Are our brains wired differently?

[JitterbugPerfume]

and if so, how? Skeptics and non skeptics will never agree on the basics. How is our brain chemistry different (if it is)


Is it hardwired? Can we / they change?

This is a serious enquiry

[salvorhardin]

1. It's a good question

I don't think there's any good answers yet though. There are some studies that show differences in how skeptics/scientists think vs. believers and differences in brain chemistry (for instance, skeptics tend to have less dopamine floating around in their noggins) but nothing to say that the wiring is substantively different or whether the scientific outlook is inherited or learned.

Here's the thing though. We'd be the abnormal ones. You've got to remember that in the vast majority of people who engage in pseudoscientific, paranormal or just plain noncritical thinking, their brains are working perfectly normally. They're not crazy, they're not unintelligent, most of the time they're not even ignorant. It's just that humans evolved in such a way that probabilistic thinking is not only the norm, but the default. When it comes to competing ideas, no matter what they are, the human brain suppresses deductive reasoning and relies on best-fit pattern matching and emotions to weight choices.

More and more I'm thinking that what it comes down to is morals and values. We've learned to value logical deductive reasoning over probabilistic emotional reasoning. So when our ventral-medial prefrontal cortexes make that decision to go with deductive or probabilistic reasoning, we're more likely to go with the former.

Anyway, that's just an idea I've been kicking around and I am not a neuroscientist so take that with a boulder of salt. It's just speculation.

[beam me up scottie]

5. Why does that make me want to cry?

Thank you for your valuable insight, Sal, I know how much time you've spent collecting this research.

And for making me glad to be abnormal. :)

[salvorhardin]

12. I don't know if it's something that should cause us angst

After all, the human mind is a beautifully adapted piece of computing machinery. Without probabilistic reasoning and the kind of wild intuition it confers we would never have survived long enough for belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal to have become a problem. Neither would have survived without deductive reasoning. In fact, most people, even believers, are able to pursue critical reasoning perfectly fine and do so every day. If, as some scientists think, our ability to reason deductively is a side effect of having developed language then it seems highly doubtful that there's a structural difference in the brains of skeptics/scientists and believers.

And that's what I'm hoping because then it does all come down to morals and values. Those can and do change fairly quickly. The human brain not so much.

[beam me up scottie]

32. True.

Although the mother of a crystal child thinks that because her daughter's brain is too small for her skull, it's a sign that they're evolving:

Linda had a brain scan done to check that there was no serious problem relating to Angela's persistent headaches. The scan was normal, but showed that Angela's skull is relatively too big, and that there is a gap between the brain and the skull. Obviously an evolutionary step, as the species provides either for more brain capacity, or for a larger skull to "carry" the heavier and larger energies of the subtle bodies in a multi-dimensional being.

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Indigo_Children/id/222753">middle of the page, skip everything else if you can't tolerate moonbat shit.

It's all in the spin. :D

[JitterbugPerfume]

6. would a scan

show activity in different areas in a skeptic/non skeptic brain?

[salvorhardin]

11. Maybe for specific tasks

I think you'd want to take a look at things like attention and decision making (particularly moral decision making), but, and this is critical, it wouldn't tell you why. My feeling is that brain scans, even fMRI, wouldn't be very helpful in answering your original question.

It's late, and I'm tired, so I don't think I can do your question justice but here's an article by Michael Shermer talking about the limitations of brain scans.

Five Ways Brain Scans Mislead Us
Colorful scans have lulled us into an oversimplified conception of the brain as a modular machine
Scientific American Mind - November 5, 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=five-ways-brain-scans-mislead-us&print=true

In short, and this is why I'm mistrustful of any study purporting to having found a neurological difference between scientists/skeptics/atheists and believers in pseudoscience and the paranormal, is that our brains are not neatly divided into little functional processing units. Sure, there are areas of the brain devoted to, for example, processing visual stimuli at a very low level but when it comes to things like cognition the brain is a vast network. Most areas of the brain are activated under many different conditions. So you can't look to a brain scan that shows a portion of the temporal lobe lighting up when a religious person ponders religion and say, aha! there's the god spot. Other types of reasoning may well activate the same area and probably do.

[LeftishBrit]

16. I doubt that it would do so consistently.

'Non-sceptic', after all, covers a lot of beliefs - and 'sceptics' are also pretty diverse. However, there is already evidence that religious experiences are associated with temporal lobe activity. Since some of the 'non-sceptic' approaches are religious or quasi-religious, I would guess that they might be associated with a tendency toward activity in the same general area.

