R: And you write that "Even on
the playground, we see remarkably sophisticated political machinations, and our
most essential political education occurs in environments like the playground." It starts really young, eh?
D: Yeah. I think that we start knowing that we've got
to be nice to people when we're little kids.
You know, mom and dad say "Play nice!"
And that's an important lesson that, hopefully, we take along for the
rest of our lives, and that we can change our brain, we can learn how to play
more nice as we grow older, and we sometimes forget that when we're adults, and
we often unfortunately see adults that have forgotten to play nice. But the important lesson of that is that we
have a brain that is plastic, a brain that can change, and that we are
political animals that need to navigate a very complex social and political
world that is shifting very frequently.
And I think this is the point that the author you are talking about in
The New Statesman: a lot of the what I would also call Neurobollox work is
interpreting neuroscience as if we're hardwired, and it's predestined that we
will behave this way or that way; we're over-interpreting the findings that are
coming out of these brain imaging studies, making it as if they're saying more
than they're really saying. Sometimes I
think people hear that, "Oh, the amygdala is more active in Republicans," and
they think "Ah! Republicans are "Fraidy-cats,
so they're chicken!" Or, "They're
reacting out of fear!" Or, "They've got primitive brains." All of that is Neurobollox. I think that that author is exactly right,
that's all neurobollox.
We are political animals in the sense of being very sophisticated
animals that have a capacity to approach the world in a really nuanced way, and
to see things, not only from our own perspective, but as I was mentioning with
that medial pre-frontal cortex, we can see things from the perspective of other
people if we choose to do so, and that is an incredible capacity that we have
as humans. There are very few other
species that can take the perspective of others. Gorillas appear to be able to do that to a
degree, chimpanzees can do it to a degree, but humans can do it at a very early
age. Two year old can outperform
chimpanzees on social tasks at a tremendous rate, and in fact that seems to be
what really differentiates us from chimps, is that we can take the perspective
of others; we can engage in this sociopolitical cognition that chimpanzees
can't. We're not technically smarter
than they are, we're socially smarter.
R: OK, you mentioned something
that got me really thinking, and that's this part of the brain that differentiates
"us" from "them." This is where you get
into this whole "coalition" concept.
Now, other researchers have suggested that that part of the brain is
what becomes activated or deactivated when people have religious
experiences. Are you familiar with any
of that work?
D: I'm trying to think. I mean, I know of a few studies that have been
involved in - I remember one where people were writing a letter to Santa Claus
or having a prayer experience and were activating this Default mode Network,
and so it can be used for some kind of religious experiences. If you're praying to God, the default Mode
Network can be activated in that, and that's maybe, again, a form of social
cognition. I think of the Default Mode
Network as being involved in social cognition; it activates for a variety of
different kinds of social paths, and to the extent that there are religious
experiences that are also social, either communing with God or communing with
the church, or communing with the universe as a whole, I think that /
R: That's what it was, the book
was called Why God won't Go Away: Brain
Science and the Biology of Belief, and the author is Andrew Newberg. What they found is that people, they quiet
the part of the brain that creates that sense of coalition or connection, so
that feel connected to everything.
D: In the reading that I've done
on meditation and the brain, there are a bunch of different ways that religious
experiences can change and activate with the brain. If you meditate , one kind of mindless, like
a Zen-type of meditation, you can quiet the parietal lobe, and when I've
meditated I've been able to quiet my brain in a way that I lose track of time
and space, I lose track of body or being present at all - the definitive you
evaporates. Another way of meditation is
called "mindfulness," meditation where you're actually getting really in touch
with your body. So you can either quiet
these parts of the brain, or you can activate them, when you're meditating; and
I think these both can be different kinds of religious experiences. I think of the brain sometimes as being like a
piano, that you can play lots of different kinds of music on.
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