The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, took an innovative approach by examining two groups of individuals with focal brain lesions resulting from injuries or disorders. One cohort consisted of 106 Vietnam veterans who suffered traumatic brain injuries in combat decades ago. The other included 84 patients from rural Iowa who experienced strokes, surgical complications, or other brain injuries.
I’m shocked. SHOCKED I SAY! Well, not that shocked.
The impact brain chemistry has on all sorts of things is very poorly understood.
There’s this device called a “God Helmet” which purports to induce religious experiences on demand through electromagnetic stimulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
There are other experiments with infrasound which appear to induce ghost like hallucinations:
https://higgs.ph.ed.ac.uk/outreach/higgshalloween-2021/haunted-frequency
Could all the sensations of “a presence” or ghosts or spirits just be by-products of electromagnetic or auditory pollution? Possibly. Nobody wants to look into it because “well, clearly, spirits and such aren’t real!”
It’s a decided lack of curiosity. :(
I’m an atheist and committed skeptic when it comes to anything supernatural, but I’d love to try all of those. I’d really love to try them on a high dose of mushrooms.
They did for the god helmet. The wiki page references it as [17] https://doi.org/10.1558%2Fjcsr.v2i2.24573
The impact brain chemistry has on all sorts of things is very poorly understood.
It’s not just an impact. Everything we are IS brain chemistry. Emotions, thoughts, wants, desires, likes, dislikes, skills, talents… they’re all just a combination of chemicals and firing synapses in the brain. We are biological meat bags. There’s no such thing as a soul.
Of course, God reaches out to those that need it the most /s
I mean, from the abstract it looks like what the study did was localise the specific network of right hemisphere neuronal clusters that, when damaged, predict religious fundamentalism. Since they only studied patients with TBIs, they weren’t testing the claim that brain damage increases the likelihood of fundamentalism. The rate of fundamentalism in the general population could, hypothetically, be higher than among TBI patients (i.e., if brain injuries actually reduce fundamentalism) and this study’s insights would still hold.
I’m gonna copy my unedited response to this when someone posted this study as a Psypost link because I can’t be arsed to change it and it’s the exact same problem.
I like the overall lack of bullshit psypost articles on Lemmy and would like to keep it that way.
If you see a psypost article you should be suspicious.
If you see a psypost article about a paper with a conclusion that you agree with you should be extra suspicious.
EDIT: And now I’ve bothered to read the abstract of the paper and the first bit of the psypost article and they don’t say the same fucking thing.
The journal article is saying they identified brain regions associated with fundamentalism by looking at brain lesions. There may be a seemingly obvious connection to say that the brain lesions caused the fundamentalism, but I don’t see them actually say that after skimming the full text. They focus on what regions are associated with fundamentalism using lesions as a tool to find them.
The psypost article says in the first sentence the damage changes the likelihood of fundamentalism.