I have started a new topic for this as i probably am detracting from the OP intentions with his book.
thats the guy.
obviously this isnt the entirety of my suggestion above, however, certainly this research would form part of it.
I note Newberg says…
One area of future research is the study of the impact of religious experiences on the brain over time. These studies could help us better understand the long-term effects of religious practices on the brain. Another area of future research is looking at religious experiences and brain disorders. Religious experiences may be affected by brain disorders such as temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, or Parkinson’s disease. On the other hand, religious and spiritual practices might be useful in helping people manage these conditions.
I find this quote interesting because i once used to believe that terrorists, if only they could be educated properly, might realise how evil what they do really is. However, in more recent times i have noticed that very often terrorists are highly educated. It seems incomprehensible to me that a highly educated individual can resort to such barbarism and yet take a look at the following news story from Australia a few months ago:
How is it possible that someone who was once a school teacher and indeed even a principle can do such a thing so soon after having been in said career. The man had become delusioned by some kind of religious cult type fanaticism.
How does one rationalise that kind of change in a person? Im sure a lot would put it down to drug abuse but in this case, it appears to be almost entirely as a result of a conspiracy theory laden religious experience and belief.
Such a sad story for all involved. Link to other details:
It is hard to know from the story how religion figured in specifically, but sounds like mental illness had a role as well. I wonder if mental health care is as hard to access in Australia as it is here.
I think i have found my answer to this notion that surely higher academic achievement would reduce terrorism and extremism in general…
Steve addresses this beautifully on page 49 of his book…
The correlation between intelligence and rationality is surprisingly weak, and highly intelligent people can and do succumb to startling lapses in rationality. Albert Einstein expressed a naïve and unshakeable optimism concerning Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Union:
The human brain (and interconnected central nervous system) is incredibly complicated, and what we know about the driving forces behind religiously motivated terrorist attacks is only in the beginning stages at the moment.
Major mental illness is a significant factor in many instances of religiously motivated violence, and I think the medical explanations (e.g. psychosis, substance abuse, head injury) are much easier for us to understand, accept, and treat than the neurotheological experiences being researched by a small number of psychiatrists and neuroscientists such as Newberg.
It’s realistic and objective to say that any intense experience can create lasting changes in the way the human brain is networked. We have a solid body of evidence now about post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance. We finally know that some individuals (but not all individuals) will experience long-term changes to the brain’s architecture following an acute episode involving danger, intense fear for oneself or others, proximity to intense emotional threats (as from a psychopath), and so on.
So intense religious experiences can also affect the brain’s networking priorities, sometimes in helpful ways, sometimes in damaging ways. We tend to want to put religious and spiritual experiences into little boxes that are far removed from other kinds of brain-altering events. But the honest biological reality is that the human brain doesn’t really separate religious and spiritual changes from other kinds of changes. The brain is much more interested in sorting by trait and network category.
An example would be trait empathy (which is not the same as cognitive empathy). The brain always wants to know if trait empathy is a priority (surprisingly, it isn’t for everyone, as in psychopathy), and how strongly it should be weighted against other brain priorities (it’s always a balancing act), and how various life experiences should be sorted when it comes to trait empathy.
A positive religious or spiritual life experience, which is intense (meaning extra neurotransmitters) and which marks a turning point might give the brain lots of new instructions for strengthening the trait empathy network. For example, going on a pilgrimage has the potential to trigger lasting changes: “I met incredible people from all over the world today!”; “We shared our loaves of bread!”; “We sang uplifting songs and hymns at the hostel!”; “I’m really glad I came, even though my feet are killing me!”
On the other hand, a depressing cult experience is never going to give your brain the “food” you need in order to strengthen your trait empathy circuits. With repeated exposure to emotional and physical abuse, your brain changes all its priorities, favouring survival and fear-monitoring skills. It’s a natural biological response to extreme stress, but to heal the brain after such an experience takes considerable time and professional expertise.
It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence, but it does have everything to do with the way the brain’s networks reflects the brain’s emotional, physical, and spiritual priorities.
