
Neurotheology: This Is Your Brain On Religion  - kqr2
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132078267/neurotheology-where-religion-and-science-collide
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hugh3
Surely the obvious thing to do would be to compare the brains of religious
meditators to atheist meditators?

Isn't the main result they appear to have acquired so far the fact that
meditation increases blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for
concentrating on things?

Also I'm deeply skeptical due to quotes like this:

 _"One could try to conclude one way or the other that maybe it’s the biology
or maybe God's really in the room, but the scan itself doesn't really show
that," Newberg says. "For neurotheology to really work as a field it needs to
be very respectful and open to both perspectives."_

which leads me to suspect that this is just a way of bilking religious
institutions out of money to fund fMRI scans and pay researchers' salaries.
Nice work if you can get it!

Meanwhile, I should head back to the lab to continue my experiments. Maybe
it's gravity which causes the rocks to fall when I release them. Maybe it's
the hand of God pushing down on them. We need to be open to both perspectives!

~~~
tjr
Does it not stand to reason that if your field is "neurotheology", you need to
be "open to both perspectives"?

~~~
KiwiNige
I'd tip that being open to the hand of God being involved helps to get some of
the participants to engage in the project.

~~~
hugh3
What legitimate scientific questions can this field answer anyway? What
falsifiable hypotheses can it disprove?

Different areas of your brain light up in the FMRI when you're thinking about
different things; we've known this for decades, but it hasn't proved much in
particular.

------
zby
Last week I just finished 'Religion Explained' by Pascal Boyer - and it is
indeed quite good explanation - I recommend that book. In short the theory
presented there is about religion as a kind of side effect of having brains
trained for what was needed to live. It is quite convincing, maybe a bit
falling into the false dichotomy path by trying to present itself as the sole
and only theory - while the reasoning there does not in fact eliminate other
mechanism adding to the trend of evolving a religious attitude.

