If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.
—VOLTAIRE
AT THE END OF THE 1990S, JEFF SCHIMMEL, A LOS Angeles–based writer who had a conservative Jewish upbringing, had a tumor removed from the left temporal lobe of his brain. The operation was a success in many respects, but it led to a profound alteration of his personality. Schimmel began to have the impression that people sometimes were a bit unreal, as if they were animated figures; he started hearing voices in his head, and then he had visions. He interpreted one of these visions as an appearance of the Virgin Mary, and the irony of a Jew being visited by that icon of Catholicism was not lost on him. Schimmel went back to his neurologist and underwent a new MRI scan to compare his brain before and after the operation: it was remarkably different. The affected lobe had shrunk, changed shape, and become covered with scarified tissue. That tissue was responsible for his visions and auditory hallucinations, because the scars had started causing random neuronal firings, essentially giving Schimmel a case of temporal lobe epilepsy. His brain had been turned on to religion.
Schimmel’s case was certainly not the first time that a connection had been found between a misfiring brain and religious experiences. Indeed, two and a half millennia ago none other than Hippocrates labeled epilepsy “the sacred disease.” Schimmel, however, looks at what happened to him not as a problem but as an opportunity. He feels that he is a better, more spiritual person and has taken up Buddhism (yes, I know, a Jewish Buddhist who sees the Virgin Mary . . .) to channel his newfound sense of religiosity. Regardless, this and other evidence from neurobiology and cognitive science raise the question of how much religion and gods are in our brain as opposed to “out there.” Considering how important religion is to most people’s sense of meaning and general outlook on life, we will be well served by embarking on a little investigation of the biological basis of religious belief. Who knows, we might find ways to become better human beings without having to have seizures—or even resorting to religion at all.
As it turns out, science can induce the subjective feeling of a mystical experience in a number of ways—and without having to use illegal drugs. Perhaps the most famous series of experiments in this area are those conducted by Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Canada. Persinger has invented a device that attempts to repeat—under safe and controlled conditions—precisely the sort of thing that happened rather serendipitously to Jeff Schimmel. Persinger calls it “the God helmet”: a modified motorcycle helmet capable of generating small and highly localized electromagnetic fields that stimulate specific areas of the brain within the right temporal lobe, causing a variety of responses in the subjects, including the sensing of a presence even though they are all alone in the experiment room.
If the appearance of the supernatural in your room is not your cup of tea, then neuroscientists can trigger an out-of-body experience for you, another oft-recounted and highly emotional phenomenon that many invoke as evidence of the existence of a nonphysical reality. Olaf Blanke and his collaborators at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland used electrodes to stimulate different parts of the brain with the goal of treating epilepsy. They found that when they induced currents in an area known as the right angular gyrus, the subject experienced what they called “whole-body displacements,” or out-of-body experiences. The researchers concluded that these are caused whenever the brain fails to integrate somatosensory and vestibular information, that is, when your sense of your body’s position does not square with your assessment of balance. It’s interesting to note that a similar impairment of so-called proprioception (the inner sense that tells us where our body ends and the rest of the universe begins) is also caused by a variety of other stimuli often associated with mystical experiences, including abstinence from food, ingestion of hallucinatory drugs, and—most tellingly—deep prayer or meditation (hence the sense of “being at one with the universe” often reported in these cases).
Of course, the ability of science to replicate a variety of mystical experiences doesn’t preclude the existence of gods and transcendental realms. After all, if we are capable of having real mystical experiences, somehow that would have to involve our brains, since that’s the way we experience everything—be it a physical object or a hallucination. Indeed, more broadly, it is simply not possible to demonstrate, either scientifically or philosophically, that there is no supernatural “out there” (that is, independent of the human mind). Still, it seems reasonable to think that the more science looks into mysticism, and the more it finds ways to explain the appearance of mystical experiences, the more we are rationally compelled to lean toward the conclusion that these experiences are a result of the human brain (mal-)functioning under unusual conditions.
Here is another way to look at the problem. Suppose someone claims to have observed a flying saucer and describes its color, shape, and trajectory in detail. You do some investigating and discover that an unusually large meteor was observed at about the same time and location. Moreover, the meteor had the same color and followed the reported flight pattern. Our witness—when told about the meteor—can easily reply: “Yes, but that doesn’t prove that there was no flying saucer. Just because you have a naturalistic explanation of what I saw, it doesn’t mean that aliens do not exist.” Notice what is going on here. To begin with, the reason to prefer the meteor explanation to the flying saucer one is not because it proves that there was no flying saucer. Science doesn’t work that way. Rather, it is more reasonable to accept the naturalistic explanation because: (1) there is one explanation available that fits the facts very well, and (2) concluding that there was a real spaceship out there is an extraordinary claim and the available evidence is simply not commensurate to that claim. That said, of course it does not follow from the explanation of a particular incident that “aliens do not exist” (in general). But again, a belief in aliens (or any other belief, for that matter) becomes rational only when it is based on compelling facts. Possibilities are simply not enough.