It may seem at first glance that a topic such as neurotheology has no real bearing on our journey of building a relationship with God, but Jesus’ Kingdom parables make a lot more sense when read them alongside the idea that our understanding is shaped by the kinds of priorities our brain is built from – priorities that can change over time.
In the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4:13-20, Jesus uses the metaphor of the pathways on which the seeds of the word are sown. The seed is the same for everyone, but the results aren’t the same for everyone because some of the pathways are hostile to the seeds and its roots.
We now know the brain is a complex series of pathways that synthesize and integrate and put into action “the seeds of life,” including the seeds we use to build our relationship with God.
A few years ago, I was taking a Moral Theology course, and we had a well reasoned textbook by William C. Mattison about the moral virtues as understood and taught by the Roman Catholic Church. As is often the case, the virtue of temperance had a somewhat lesser status in the grand scheme of the virtues, but as I read, I saw that the Roman Church’s teachings on the four stages of moral growth from intemperance through incontinence to continence and finally to the virtue of temperance align almost perfectly with Jesus’ four pathways in which the seeds of the word can fall.
Mattison, summarizing Aquinas, defines the temperate person as someone who does the right thing for the right reasons but also with the right emotions. He says, “Well-ordered emotions grant to the virtuous person a facility, an ease of action, not present in the person who acts on rational deliberation alone.”
A brain that balances the priorities and methods of both Heart and Mind, System 1 and System 2, faith and science, empathy and self-discipline has such an “ease of action.” It’s going to be an inner place (an inner Kingdom) where one’s chances are much better of being able to hear the word and accept it and bear its fruit (Mark 4:20).
There’s nothing in the Parable of the Sower that says you have to be perfect as you struggle with the demands of temperance. Good soil, after all, is a kind of messy at the best of times. But it’s certainly within our power to ask God to help us pull out the thorns that choke out the words. We still have to do the work of pulling the thorns, but we can and should ask for help from our fellow human beings and especially from our beloved Mother Father God in this task of faith.
This idea seems to be in conflict with the teaching I have received about emotions.
I have been told that emotions cannot be controlled, they come and go without our rational decisions. Emotions are not good or bad, they are just emotions.
Although we cannot control our emotions, we can control our behaviour. Whatever emotions we have, the emotions are not an excuse for bad behaviour.
Emotions can be informative as they rise from our needs, hopes, expectations, etc. Instead of feeling guilty about ‘wrong’ emotions, we could think why we have certain kind of emotions. That might reveal something of the state of our internal self.
This is such a complicated topic, with new research and new theories coming out all the time, that I thought I’d pick up a layperson’s book about the brain and look for a nice, simple quote from a neuroscientist who knows a thing or two about the brain. I grabbed Dean Burnett’s “The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To” (2016). I went straight to the index . . . and discovered there isn’t a single listing for “emotion.” There are plentiful index entries for fear and personality and memory and intelligence, but not a word about that aspect of the human experience we describe in broad strokes as “emotion.”
(On a related note, when I was doing research for my Master of Theological Studies paper, I quickly discovered that in theological texts written from a “modern” perspective, you won’t find any index listings for “Soul,” as if au courant theologians are now embarrassed to talk about the soul.)
So I guess there’s the problem of definitions when we try to talk about right reasons and right emotions.
Although I respect the work of neuroscientists who are trying to understand the brain’s complex functioning, I’m not one of those people who believe the brain can be reduced to purely mechanistic or Materialist models. Some of the parts of our lives that make the least logical sense are the parts that bring us the greatest sense of being close to God.
Long generations of teachers have given us the idea (wrongly, I would argue) that an “emotion” can’t be understood or controlled, making us prisoners of our own fickle selves. But when you think about it, anyone who creates lasting art or music or educational programs, etc., especially in service to God and others here on Earth, is tapping into their illogical “emotions” such as creativity, intuition, humour, love, and forgiveness, and is harnessing those “emotions” through logical education, hard work, learning from mistakes, memory, temperament, and personality to turn the brain’s conflicting goals and priorities into something useful.
So we can control our emotions if we find the right channels or venues.
