Originally published at: Brain damage may increase religious fundamentalism, study shows - Boing Boing
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Then again, a lot of religious fundies choose their life of bigotry, hate, and exclusion simply because they’re stupid and ignorant arseholes.
Brain damage no doubt leads to all kinds of negative outcomes, including increased credulity. But as an atheist I’ve observed that people come to religious faith – not all of it fundamentalist – for a whole variety of reasons – not all of them bad ones.
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They need to broaden the study beyond people with known brain damage.
Could religiosity and cognitive dissonance actually cause brain damage?
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Yes. the only people with brain damage are religious people… /s
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That’s not what I said.
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Those sample groups seem rather small and specific; one would think more studies done over more time with more subjects would be needed before making any kind of definitive assessment.
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Interesting. My kids have (varying degrees of) brain damage from a tough start in life, and though they’ve not shown any particularly fundamentalist religious traits, I can certainly report that an understandable and entirely expected tendency towards absolutism or authoritarianism is occasionally noticeable.
I shall have to read the article proper.
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No, but the study also didn’t indicate any evidence of religion in general causing brain damage. It didn’t even indicate that fundamentalism causes brain damage. And the fact that billions of people on this planet subscribe to some religiousness would indicate there’s no reason to believe that religiousness causes brain damage. There’s not enough there to justify a study. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous and bigoted question.
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The authors characterize it as large, but for an epidimeological study they are pretty small:
The first group consisted of 106 male Vietnam War veterans who had sustained traumatic brain injuries during combat. These men, aged between 53 and 75 at the time of brain imaging, were part of a long-term study conducted at the National Institutes of Health. The second group included 84 patients from rural Iowa who had experienced brain injuries from various causes, such as strokes, surgical resections, or traumatic head injuries. This second group was more diverse in terms of gender and had a broader range of injury causes.
Sample size issues aside, there is just a lack of study controls here - they didn’t look at people without traumatic brain injuries to understand what their networks look like (and whether the same networks associated with fundamentalism crop up there), and they didn’t look at people before their injuries. And they haven’t evaluated multiple hypotheses about what might be driving fundamentalism. To their credit, the study authors acknowledge all of these limitations.
My hope is that the media can resist politicizing this study.
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Right… because it’s not the brain damage that causes religious fundamentalism or vice versa… it’s the environment. If your family isn’t particularly religious, and especially not fundamentalist, it’s unlikely they’ll adopt that…
That’s interesting. I think that’s what religious fundamentalism ultimately is, an authoritarian ideology. And authoritarianism comes in a variety of flavors, only some of which are religious.
Either way, how we avoid people embracing authoritarianism is a society that rejects it, encourages kindness, equity, and thoughtfulness and works to build immunity into our institutions. Robust democratic practices in all areas of life helps.
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This seems like one of those papers that will get retracted.
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Humans have been inventing religions for probably millions of years. Our brains seem wired in such a way to do that, out of a need to explain observable phenomena. It seems a natural tendency that needs to be overcome with rational thought. Just like the natural urge to fight or fuck needs to be tempered most of the time. We just monkey brain after all!
I reject all religions and magical thinking but that’s after careful thought and self reflection. As a small child I was exposed to all of that (as are most of us), but I didn’t immediately reject it, I was probably 10 years old before I had the faculties to really think about it.
I think most deeply religious people are victims of indoctrination, not physical brain damage. But thinking physically alters the brain so I wonder if the effects of believing things in opposition to reality are physically detrimental? It could possibly be studied is all I’m saying, except you can’t because that would be offensive to religious types.
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After what I have seen in a Red state regarding who controls the lives of disabled, addicted, mentally ill, and/or indigent elderly people and what they teach in order to provide shelter or basic care I question how they isolate for that kind of thing in any disabled population in the US.
People adapt to survive, especially people who are undergoing some kind of cognitive decline.
Like how do they decide at what point the “confabulations” end and the “religious fundamentalism” begins for instance?
Anecdotally I’ve had a chance to observe demented and non-demented fundamentalism and based on my personal experience I’d say there is a definite difference in the sense that “ritual” can be a symptom of mental illness but need not always be so. But the line is probably… uncomfortably subjective.
Also anecdotally I have observed some one go through rapid cognitive decline and death who was an atheist and I perceived the same shift in their personality during their decline though they never converted to any kind of fundamentalist religion or religion at all.
My point maybe is I’m tired of watching my loved ones die only to be subsumed into numb statistics people argue about on the internet but I digress… so I’ll bring it back OT.
I question what good a study like this is to people if all people are going to do is use it to shame others on their way to various graveyards and I question what biases such a study can control for in the extant social environment.
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To imagine that religion is always bad, because you find it all the same, despite the very real differences in religious practices, isn’t helpful. Context matters. Bayard Rustin or Benjamin Lay pr Rumi aren’t/weren’t Joel Osteen or Abdul of the Taliban… I find it weird to throw literally billions of human beings into the same bucket with no real reflection of how they might be in reality.
I don’t think we’re merely holding down wild impulses.
Good for you. But that’s YOU, and to assume that your position is the only “correct” one and is the only one that is arrived at in a thoughtful and carefully considered way is to be highly dismissive of the lives of others. Are some people just miming what they think will keep them in good standing in society? No doubt. But many people spend time thinking just as deeply as you about the nature of the world. They’re not inherently bad people just because they reach a different worldview than you.
We’re all victims of indocrination to some degree. it’s the nature of modern society. The postmodernist didn’t look askance at modernity for no reason.
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The study itself is ridiculous and bigoted, clothed in a veneer of scientific rigor. I question the motives behind it.
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While the study may have its flaws and shortcomings, the same can be said for almost any study, particularly in the medical field. Having read the linked PsyPost article, the authors acknowledge the shortcomings. They are not trying to say they’ve solved religious fundamentalism - they are saying that those traits are associated with brain lesion patterns in a subset of brain injured patients. Do you see some sort of academic malpractice in what they’ve done here? Have they somehow manipulated their brain-imaging data? Falsified other data? If we don’t have evidence of that then it is dangerous to start speculating about it - it undermines the entire field of science at a time when public confidence in scientists is wavering.
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This is exactly what i was going to point out. Fundamentalism (in my experience) tends to be a combination of family/social networks and , for want of a better term, “ease of fitting in.” Most of the folks who reject their upbringing do it because they cannot stay there and be who they are. For the rest, leaving means abandoning their social supports, which most are not very eager to do. Making it synonymous with pathology is cheaping out. “It’s not their fault, they can’t help it.” I don’t think so. It’s a choice, and so is leaving it. That is a very hard thing to do. We had to make that choice, and parts of it suck. I understand how difficult it is. But it is still a choice.
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Thats the rub, here we are talking the the details of the ‘what’, and not the details of the ‘why’.
Most media will take this study and run with the idea that religious people have brain damage.
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Unless I’m missing something; that seemed to be the entire focus of the study: not whether lesions lead to religiosity; but whether they are associated with a very particular style of adherence and practice.
They’d need a considerably more varied sample to verify; but the going hypothesis seems to be that the brain damage causes particularly extreme and inflexible approaches to existing beliefs, more or less regardless of content, rather than making people easy marks for things they would have previously rejected out of hand.
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It’s a social relation. And we’re social animals. Religion sticks around with humanity, because it is certainly fulfilling a particular need, that of social relationships, community, etc. And for some, leaving even authoritarian and abusive religions can be difficult, in the same way leaving ANY abusive, authoritarian relationship can be difficult. But sure enough, it’s a choice!
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