[salvorhardin]

19. I think what we're seeing with the temporal lobe studies is something much more general

After all, if we strip away all the Christian or other religious imagery associated with the types of experiences reported in temporal lobe studies we're essentially left with diassociative and transcendent experiences. Plenty of atheist skeptics and scientists have the same sorts of experiences. I think it comes down to how we personally interpret those experiences. For instance, one type of experience that I think we've all had that's decidedly nonreligious but has many of the same qualities as a religious experience is the "Aha! moment". When we've been working hard to understand something and all of a sudden everything becomes clear, it can be as if the workings of the universe are laid bare before us.

[LeftishBrit]

49. Interesting point

It may well be that the difference between religious and non-religious people lies more in how they interpret their experiences than in the experiences themselves.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

17. Good post sal

More and more I'm thinking that what it comes down to is morals and values. We've learned to value logical deductive reasoning over probabilistic emotional reasoning. So when our ventral-medial prefrontal cortexes make that decision to go with deductive or probabilistic reasoning, we're more likely to go with the former.

I can relate a lot of what you say to my own experience as a teenager. I was a theist then and believed in the supernatural. I used probabilistic emotional reasoning to make evaluations about past occurrences, and to form world views and predictions.

I became interested in science and philosophy as a young adult and moved away from theism as the starting point of my approach to the universe. The rigors of reading a history degree helped to equip me with the analytical tools and reasoning that had me abandon theism towards a materialist conception of the universe.

[JitterbugPerfume]

26. Thank you Sal!

you have been a tremendous help in answering my question

[Pale Blue Dot]

2. I think we ALL have a hard time changing.

I think it's a worthwhile area of study, however, to examine how skeptics and non-skeptics deal with cognitive dissonance (what we do with information that conflicts with our convictions or long held beliefs).

[uriel1972]

3. We still don't have a good picture

of how the mental illnesses work. I'd say until we can pinpoint those we're going to have a lot of trouble fine tuning it down to how skeptics/non-skeptics work.

[Heddi]

4. are the brains of Atheists and Evangelists wired differently?

what causes any two groups of people to hold thoughts that are diametrically opposed? Flat-earthers vs. round earthers? Those who believe in Evolution vs. Creationists? People who hate chocolate ice cream vs. chocoholics?

I am (duh) a skeptic. A professional cynic. My mother, on the other hand, believes everything and anything that anyone tells her. If she reads it on the internet, it's true. It's ESPECIALLY true if it comes through email with 24,000 FW:'s in front of it. Double Plus Good if there's an animated GIF or something attached. That makes it ESPECIALLY truthful.

She is a gullible person and falls for everything in a very bad way. She is a scam-artists dream. However, she is incredibly intelligent, a talented artist and writer. She just has a really hard time using logic and reason to make decisions, and she tends to go for the most far-out bit of reasoning when attempting to figure out why something happened, or what something was, etc.

Ex: Sleep Paralysis. We have both experienced this independently. It is a very well researched phenomena. However, in my mother's mind, it's not Sleep Paralysis. What is happening is evil spirits and ghosts are sitting on her chest, preventing her from moving, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Even though she fits every profile of those who would suffer sleep paralysis, even though her symptoms are exactly the same as others with sleep paralysis...hers is different.

Even when presented with evidence that this is a common occurance, she disbelieves it. SHE KNOWS that she's being terrorized by ghosts or spirits. She KNOWS she was abducted by aliens. She KNOWS that the moon landings were faked.

Why? I don't know. Maybe she enjoys the idea that there is more "mystery" to life than what boring old science explains....I don't know.

For me, I'm the opposite. When I first experienced sleep paralysis, I was in high school, and went to the library the next day and read up on sleep disorders and found sleep paralysis. THe ideas of ghosts sitting on my chest never occured to me....but it was my mother's first thought.....

I dunno.

[bluedawg12]

8. Here are some interesting PET scan images of the brain in prayer

or meditation and brain activity does change. Interestingly, one can be taught these techniques, so while they seem personal and spiritual, I tend to think of it as training the brain to uncouple certain functions, like the orientation area for self awareness or the frontal lobe, for executive functions. I suppose once taught, learned or self- discovered, these techniques may appeal to certain people who then enjoy mediation, prayer or speaking in tongues and that is internalized as faith.

http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=185#physiology



And if you look at the orientation area, it goes dramatically down in its activity during the meditation practice. It is mostly yellow and just a little bit of red, compared to what you see in the normal waking state. So this area of the brain becomes much less active. We think this is part of what is associated with somebody losing that sense of self. They feel at one with God, at one with their spiritual mantra, whatever it is they are looking at. This was a group of Tibetan Buddhist meditators.