By the way, I don’t consider either anger or hatred to be “emotions” in the sense of the soul’s needs and expressions. Anger and hatred are eruptions from parts of the brain that are poorly regulated – that is, they’re poorly balanced with brain networks such as the interoception network or the default mode network. (If you’ve ever been the target of someone who’s having a narcissistic rage reaction, you know what I mean about an eruption – there’s no logic and no justice, just a blind need for vengeance.)
“Emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body”
“a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others”
“instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge”
Anger is a fairly typical example of an emotion. As I wrote, emotions such as anger are not an excuse for bad behaviour.
How a person reacts tells quite much about what is inside that person. A narcissistic rage reaction is a revealing one, although a diagnosis should not be based merely on such reactions.
I believe we can affect our emotions indirectly. If emotions rise from our internal needs, hopes, expectations, wounds, unbalance, etc., feeding our internal world with positive, healing stuff should affect the emotions. For some, therapy may help, or praying and meditating. Getting filled with the Holy Spirit will change the emotional reactions because something changes within us. Some symptoms of being filled with the Holy Spirit are being filled with the love of God, heavenly peace, joy and a passion for God.
When I wrote “teacher,” I was thinking specifically of religious teachers and philosophers who have tried to create rigidly defined boxes around the things we experience subjectively inside our own heads on a typical day. These boxes are often used to explain away or justify choices that hurt ourselves or others.
I’m old enough to remember how hard women had to protest against false claims that their “emotions” made them unreliable, fickle, unworthy to vote or hold high office. In many cases, it was well-educated men – leaders, teachers, ministers – who were making these false claims about women and emotions. Fortunately, there were other men – also leaders, teachers, ministers – who saw the fundamental untruth of these claims and joined with women to talk differently about the human experience.
I think it’s a matter of habituation: emotions may come or go, but they can also be somewhat managed in terms of the future by how we respond to them. Two instances from when I was a university students are illustrative:
riding my bicycle along a highway after biking to another town for a meeting, I was pulled roughly along by the wind of a passing trailer truck driving too close to the shoulder line. A panic attack ensued, and I decided to find a phone and call a friend to please come get me. Ever since, when pedaling along a road the mere sound of a heavy vehicle coming up behind me tends to trigger an anxiety episode.
on a campout with others during a spring break week I was trying to learn to water ski on a single ski. I failed to even get up on top of the water several times, but on about my third attempt I managed to balance well enough to break out of the water and start actually skiing, but before even full second passed I wiped out hard enough I was underwater and didn’t know which way was up, and a panic attack ensued. Instead of signalling to be picked up, I signalled for the boat to come around so I could try again despite the panic. Several more times the same thing repeated, but I refused to let the panic win and kept trying until finally I managed to stay up on the single ski for three full seconds before realizing I was about to wipe out again so I released to tow rope and sank into the water. On later trips I felt some trepidation even at skiing with two skis, but even when I wiped out no panic attack came.
I think the difference is that by giving in to the panic in the first instance I made a neural pathway that increase the likelihood of another panic attack in similar circumstances but in the second I avoided forming such a pathway by refusing to let the panic win. This wasn’t control of what emotions hit me in the moment but did serve to control them for the future.
While there may be no logic, there can be explanations, which in my observation boils down to a threat to the person’s self-image. I once watched a guy who’d been asked, “Did you take my wallet?” go into a rage with cursing dominating his word count, violent physical movement over which he seemingly had no control, and what words could be understood boiling down to “I wouldn’t do that I’m not that kind of person how dare you…” It fascinated me that even when shown video of him scooping up the wallet in question his rage just increased and his denials more vehement.
It comes to mind that I’ve seen the opposite, someone confronted with the evidence that he had been stealing from a friend who’d provided temporary housing ; the guy just smiled and said, “Maybe”, like it wasn’t a big deal for him to walk off with over a thousand dollars worth of items. That’s scarier to me because while I can see an explanation for the rage I can’t explain the “So what?” attitude of that “Maybe”.
That sounds too much like what a social worker I knew said, that we choose to feel happy or angry or depressed, that having emotions is a decision we make. I didn’t engage in a dispute, but I thought to myself, “That doesn’t even work for Vulcans”.
I recall a novel where that was inverted: the primary society of the story was matriarchal because males were regarded as too much prisoners of their emotions. It was a fascinating commentary on societal attitudes!