Despite all the scientific evidence and philosophical talk about the proportionality between belief and evidence, the fact remains that a large number of people have a hard time letting go of the mystical and the supernatural. Why? This is the question we will examine in the remainder of this chapter and in the next one, seeking answers at several levels of analysis: the chemistry of the brain; the psychology and sociology of the human condition; and even the evolutionary biology of Homo sapiens, our own species. This is an important quest not only because our view of life and its meaning is profoundly different depending on whether or not we espouse supernatural beliefs, but because our lives are affected—whether we like it or not—by the large number of our fellow human beings who do believe in gods, or even simply in the ability of mysterious forces to alter their destiny.
Let us start with what goes on inside our heads, and in particular with the surprising effect that simple brain chemicals can have on how superstitious we are. Peter Brugger is a neurologist at the University Hospital in Zurich (Switzerland), and he carried out an intriguing experiment to see what the difference was, brain-wise, between skeptics and believers in paranormal or transcendental phenomena. It is well known that people who are inclined toward that sort of belief also have a tendency to “recognize” patterns in what are actually random bits of information. People characterized by a more skeptical mind, on the other hand, sometimes miss real patterns because they have a relatively high bar for accepting a positive conclusion. Accordingly, Brugger showed that believers often saw words or faces in what were actually meaningless patterns, and that skeptics did not recognize some words or faces when they were in fact there.
Here is the astounding part of Brugger’s findings, however: he and his colleagues administered L-dopa, a substance that is normally given to Parkinson’s patients because it increases the level of dopamine (a neurotransmitter) in the brain. After taking the drug, skeptics saw more faces and words than before, and their response to the experiment became much closer to that of believers! Interestingly, the drug did not further increase the tendency of believers to see patterns where there were none, perhaps because there is a plateau, an upper limit of inducible “superstition” in people. Now, why would dopamine have anything to do with our tendency to see patterns in the world around us? A clue might be found in the fact that dopamine is part of our brain’s reward system: it causes a self-induced natural high when we do something right. Finding patterns to help us understand and navigate the world is generally a good thing, so our brain rewards us for it. Brugger’s experiment simply shows that there is natural variation in the link between dopamine reward and the tendency to see patterns: highly superstitious people and skeptics occupy the extremes of a distribution that finds the rest of us scattered in the middle.
As it turns out, however, it’s not just pleasure that is neurologically related to superstition—so is fear. Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University elegantly demonstrated that lack of control over a given situation—a rather distressing condition for most of us—increases our tendency to be superstitious. The feeling that we cannot control what is happening to us activates an area of the brain known as the amygdala, which, as we have seen, is already closely connected with our emotional responses, and in particular with fear. However, picking up a pattern in what is going on allows us to make sense of the situation and perhaps even make predictions about future developments. This in turn diminishes our fears—as it turns out, regardless of whether our newfound “control” over the situation is based in reality or not.
There is suggestive evidence of the correlation between superstition and lack of control in the cultural anthropological literature. For instance, tribes of the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea) display a conspicuously more ritualistic behavior if they tend to fish in deep rather than shallow waters. Why? The first situation is far more unpredictable than the latter (because of sudden storms, for instance, and because the fishing grounds are generally less familiar), and the increased degree of superstition apparently compensates for the increased amount of uncertainty and fear. The same effect can be seen in sports: it is a well-known fact that baseball pitchers are more superstitious than fielders, which makes sense considering that the outcome of any given play is far more predictable for the latter than the former. (Indeed, this pattern holds even for the same player when he switches from pitching to fielding!)
So Whitson and Galinsky tested various aspects of the connection between lack of control and the perception of illusory patterns (a form of superstition) by means of a set of six experiments in which they could manipulate both the type of pattern presented to their subjects and the feeling of control that the subjects were experiencing. In the first experiment, they established that, indeed, increased lack of control augments the subject’s need to see patterns. Their second experiment went a step further by showing that this increased need to perceive patterns translates into an actual augmented perception of (illusory) patterns. (In this case the subjects were seeing images where in fact there was only random scatter.) Moreover, the third experiment established that simply recalling the memory of a situation in which people experienced lack of control also increased their illusory perception. In the fourth (ingenious) experiment, Whitson and Galinsky were able to distinguish between lack of control and threat in generating superstition, and they found that threat by itself is not sufficient—it is the feeling of lacking control that generates the response. The fifth experiment focused on what happens when the lack of control is experienced in connection with financial matters, such as market volatility and investment decisions. They demonstrated that illusory correlations generated by uncertainty do drive investment decisions—clearly not a sound financial planning strategy.
The last experiment in the Whitson and Galinsky series is the one that gives us a ray of hope, as it addressed the question of how to break the connection between lack of control and superstition. All that was necessary was to give the subjects a chance to affirm themselves, that is, to be reminded that they were in fact capable of handling situations; when this happened, the connection between lack of control and superstition receded to baseline levels. The authors concluded that psychotherapy (in the broad sense of “talk therapy”) may be one way for people to regain a sense of control over difficult situations, simply because it enables them to construct a narrative that makes sense of what is happening to them, thereby undercutting the need for superstition.