We also looked Franciscan nuns in prayer. We saw some interesting similarities and differences. The nuns were doing a prayer called centering prayer, which is kind of meditation. They were focusing on a particular phrase or prayer. It is much more verbally based, I guess, than the meditation of the Tibetans. Again, one of the similarities we saw was a fair amount of increase in this red activity in the frontal lobes. So they activated their frontal lobes as they were focusing on this particular prayer or phrase from the Bible.



But we did see a similarity of decreases of activity in this orienting part of the brain; again, it’s all more yellow with just a little bit of red, compared to what we saw in the original baseline state.

[Heddi]

10. It's not the God Spot that's been talked about recently, but I remember in Nursing School

learning about a spot in the brain that, when manipulated by brain surgeons during brain surgery (duh!), caused the pt to have "out of body" experience and other other-wordly experience type things.

Now with my mom, she's not a pray-er. She does, however, tend to be, uh, the opposite of Occam's Razor. Rather than going for the most simple explaination, she finds the MOST convoluted explaination. I would almost wonder if it could be classified as a Mental Illness because it's so pathologic and frankly has really affected her life negatively in the past, but I don't know. I'm a heart nurse.....I don't know nuthin about the noggin.

[bluedawg12]

20. I wonder if there is a difference between people that are intensely spiritual

and the everyday folk who attend say once a week, don't have epiphanies but learn the politics of rw theocratic thought by rote.

Is it possible that no part of their brain lights up? Except maybe the oldest lizard part of the brain?

I mean they can walk, eat, chew, and breath? :evilgrin:

[mr blur]

13. Well I'm not a scientist, but -

there's an incredible amount of mystery to the bits of life that boring old science can explain, if you ask me.

[bluedawg12]

7. Some ruminations and an interesting article.

I wonder if it starts off as a basic personality trait early in life? Perhaps analytical minds crave order and abhor chaos and feel more secure with control than loss of control.

One of the reasons I like science and reason is that it gives me some tools that allow me to sit down and map out any problem in life and have a sense of calm that I will come up with the best solution for myself, for that moment in time.

Conversely, I wonder if it is just the opposite side of the same coin with people that seek out spiritual answers, it is a sense of control yet at the same time it is an abdication of the responsibility of decision making.

Both end up with a sense of comforting order in their lives but in the first instance it comes from internal problem solving skills, in the second it seems to be from pre-programmed problem solving skills.

This doesn’t answer anything about neurotransmitter, or neurocircuitry differences in people who think scientifically and those who tend not to. But this might be interesting, I just found it.

BTW- the story of the woman with the "full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, 'That was my brain dying.'" There is a non-sentimental realist, no ghosts on her chest.
With my luck that's probably what I would say, along with, "Gee, I hope I didn't lose any Betz cells." However, I wonder what is more comforting and who is happier? I guess that's an entirely different question.


It is a neurophysiologic perspective even if it is at a Pew Forum site:

http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=185#physiology
How Our Brains are Wired for Belief
Monday, May 5, 2008
Key West, Florida


The next slide is going to be the same person, now speaking in tongues. If you look in the frontal lobe area, where the arrows are pointing, as I toggle back and forth, you can see there’s a lot less activity in the frontal lobes when the person is speaking in tongues. So when they started to speak in tongues, and we see this in all the people we studied, their frontal lobe activity goes down.

This actually makes a lot of sense because in contrast to the meditators and nuns, who are focusing on doing something, the way the Pentecostals describe speaking in tongues is they are not focusing on doing it; they let it happen. They just let their own will go away and allow this whole thing to take place. They don’t feel like they’re in control of this process. And the findings on the scan at least support the phenomenological experience they have.

<snip>

"At this point we don’t have that answer and this is, again, the big epistemological question about how we understand what reality is, how we begin to think about our beliefs about reality and what we can say, ultimately, about what these scans mean in the context of what’s really going on. But I think there’s still some very valuable information in at least understanding what’s going on inside the person who is having this particular experience.

