Replies to post #307886 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Here is an attempted rebuttal from a 'faith based' site.

Are religious fundamentalists brain-damaged?

https://www.christianpost.com/voice/are-religious-fundamentalists-brain-damaged.html


By John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, Op-Ed Contributors | Tuesday, February 05, 2019


In 1902, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of children’s stories that became known as the “Just So Stories.” These were fanciful “explanations” for how various animals acquired their best-known characteristics, like the camel’s hump, the leopard’s spots, and the elephant’s trunk.

They were called “just so stories” because his daughter Josephine demanded that they be told in the same way each time, in other words, “just so.”

In 1976, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, writing about the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, used that phrase, “just so story,” to express his skepticism about the entire field of study. Since then, the label “just so story” has come to mean “an unverifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals.”

The most recent “just so story” I’ve seen announced a link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism. Yes, you heard that right: brain damage.

The study, entitled “Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism,” was published in the journal Neuropsychologia. In it, researchers went over the data from 119 Vietnam War veterans who 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.”

Is your Spidey-sense going off here? It should be… The researchers weren’t studying the brains of 119 random people looking to see what, if anything, they might find. No, they assumed that a particular kind of brain damage played a role in whether someone became a religious fundamentalist, and then went looking for evidence that confirmed those suspicions.

My own Spidey' else tells me that the author has misunderstood what hypotheses are and how they work...

"a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation."

Yes, looking for evidence. But not to confirm bias but rather as a starting point.

Can you spell “confirmation bias,” boys and girls?

Comparing the brain-injured vets’ CT scans to those of non-injured vets, researchers found that an injury to a specific region of the prefrontal cortex “was associated with religious fundamentalism.”

If your Spidey-sense is now giving you a headache, good. So many unanswered questions here… for example, “What do they mean by ‘religious fundamentalism?’” In this case, “an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues.” So, like, every Abrahamic religion?

Yeah, pretty much. The study does not find that all religious people are like that, just the brain damaged.

It gets “better.” “Fundamentalists” tend to “oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life,” and “are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs.”

The researchers theorize that damage to the particular region of the prefrontal cortex causes “a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness.” This leads to “an increase in religious fundamentalism.”

So many problems here, so little time, so I’ll settle for two obvious problems. First, we have no idea whether these brain-injured vets were actually “fundamentalists,” or if they simply answered the questionnaires in a way that led a researcher to label them that way.

'If'? Why assume that the questionnaires are flawed rather than designed and administered to provide valid information?

The lack of “cognitive flexibility and openness” in what the researchers deemed “religious matters” might also be true of the rest of their lives. Why single out religion?

Uh, because of the fanciful and dogmatic nature of those religious texts?

Not to mention, the researchers seemed to lack a good bit of “cognitive flexibility and openness” to any understanding of religion that’s different than theirs. Are they brain damaged fundamentalists too?

And, second, don’t lots of non-religious people aggressively “oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life?” Some are even running for president right now. Is there something wrong with their prefrontal cortex?

'Lots of' is NOT a hypothesis.

In the just-so story “How the Elephant Got Its Trunk,” a curious elephant wanders too close to a river and a crocodile grabs it by its-then stubby nose, stretching it until the calf gets away. The new elongated nose proves so useful that no elephant would even dream of going back to their old stubby one.

The only difference between that story and the one published in Neuropsychologia is that Kipling actually knew he was writing a “just so story.”

The other difference is that the authors of the study concluded 'not the only' and 'accounted for 20% of the variations.' Leaving themselves open to other explanations and to future investigations, which is how scientific studies work.

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.

[fuagf]

How Religious Fundamentalism Hijacks the Brain

Bobby Azarian Ph.D.
Mind In The Machine

"For real?
Scientists have established a link between religious fundamentalism and brain damage
[...]
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."

Fundamentalist ideologies act like mental parasites.

Posted Oct 10, 2018

Source: Shutterstock

In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person’s life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual. This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.

It is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease, because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system. But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as mental parasites. A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival. Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence. By understanding how fundamentalist ideologies function and are represented in the brain using this analogy, we can begin to understand how to inoculate against them, and potentially, how to rehabilitate someone who has undergone ideological brainwashing—in other words, a reduction in one’s ability to think critically or independently.

How Religious Ideologies Spread

Similar to how organisms and their genes compete for survival in the environment and gene pool, ideas compete for survival inside brains, and in the pool of ideas that inhabit them. The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time. In his influential 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as “memes” (the mental analog of a gene), which he has defined as self-replicating units that spread throughout culture. We are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various customs, myths, and trends that have become part of human society.

As Dawkins explains, ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another. For example, an ideology—such as a religion—that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others. Successful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self-replicate go extinct. In this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.

It is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged. When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality. The realization that oneself and all one’s loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying, and this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety-reducing ideas, like ones that offer a never-ending afterlife. But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.

Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or “cultural software,” that is running on the brain’s hardware. Esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett insightfully described how ideas can control minds when he said, “The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” In this regard, it is often not the brain that controls the mind, but the memes that compose the mind that control the brain. This is especially the case when the meme is a religion.

Religions Mutate

Like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated—or passed from one person or group to another—it undergoes mutations. As a consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced, which generate different types of behavior. As such, there are often good and bad variants of any given religion. For instance, there are moderate versions of Christianity and Islamthat promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior. These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, i.e., the religious-practicing individual. At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity—specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions—that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional.

Ideological Viruses and Mental Parasites

There are various types of viruses and parasites, and viruses are themselves parasites. While biological viruses are infectious agents that self-replicate inside living cells, computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs. One particularly nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a “Trojan horse,” disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own “fitness” (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as “parasitic manipulation.”

One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.

In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call “magical thinking .. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/201309/all-paths-lead-magical-thinking ,” which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can’t survive, nor can it replicate itself. Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought .. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-21081-001 , which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic.

We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.

If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain. An ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self-replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus, and defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one. When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a host brain, the organism’s mind is no longer fully in control. The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival. This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive function in areas like analytic reasoning and problem-solving.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201810/how-religious-fundamentalism-hijacks-the-brain#

About the Author
Bobby Azarian, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist and science writer in the Washington, D.C. area.
Online:www.bobbyazarian.com

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201810/how-religious-fundamentalism-hijacks-the-brain

See also"

The Foster Hillary-obsession parasite is a particularly vicious breed.
"She's got Hillary worms eating out her brain."
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148183585

Sure is. It sounds sexier than a virus which i've been seeing him as.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=143641701