Religion places bad bets on the left brain

Sometimes you hear, "He's a left brain person" or "Creativity comes from the right brain."

Neuroscience is a lot more complicated than that, but it's still fascinating to read descriptions of the specialized functions in the two sides of the brain.

Such as Michael Gazzaniga's "Spheres of Influence" in the June/July issue of Scientific American Mind. He describes research on split-brain patients where the major connection between the two hemispheres, the corpus collusum, is severed in order to treat intractable epilepsy.

This allowed Gazzaniga and his collegues to study how the two hemispheres dealt with a problem that has a lot of relevance to religion.

We have subjects try to guess which of two events will happen next: Will it be a red light or a green light? Each event has a different probability of occurrence (for example, a red light appears 75 percent of the time, and a green 25 percent of the time), but the order of occurrence of the events is entirely random.

There are two strategies that can be used here.

Frequency matching involves guessing red 75 percent of the time and green 25 percent. But since you don't know what color is coming up next, there's a high propensity for error that lowers the success rate below 75 percent.

It turns out that maximizing is a better strategy. Here you simply guess red every time, which ensures an accuracy rate of 75 percent -- since that is how frequently red appears.

Animals such as rats and goldfish maximize. The "house" in Las Vegas maximizes. Humans, on the other hand, match. The result is that nonhuman animals perform better than humans in this task.

Use of this suboptimal strategy by people has been attributed to a propensity to try to find patterns in sequences of events even when they are told the sequences are random.

That's what the left brain does: try to produce order out of perceptions. It analyzes, makes stories out of sequences of events, comes up with elaborate hypotheses.

Just like religion.

"Miracles" are woven out of the cloth of rarely observed, but entirely natural, phenomena. Destiny or karma is fashioned by interpreting everyday events in an other-worldly fashion. Instead of simply seeing things as they are, left-brain religiosity makes a whole lot more out of them than is actually there.

By going beyond simply observing events to asking why they happened, a brain can cope with such events more effectively should they happen again. In doing so, however, the process of elaborating (story-making) has a deleterious effect on the accuracy of perceptual recognition, as it does with verbal and visual material. Accuracy remains high in the right hemisphere, however, because it does not engage in these interpretative processes.

We need both sides of our brains. Each hemisphere has its own role to play in producing a unified consciousness of reality.

It's important to keep in mind, though, what is happening in our minds when we look at simple things in a complicated left-brain way.

An Indian man in a turban giving a talk on a stage becomes God in human form, divinely inspired. In similar fashion, a Catholic elected to a high office by his peers comes to be seen as infallible in certain circumstances.

The right brain just sees. The left brain sees and then makes up a story about it.

Sometimes that is useful. But not when there's no substance behind the story -- just a desire to tell tales.

Comments

[Stuart Resnick]

> That's what the left brain does: try to
> produce order out of perceptions. It
> analyzes, makes stories out of sequences
> of events, comes up with elaborate
> hypotheses.

A primitive man sees that there's a pattern where people who eat a particular berry end up dead the next day. Perceiving the pattern allows him to avoid the berry, and thus survive and procreate. Over generations, the tendency to see patterns gets reinforced.

Since this tendency is strong, we end up seeing patterns even when they're not there. We may start believing that if we do a particular dance, it'll rain. This may be non-optimal behavior, but the result -- excessive dancing -- is hardly life-threatening. Unlike eating poison berries.

The tendency to see patterns whether or not they exist is part of our genetic heritage because seeing too few patterns may have deadly consequences... whereas seeing too many patterns is nothing worse than stupid.

Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/
http://home.comcast.net/~sresnick2/booboo.htm

[Brian]

Stuart, you're right. Evolution seems to have tilted us in the direction of finding stories or explanations because, as you say, it's more advantageous to think "that sound is a tiger about to eat me" than "it's just the wind."

Gazzaniga also writes, "The left-brain interpreter makes sense out of all the other processes. It takes all the input that is coming in and puts it together in a makes-sense story, even though it may be completely wrong."

The obvious problem here is that religion takes one-of-a-kind stories, such as those in the Bible, and doesn't test to see whether they are right or wrong. It makes universal truths out of single stories, leading to serious errors.

So we need to recognize the biases built in to us by evolution. Sometimes they are functional, sometimes not. Knowing the difference is key.

[Stuart]

> So we need to recognize the biases built
> in to us by evolution. Sometimes they are
> functional, sometimes not. Knowing the
> difference is key.

The simple example I like to use:

When I was born, during those first few minutes of life, it was vital to my survival that I find a nipple and suck on it. Surely vast amounts of DNA coding had evolved to make me instinctively go for my mother's breast.

Once I had my first gulp of breast milk, the experience itself was enough to "teach" me to return to the nipple next time I was hungry. The blind instinct that drove me to my first meal had done its job, providing a huge boost to my survival chances.

But because of the slow and clumsy way that humans function (as information storage devices), that instinct that fullfilled its purpose during my first moments of life, remains with me for decades and decades after it's done its job. I may find myself sucking on cigarettes or beer bottles, driven by that old instinct that's no longer so helpful.

Isn't this a huge part of how Western psychology functions? That is, it's a process of identifying those habits and patterns that served me well as a helpless child... but may now be counter-productive as an adult. When the instincts/habits are unconscious, they control me (making me e.g. smoke and drink against my better judgement). But the hope of psychology is that once the pattern is made conscious, I'll no longer be a slave to following it.

Just so with religion. Blindly following an authority was essential to survival when I was a child. I can see why DNA promotes such following, every bit as much as it promotes nipple-sucking. But once the rational mind has sufficiently developed, the instinct/habit of blindly following authority can be recognized, and perhaps let go to some extent.

Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/