<snip>

Let me pause for a second and ask what we talk about when we’re talking about people who are not religious. What is it about atheists that is different? Are they different, or are they the same? There is some evidence to suggest there are differences. Some of you may have read a book called The God Gene. It was an interesting study that showed there was a significant, although relatively mild, correlation between a gene that coded for what’s called the VMAT-2 receptor, which has to do with serotonin and dopamine, two very important neurotransmitters in the brain, and feelings of self-transcendence. The fact that there’s a correlation between the neurotransmitters and some feeling that’s related to spirituality is interesting. Maybe there is something physiologically to this.

In our studies, we found – going back to the thalamus that we talked about earlier – that people who were long-term practitioners and meditators tended to have a lot more asymmetry: One side of their thalamus was much more active than the other, compared to the normal population of people who are not long-term meditators. I don’t know what that means per se, but it seems to suggest that the ways in which we process information about the world might be fundamentally different.

<snip>

One of the questions we have to ask is, if you are a non-believer or an atheist, is that the result of a lack of having such experiences, or are you having these experiences and then ultimately rejecting them? One of the examples we talked about in our last book was a woman who had a near-death experience. She described it as the full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, “That was my brain dying.” That was her interpretation of it, whereas other people have that experience, and they say, “That was me transcending into the next realm; that was my spiritual experience, and it was transformative; it changed who I was.”

[Silent3]

27. I see religion, more often than reason, stemming from a desire for order and control

I wonder if it starts off as a basic personality trait early in life? Perhaps analytical minds crave order and abhor chaos and feel more secure with control than loss of control.

A rational, skeptical mind has to accept that a lot of things are beyond his or her control: that there's no Great Plan being fulfilled by the tragic death of a loved one, that prayer isn't going to stave off tornados or earthquakes, that there's nothing we can do (short of, perhaps technology nowhere near available) to make sure we live forever, etc.

Even with slogans like, "Let go, Let God", it's about making a decision (to let go, a primary decision one does have control over, leading to that which supposedly follows) that will put your life into the hands of the ultimate in order and control, a magical father figure who will take care of everything, protect you, and make sure everything turns out right.

[mr blur]

28. I think you've got something there -

The number of times on places like FSTDT one reads Fundie rants when they say things like, "Why do you atheists bother to carry on living when you have nothing to look forward to after this life?" and "How can you know what's right and what's wrong if there's no God!?"

[bluedawg12]

31. I was thinking some of the the same things as Silent3 and mr blur.

About the issue of turning one's life over to an authority figure who will then protect you, or, the other mantra, as long as I do the will of (X,Y,Z) I am doing the right thing and I'll be OK is, a sense of ultimate and cosmic security. The I have a "Super Daddy who will protect me," ideal. It's mostly passive in terms of problem solving.

On the other hand, being rational means admitting that there are an infinite number of things we have no control over, and just knowing that means..."control!" Real control, control over ones ability to reason out things. I may not win every fight in life and I should not expect to do so, but, there is a lot of comfort in knowing that I might be able to figure out why I lost. That's active problm solving.

The other notion about morality being a consequence of organized religion and the fear that atheists cannot be moral people. geesh.I would rather figure out why, for example, lying is wrong, for myself and look at all of the consequences of that behavior, then decide how to live my life, then learn it as item number 5 on some moral menu.

Or, to return to science, I would prefer to discover how things work rather than rely on some very old writings that were never meant to be scientific.

[Orrex]

9. My skepticism came in an epiphany achieved while sitting atop a mesa in the lotus position

Something about my chakras just fell into alignment and poof! Suddenly I didn't believe anything!

[TZ]

14. I think there might be.

I read a story on DU not too long ago about a neurosurgeon that after having a stroke became a very spiritual, religous person. Since we know that stokes damage parts of the brain permanently forcing a person to use different areas to compensate, it sounded to me like she became religious because of that brain damage....

[uriel1972]

15. ooooh tread carefully

some people might not like the idea that religion comes from damaged brains, no matter how strong the evidence might be (it would explain a lot tho) :)

[TZ]

18. I'm not sure its from damaged brains so much

as religious people tend to use a different part of their brain more..sort of a version of the old "right hemisphere, left hemisphere" debate.
I do truly think that skeptics and atheists use different areas of the brain in general from non-skeptics and believers.

[bluedawg12]

22. There are definitely abnormal states where people experience

hyper-religiosity.

