Hearing prayer shuts off believers' brain activity
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
The changes in the brain's functioning during meditation are pretty amazing. This has been researched pretty well with buddhist monks, etc.
What's the actual phenomenon being measured here? Is it a shutting down of skepticism due to prayer, or due to trust, or something else?
"Mr. Wilson, ve at za Max Planck Institute for Kernphysic invented zis field, and you are doing it vrong! You have neglected ze contribution of higher order terms without grounds, and as results from Bergen, et al show..."
Sometimes, I wonder what a religion would be like with rapid-fire talks anyone could speak at, poster sessions, and critique for every presenter.
It would look like the Talmud, since that's exactly what they did. Most of the scholars were also farmers, and in the off season they would all get together and argue. Someone would present a logical conclusion, other would refute it, etc etc. They wrote it all down, including all the arguments.
Physicists at lectures are more analogous to other religious scholars (like from other sects). You'd find a lot more skepticism there than in religious lay-people who probably aren't very educated in theology.
It seems to me that religion is something everyone ought to be challenging, because it often includes strong moral directives with enormous impact on our lives.
In Islam, there are well-defined requirements with regards to the amount of knowledge a lay-person is required to attain. On the matter of beliefs, theology, cosmology, etc. the criterion is something like, "the subject must be studied sufficiently to be able to remove the doubts that are a person is capable of understanding". So for example, an illiterate Muslim bedouin is only required to understand the analogy between footsteps in the sand that indicate on the presence of a person having walked and the wonderous creation indicating on the presence of a creator. On the other hand, a Muslim that has a Ph.D. in philosophy has the responsibility to study deeply the cosmological and other rational arguments that justify every level of belief.
The bedouin can't be faulted for not studying to the level of the Ph.D. and the Ph.D. can't be faulted for not accepting without question the reasoning that was sufficient for the bedouin.
Science?
EDIT: Figured I should explain myself lest I get voted down for being snarky. In science, to me at least, a lot seems to be taken on faith. There are many stories of a wrong result being published and scientists later not publishing their own research because it didn't agree with that wrong result. Combine that with the fact that a scientist with lots of published history accumulates more and more credibility and, from the outside, it starts to look like a religion with a self-correcting facility.
Of course at certain times assumptions are made or theories wrongly rejected :) but, in the words of a great man, "it all comes right in the end".
We suffer somewhat from salience bias: cases where the scientific process is successful are frequent and expected. Cases where the method failed but eventually corrected itself are spectacular. There are literally hundreds of thousands of papers published each year. Quick, can you name two researchers involved in the discovery of the electron's discrete charge? What were their methods? Now, how about Millikan?
As for religions, I would be more likely to believe in one where challenges and debate were frequent, as opposed to something more rigid like, say, Catholicism.
In other words, it's not the perception of prayer. It's the perception of supernatural intervention. Totally misleading title.
Believers not being skeptical is a bit redundant.
Also, there's no incompatibility between believing in a higher power and being able to reason. I'm a Christian in his third year of a Computer Science degree at a major university, and I like to think I have some capacity for reason :p
Link to study abstract "The power of charisma--perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer" http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/12/scan...
Sensational headline, obvious results. Nothing much to see here, folks...
Obvious result. Not so sure as I don't agree that the interesting result is that being spun from the paper (of which I've only read a detailed review and an abstract as it's paywalled).
The takeaway point for me, that harkened back to Milgram's Experiments and the like, was that the person running the experiment was able to induce in the subjects entirely different behaviour simply by saying the level of authority that the people they were hearing [supposedly] had.
To recapitulate they alter their critical consideration according to the level of authority claimed for the speaker by a third party. It is the authority of the scientist that swings the whole thing.
Could this be how hypnosis works? Patients for whom hypnosis is effective have a mental model of 'the power of the hypnotist', and effectively anaesthetize their critical thinking faculties to follow the hypnotists commands?
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
I challenge anyone to find a major problem with this summary of the study.
I don't see how this is interesting to a hacker. It's interesting to a redditor, but that's why I don't go there.