for storytelling or even romantic love and its corollary, the ability to devote oneself unconditionally to another being, may have been co-opted by religion. In another vein, Richard Dawkins has pointed out that there could have been strong selective pressures for children to blindly accept certain things they are told by their parents or elders. Obeying your parents when they tell you not to eat certain plants, play with crocodiles, or cross the street on your own, is potentially life saving. This form of blind faith in one’s elders, in turn, may have set the stage for unquestioning acceptance of superstitions, and eventually an earnest belief in angels and demons.
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