If I recall, some schizophrenics have almost exclusively religion based delusions and hallucinations.

I'm not saying people of faith are crazy, I do wonder if some of the great seers, prophets and the like, weren't delusional?
...........

This is fascinating:

Medicina (Kaunas). 2008;44(7):529-35.
Are religious delusions related to religiosity in schizophrenia?Rudaleviciene P, Stompe T, Narbekovas A, Raskauskiene N, Bunevicius R.
Vilnius Mental Health Center, Vilnius, Lithuania. [e-mail]

This article attempts to explore the phenomenology of religious delusions in patients suffering from schizophrenia and to determine parallels between personal religiosity and content of religious delusions. We have studied the content of delusions in patients with schizophrenia looking for religious themes using Fragebogen fur psychotische Symptome (FPS)--a semi-structured questionnaire developed by the Cultural Psychiatry International research group in Vienna. A total of 295 patients suffering from schizophrenia participated in this study at Vilnius Mental Health Center in Lithuania, among whom 63.3% reported religious delusions. The most frequent content of religious delusion in women was their belief that they were saints and in men--that they imagined themselves as God. Univariate multiple logistic regression analyses revealed that four factors such as marital status, birthplace, education, and subjective importance of religion were significantly related to the presence of religious delusions. However, multivariate analyses revealed that marital status (divorced/separated vs. married OR (odds ratio)=2.0; 95% CI, 1.1 to 3.5) and education (postsecondary education vs. no postsecondary education OR=2.3; 95% CI, 1.4 to 3.9), but not personal religiosity, were independent predictors of the religious delusions. We conclude that the religious content of delusions is not influenced by personal religiosity; it is rather related to marital status and education of schizophrenic patients.

........

This is tragic:

http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news04/dec04/religiosity.html

In the News
As published in the San Antonio Express-News, December 13, 2004.

Religiosity Common Among Mothers Who Kill Children

By Lisa Falkenberg, Associated Press

"Andrea Yates said Satan told her to drown her five children.

Deanna Laney said the Lord sent her signs to beat her three sons with stones.

And the night before Dena Schlosser became the latest Texas mother to take her child's life, she told her husband she wanted to give her children to God. The suburban Dallas mother was charged with capital murder for severing her 10-month-old baby's arms. Attorneys were expected to discuss her competency in court Tuesday.

Women who kill their children commonly cite God, the devil and other religious influences for their actions. Although the mothers are also often found to be severely mentally ill or psychotic, the recurring theme of religiosity begs the question: Is religion to blame?

Theologians, sociologists and psychiatrists generally say no. They say religiosity is a common theme among psychotics because hallucinations and delusions usually take familiar forms.

"Most of the people in nut houses are religious because most Americans are religious," said Rodney Stark, a social sciences professor at Baylor University. "We know what causes schizophrenia and it isn't going to church. It's biochemical."

But some experts suggest mental illness is harder to detect and treat in faiths more inclined to attribute odd behavior to Satan and trust prayer over medicine.

"They're not seeing this as a mental illness. They're seeing it as the person having demons, perhaps, or a sin problem or not being spiritually fulfilled," said Roger Olson, a theology professor at Baylor's Truett Seminary.

And, in some fundamentalist environments, symptoms of mental illness can appear normal: Obsession over a religious leader can be interpreted as religious fervor, and delusions can be interpreted as religious visions.

Schlosser's husband wasn't alarmed when she told him she wanted to give her children to God, according to Texas' Child Protective Services. The agency took temporary custody of the couple's other girls, ages 6 and 9, after the baby was killed, and cited the father's failure to act after his wife's warning.

The Schlossers attended the non-denominational Water of Life church, led by Doyle Davidson, a self-proclaimed prophet who teaches that women possess a rebellious jezebel spirit and that the Ten Commandments don't apply to the righteous.

Schlosser's parents believe Davidson's teachings helped push her toward a psychotic break, but Davidson dismisses those claims, saying he had little interaction with the Schlossers.

In Laney's case, the lifelong Pentecostal told her congregation in the East Texas town of Tyler that the world was ending and God told her to get her house in order. No one expressed concern, though psychiatrists later determined Laney was psychotic at the time.

Laney used rocks to beat to death two young sons and severely maim her toddler in 2003. She was acquitted by reason of insanity earlier this year.

Dr. Phillip Resnick, who testified in Laney's trial, said he was struck by comments Laney's pastor made when asked about symptoms of mental illness.

