Fascinating Brooks column today, on the cultural implications of new findings in neuroscience. Brooks writes about how neuroscientists are finding that not only does biology (through genetics) influence behavior (which is not news), but that behavior influences our biology. Excerpt:
Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.
Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.
Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.
Read the whole thing. These findings suggest strongly that culture, by conditioning us to see the world in certain ways, affects our behavior by changing the ways our brains work. As Brooks points out, it is simply not true that all human beings' brains work the same way, responding similarly to the same stimuli. Our neurological responses are likely determined by the culture in which we are raised.
This column reminded me of something I read years ago in "O Jerusalem," the popular history of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The authors wrote about how Israeli commanders figured out that the Arab psychology was tribal, and that if they (the Arabs) lost their commanding officer in battle, it would cause the fighters to collapse into panic and disarray. So they began a strategy of isolating commanding officers in battle, and trying to pick them off with snipers. The Israelis, who had a different psychology, weren't vulnerable in this way. Does this mean the Arabs weren't as brave as the Israelis? No, of course not. But it does show how a culture's psychology can dramatically affect the performance of its members at certain tasks.
People aren't machines, of course, and it's not the case that if you put in this or that factor, you will get a predictable product. There are people raised in cultures -- macro or micro -- that inhibit human flourishing who nevertheless do flourish, and vice versa. Why is it that the American South, at least in the past, was materially impoverished relative to the American North, but produced magnificent novelists? For that matter, where is the American Solzhenitsyn? Why do I read Hank Stuever's "Tinsel," which talks descriptively about the unbelievable upper middle class coddling of the children of a Dallas suburb, and I fret over the kind of adults those privileged kids are going to turn out to be -- this, even though by any material standard, these kids are being raised in an environment that ought to all but guarantee that they will flourish?
But we are not only material beings -- and, as Brooks avers in his writing about neuroscience, scientists are beginning to learn that the human person is far more complicated than we thought. It seems to me that this kind of thing points to the Orthodox Christian metaphysical view of panentheism, which is the belief that God's spirit interpenetrates matter (this, as distinct from pantheism, which holds that matter is God, or the Western Christian view that God and matter are distinct except under particular circumstances). I say "points to" panentheism to indicate that I'm trying to be extremely tentative and speculative here. But when it can be demonstrated that the human spirit/consciousness, and its artifacts (e.g., culture) can affect neurological structures and processes, and that these effects can be measured and observed scientifically, are we not moving closer to a kind of panentheistic understanding of reality? Or am I missing something? Thoughts?
UPDATE: A friend passes along this 2008 blog commentary off an earlier Brooks column about neuroscience. The commenter says that Brooks is misreading the neuroscience. Excerpt:
And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as "the unknowable total of all there is," a formulation similar to Newberg's "absolute unitary being" as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There's a superficial appeal to this kind of "neurotheology" (Newberg's term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.
Consider the research of Nina Azari and colleagues, who performed PET scans of evangelical Christians praying to the words of Psalm 23 and found, contrary to Newberg, heightened activation of a frontal-parietal region of the brain associated with sustained reflexive evaluation of thought. Consider, too, the research of Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET to study the brain functioning of a group of highly experienced yoga teachers during a relaxation meditation called Yoga Nidra, which includes a series of visualization exercises. Their PET results showed heightened activation in exactly those brain systems corresponding to the guided imagery tasks, which are different than the brain systems involved in praying to Psalm 23 or the types of mind-emptying meditation studied by Newberg.
The point is that there is no single model for religious experience. Humans are capable of many different modes of being religious, and the brain subserves them all in predictable and measurable ways. Brooks may follow Newberg in advocating belief in a single totalizing deity, but the actual findings of neuroscience are pointing in the opposite direction. What's emerging is a new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences that humans are capable of generating. As better brain imaging technologies come online, we will begin to study a wider variety of spiritual phenomena (not just what occurs when people are sitting perfectly still in a laboratory), revealing new multiplicities of cognitive processing involved in different modes of religiosity. This research will not support traditional monotheistic faith in God, though it may spark a renaissance of spiritual exploration by researchers of a poly- or pantheistic bent. That's the cultural-scientific revolution we may yet live to see.
I dunno, could it be that the one God is refracted differently through the many "dark glasses" (1 Cor. 13) that are each of us? What I mean is that we may learn nothing about the nature of God from this, but of our varying abilities to perceive God as He really is. This would pose a challenge to orthodox forms of any religion, obviously, but not an insurmountable one. As ever, I welcome your thoughts, especially from readers with a scientific background.
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