Then again, we can seriously ask what may seem a rather strange question for a book dedicated to the pursuit of science and reason: does superstition work? I don’t mean to suggest that engaging in superstitious rituals (like basketball legend Michael Jordan’s routine of always wearing his college shirt underneath his regular jersey for good luck) gives people special causal powers to alter their destiny. But maybe superstition works in a way similar to the placebo effect in medicine: within limits, if patients think they are taking a medication rather than a sugar pill, they actually feel better, and even some objective physiological measures of their health improve. (Before you think of relying too much on the placebo effect, however, be warned that the effects are short-term and do not happen with serious illness.)
It is to this possibility that Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne turned, with surprising results. This was another multi-experiment study, and it’s worth taking a brief look at the sequence of experiments and what Damisch and her colleagues were able to establish in their elegant piece of work. First off, they confirmed that “activating” superstitious behavior in their subjects—by having them perform a task with a ball that the experimenters told them was “lucky”—actually does improve performance. People who thought they were using a lucky ball scored much better than people who thought they were using a regular ball. Conclusion: superstition works! But inquiring minds wish to know—how does it work? Was it that people felt encouraged by the superstition “activation” and that extra degree of self-confidence made the difference? Apparently not: these researchers’ second experiment was able to tease apart the effect of superstition from that of simple encouragement, and it turns out that it really was the superstition that made the difference.
The third experiment began to get at the actual psychological mechanism responsible for the improved performance of the test subjects. As it turns out, the only measurable difference was that the people primed by superstition also experienced a higher degree of “self-efficacy”—that is, they were more confident that they would accomplish what the experiments had set them up to do. But wait a minute: surely higher performance isn’t simply a matter of self-confidence? If that were the case, this story would begin to sound a lot like those self-help gurus who insist that you can accomplish whatever you want if only you “believe in yourself.” Sure enough, Damisch and her colleagues’ fourth experiment went deeper, and what they discovered was that the people primed with superstition simply persisted at their goal for significantly longer than the control subjects did. That is why they performed better—they simply tried harder!
The moral of the story is that the causal chain looks something like this:
You believe in superstition > You engage in superstitious behavior > This increases your level of self-confidence > This in turns causes you to persist longer at the task > You are therefore more likely to succeed, other things being equal.
No magic necessary, just some interesting—and a bit convoluted—human psychology. These results, of course, were obtained under somewhat contrived laboratory situations, but they are consistent with what we know happens “in the field,” that is, in real human situations. For instance, Damisch and her colleagues report that there is a remarkable correlation between the degree of superstition of sports teams and their performance. This is also true for individual players on teams: the more superstitious the player, the better he or she performs. In field studies, of course, it is much harder to tease apart the causal factors, which is why it is the combination of field observations and laboratory studies that is beginning to tell us exactly how superstition works.
All of this notwithstanding, why would human beings go through the trouble of engaging in superstitious beliefs and behaviors to begin with? Why not cut to the chase by skipping the first two (or even three) steps in the causal scenario just spelled out and simply applying themselves longer and harder in order to succeed? Here is where things become more speculative, though certainly not less interesting if our goal is to make sense of the human condition. University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran suggests that superstition arises because of what he calls “the tragedy of cognition.” The idea is that with consciousness comes the ability to understand one’s present status, remember the past, and—crucially—project what might happen in the future. Unlike most (perhaps all) other animals, we know we will die, and our brains clearly recoil from the thought of permanent annihilation. Death is the ultimate situation in which we have no control, and we have seen that superstition is a way to alleviate the fear that is induced by lack of control. Death is the quintessential source of fear, despite much philosophizing about it, so our brains make up stories to reassure us that death is not really the end of it all.
We begin to do this at a very young age. Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona conducted research on how children see the world and confirmed that they have a tendency to see purpose (philosophers say “to project agency”) everywhere, not only in animals (birds are there so that there is music) but in inanimate objects as well (rivers exist so that we can float boats on them). Moreover, Kelemen found, children are very resistant to alternative, nonteleological (non-purpose-driven) explanations—though perhaps not as resistant as some stubborn adults I have come across. The step from there to accepting claims about gods and other conscious forces controlling the universe is really very short.
Interestingly, neurobiological research shows that our brains make a distinction between inanimate and animate objects very early on, and that we automatically endow animate objects with volition. Paul Bloom of Yale says that even babies a few months old distinguish the two categories: if you show them an inanimate object behaving in a complex fashion as a person would do—for example, starting and stopping—the babies appear surprised, but no surprise reaction is elicited if the same behavior is engaged in by a person.
All of this, however, still does not answer the question of where superstitious belief, including beliefs in gods, actually comes from. It has been essentially universal among human societies throughout history and is still prevalent in something like 80 percent of the world population today. We need to get to the bottom of this if we want to embark on a more rational quest for the meaning of life. In the next chapter, then, we’ll look at the sort of answer that may come from combining the insights of two of the most successful scientific disciplines of our days: cognitive science and evolutionary biology.