"He indicated that, had some of these things come to his attention, he would have referred her to a religious person, rather than to a psychiatrist, to correct her religious perceptions," Resnick said.

"If you're a hammer, things look like a nail. So if you're a religious person, you tend to think of religion as the answer to the problem," he said.

Olson said that while religion doesn't cause mental illness, he believes existing conditions can be inflamed by religious environments where leaders demand absolute obedience and claim to speak for God.

People with schizophrenia, personality disorders and a host of other mental disorders may be drawn such faiths for their structure, he said.

"This kind of culture, religious atmosphere, group dynamic can set up a situation where that person is more likely to act out in aggressive ways under tremendous pressure," Olson said.

In a recent study of 39 Ohio and Michigan women — all acquitted by reason of insanity in the deaths of their children since the 1970s — about 15 had religious-themed delusions, said Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a psychiatry fellow at Case Western Reserve University.

Another study of 56 Michigan mothers referred for psychiatric evaluations from 1974-1976 after killing their children found nearly a fourth of them experienced religious delusions, said study co-author Dr. Catherine Lewis, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

She said nearly all the women were Christian and many attended fundamentalist churches, but cautioned against assumptions.

"What isn't clear is what's causing what," she said. "Is the church causing people to develop these feelings or are people with these feelings more likely to gravitate toward a fundamentalist church?"

Yates, Laney and Schlosser all followed Christian fundamentalist teachings. So did their husbands, but with less zeal than their wives.

Schlosser's parents said she became religious in the last several years, reading the Bible and trying to convert them to the Davidson's teachings. Laney became much more devout before the killings, hearing God's voice and waking early to study the Bible, according to trial testimony.

Yates, the Houston mother sentenced to life in prison, said she drowned her children in 2001 to save them from eternal damnation. Before the killings, she corresponded with a traveling preacher who taught that only the saved could avoid hell's fires.

Resnick said religious delusions often convince mothers that they're saving children from evil or proving their faith to God.

"If you think about why a parent would kill a child, since there's a natural love and protective instinct, one would say it would have to be overcome with a psychotic belief that they're doing what's in the child's best interest," he said."
......

[uriel1972]

25. I guess it's harder to detect hyper-religiosity

in a full on hyper-religious environment. On another note I can't help being reminded of Abraham being directed by god to sacrifice his son Isaac or Ishmael depending on your faith.

[bluedawg12]

30. The late Molly Ivens once said

that the US goes in 20 year cycles of religiosity, at that time with the rise of shrub, she was so right.

It was followed by eight years on mixing religion with everything from politics, to law to science.

It would be nice to achieve a happy balance, perhaps when religionists get out of politics? Of course, it's too lucrative.

[uriel1972]

35. I don't know what it is the US

that it keeps having these great revivals and millenial panics. Other countries manage to get by like those in Europe and Australia without them. I can't remember who said it, or the exact quote but it was something like 'The USA went from the middle ages to the modern age without passing through the Enlightenment.' I wonder if this could be it.

[bluedawg12]

50. We had access to the Enlightenment

the founding fathers were products of the Elightenment, my guess is that our populace is poorly educated by comparison to other nations and we are more likely to revert to superstition.

[dropkickpa]

36. My ex, the baby daddy

was paranoid schizophrenic, and, when unmedicated, was a super religio nutball, seeing demons and the devil and shit, on a mission from god, he was a soldier of god, all kinds of really whacked out shit, and he was dangerous and violent. His nutball super reliofascist family didn't help that shit either, making it all that much worse. Medicated, he was pretty damn normal and coherent.

[beam me up scottie]

44. Wow.

I am so sorry you and dropkid have to deal with that. My ex turned into a bully when drunk and that was bad enough.

Could he be dangerous if he skips his meds?

[dropkickpa]

46. Oh yeah, he was dangerous during a break

When I was pregnant, I had him "302'ed" (involuntarily committed), and he was held for the max 21 days. He stayed on his meds until after Dropkid was born then he decided the doctors had been wrong all along and stopped taking his meds and I dropped his ass.

I told him he wasn't allowed near her or to have contact with her until he acknowleged he had serious issues and showed me proof he was under a doctor's care and taking meds correctly for at least 6 months. Haven't seen or talked to him in 8 years.

His wife in Cali tells me she's now kicked him out and told him the same thing (she got in contact with me about 6 months ago when she started having lots of the exact same problems with him and got curious about his stories about what happened with us).

On meds, he's pretty much an atheist, so the scariest part is that off meds he is a religious zealot and believes his "faith" justifies his actions. He truly believes god is directing him, and that it is his duty to carry out gods will and he is responsible for cleaning up the world. It manifests in bizarre ways, too. He's being watched by the feds and demons (they work together in an agenda for the devil), left handed people are evil, Jews are evil (they killed jebus), all kinds of shit. Scraps of paper on the ground are messages left for him by other soldiers of god, and he has to collect them all and organize them to get further orders, etc. It's sad.

[beam me up scottie]

47. Egad. You are one brave lady, dropkid is lucky to have you as a mom.

Now I know you (like me) didn't knowingly marry Mr. Hyde, so when did you realize that Dr. Jekyll had another side?

"On meds, he's pretty much an atheist, so the scariest part is that off meds he is a religious zealot and believes his "faith" justifies his actions."

I wonder how many murderous religious zealots in the past suffered from the same disease?

[dropkickpa]

48. Luckily I didn't marry him

Though it was a close thing! I started to notice slight hints here and there shortly before I got knocked up, and after that he really went downhill very quickly as I stopped going out (for obvious reasons) and he started getting sloppy with his meds and then quit altogether when I was 3 months along.

[bluedawg12]

21. hey gang! I found two interesting articles.

The first is a really handy review of neuranatomy from wikipsych.

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Brain

The other is this fascinating phenom, where the religious right, and for that matter organized religion is bound and determined to show a teleological basis for our "need for religion,' I notice I keep finding this type of neurophysiology tauted by religious or rw or both, sites, still, it is interesting.
...........
http://www.religionnewsblog.com/345

Science and Religion:
God in the Brain

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 345 • Posted: Monday August 12, 2002

The Salt Lake Tribune, Saturday, August 10, 2002
http://www.sltrib.com/08102002/saturday/760514.htm
BY TONY SEMERAD
...........

Now to find some articles about the brains of skeptics! :evilgrin:

Hey, maybe our neurotransmitters soar and respond to data and analytical stuff instead of mantras? :P

[salvorhardin]

23. Here's one you might enjoy

From the archives of my site:
Blast from the past: Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry
http://archives.neuralgourmet.com/2006/09/21/blast_from_the_past_paranormal_beliefs_linked_to_brain_chemistry

You might want to look at Peter Brugger's work in general.
http://www.neuroscience.ethz.ch/research/neural_basis/brugger_p

Phantomology: The Science of the Body in the Brain
Peter Brugger
http://www.artbrain.org/phantomlimb/brugger.html

[bluedawg12]

24. Yup. I was wondering about the addictive quality of faith systems

if the brain shows altered physiology and different brain centers are seen to be activated and inactivated during prayer, meditation and chanting, as seen on PET scans, that is certainly going to be accompanied by different levels of neurotransmitters and ultimately in differing levels of a sense of well being.

Higher dopamine levels equate to a higher level of well being, if I recall ( I am typing this on the run), some people could then be addicted to the altered states of prayer, meditation, speaking in tongues and other rituals, not saying there is anything wrong with being say for example, addicted to meditation, it would make sense to seek a physiologically quite state, lower blood pressure, a sense of calm, lowered heart rate.


Apparently, dopamine also affects, to some extent how we order and interpret data to construct realities, as in the example about seeing a face in various abstract shapes.

Interesting stuff.

[bluedawg12]

33. ...

[beam me up scottie]

34. !

:spray:
:rofl:

Send that one to trotsky!

[bluedawg12]

38. Well add this to the trotsky collection!

:rofl:

[beam me up scottie]

42. I've tried to quit, really.

But lol cats are the only vice I have left.

Plus they're free.

[Name removed]

29. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Heddi]

37. A deleted sub thread?

What in the world could that have been about? Someone PM me the details ;d

[bluedawg12]

39. I missed it, Maybe it was this child

Nothing Indigo about the baby, it's a rare level 10 Crystal cat! :rofl:

[beam me up scottie]

41. ROFLMAO!!!

:rofl:

[bluedawg12]

45. Truly eVolVEd InDiGo CHILD!11!

:rofl:

[bluedawg12]

40. Indigo Cat sees ORBES as food.

[beam me up scottie]

43. IIRC, it was only one post.

From a relatively benign non-skeptic who visits on occasion. :shrug: