Today NPR reported on fMRI research that indicates that when people think of issues pertaining to religion regions of the brain involved in interpersonal relations light up.
The human brain, it appears, responds to God as if he were just another person, according to a team at the National Institutes of Health.
A study of 40 people — some religious, some nonreligious — found that phrases such as “I believe God is with me throughout the day and watches over me” lit up the same areas of the brain we use to decipher the emotions and intentions of other people.
The researchers speculate that the development of this sort of cognition was crucial to the development of civilization:
Without religion, Bulbulia says, “large scale cooperation, which now spans the world, would be impossible. He adds that humans differ from other species in their ability to cooperate in very large groups.
Religion can help foster cooperation because it ensures that people share the same set of rules about behavior, and think they’ll be punished if they don’t follow them, Bulbulia says. Religion also unites people, especially in times of great uncertainty.
This theory, I think, would indicate that it’s rather inaccurate to suggest that the brain processes thoughts of God exactly as it processes thoughts of other persons. Rather, if the evolution of religious thought played a large role in the ability of humans to engage in large scale cooperation, then this is because the thought of God would be something like the “Person = x” similar Kant’s famous “object = x”, functioning as a general structure allowing for the possibility of empathy towards all people irregardless of their differences. Just as Kant’s “object = x” isn’t any particular object but a formal structure that allows objects to be thinkable, so too would the person = x be a formal structure enabling all interpersonal relations (cf. Deleuz’es “Tournier and a World Without Others” for a good gloss on this Other-structure). Where individual encounters with particular people tend to be governed by the same/different schema, allowing for empathy towards those whom we code as “like us”, the formal schema of the “Person = x” would allow these individual differences to be surmounted– to a greater or lesser degree, anyway –allowing for the different to be seen as a part of the same. In this way, differences between different tribes, cultures, languages, customs, etc., could be surmounted to allow for cooperative activity. Of course, at this meta or transcendental level of personhood– the person = x –the same/different schema would still be operative but in a way in which sameness was no longer defined by local and immediate social relations between individuals. In other words, what this neuro-research seems to have uncovered is something like belief in the existence of the Lacanian big Other, where the subject believes, through the screen of fantasy, that the Other is structured in a particular way and that it desires specific things (the transformation of desire into demand via fantasy that fills out the lack in the Other).
Of course, one wonders why neurologists are claiming that the functioning of these brain centers is an evolutionary development (presumably they’re referring to genes) rather than a cultural acquisition. All the fMRI research seems to establish is that certain brain regions light up when people think about religion. Nothing here establishes that the cause of these brain structures must be genetic or innate in character, rather than the result of developmental processes involving our relation to culture.
Anyway, read the article here.
Larval Subjects . 
March 10, 2009 at 4:12 am
Very interesting stuff. Most scientists/evolutionary biologists, I think, would admit that even “evolutionary” adaptations happen in part due to environmental cues like culture. There’s nothing about evolutionary adapatations that requires them to be understood as entirely “innate” or genetic.
Geneticists themselves talk about the importance of phenotypic plasticity, the degree to which certain phenotypes or genetic traits are expressed due to (or in relation to) environmental cues like culture.
March 10, 2009 at 4:20 am
Agreed Anodynelite, though many evolutionary biologists are deeply inconsistent in how they apply this principle. You might wish to check out the work of Susan Oyama. Very good read on these issues which gives a much more complex version of ontogeny where questions of nature and nurture become largely meaningless.
March 10, 2009 at 4:25 am
And I suspect, of course, that this is more a matter of the science reporting than the scientists.
March 10, 2009 at 8:24 am
[…] evolution of cooperation By johneffay Larval Subjects directs us to an interesting article claiming that research using brainscans has indicated that A study of 40 […]
March 10, 2009 at 11:37 am
I’ve cultivated a pretty resolute distrust in the use of fMRIs as evidence of anything. In my experience in the humanities, people trot these things out to prove incredibly banal things at best and reactionary things at worst (“Hey, this person’s brain happened to light up for the works of the Great Painters! They must really be Great!”)
What’s the difference between an fMRI and an ink blot? The ink blot might tell you what it’s like in someone’s brain! [rimshot]
March 10, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I have suspicions about fMRI research as well, though I don’t see how it is any more an ink blot than the sorts of analysis done in the humanities. fMRI’s at least have the advantage of being able to show activity in the brain for forms of cognition that might appear to be phenomenologically unrelated. I can’t imagine an fMRI study that would determine the greatness of a painter, as you suggest. All fMRI’s allow us to discern is what regions of the brain are active during various cognitive activities. These different cognitive activities can then be correlated to one another as requiring similar brain functions. It wouldn’t allow us to infer the quality of a painting or a novel. For example, it’s likely that the brain shows similar activity when reading Shakespeare and Dean R. Koontz, not because the novels are of equivalent quality, but because similar regions of the brain are activated in reading. I wholeheartedly agree that by and large evolutionary psychology and sociology has been used for reactionary ends in many instances. As a result of a lack of background in cultural anthropology and the diversity of practices it teaches us, these research orientations all too often end up naturalizing cultural acquisitions and then lecturing us about the dangers of going against our nature.
March 10, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[…] Neurology Discovers the Lacanian Big Other […]
March 11, 2009 at 5:59 pm
[…] Larval Subjects has a good explanation and critique. […]
March 23, 2009 at 10:08 am
I guess the brain scientists presuppose a genetic origin because they have no brains.
The simplistic account of ontogeny may be due to journalists more than to scientists; but I doubt that scientists aren´t to blame too. The journalists got their simplified story from somewhere, after all, they didn´t invent it themselves. And lots of scientists who know all about the complexities of development still cling in their hearts to the idea of the gene as containing in advance the fate of the organism.
March 25, 2009 at 2:11 pm
As Levi knows I am married to a New Zealander, have lived in New Zealand and (though he may not be aware of this specifically) used to teach at Vic, where Bulbulia teaches and probably did his research. In my ethnographic experience New Zealanders have to have an opinion about religion, just like they have to have an opinion about rugby; they do not have to have positive opinions, just opinions Up until a few years ago shops other than grocery stores and pharmacies could not trade on Sundays, that is until garden centers began opening in violation of the law. In the 70s sometime, a man named Lloyd Gearing was tried for heresy by the Prysbertarian Church (the largest in NZ) for taking up arguments about the historical Jesus and the theological compatibility of evolutionary theory (that’s how God did it) and basic Christian life; this trial still resonantes. More recently some folks have tried bringing American sorts of fundamentalism into NZ in order to oppose legalized prostitution and the domestic partnership laws for example. There are lots of good reasons why ordinary NZers would have to have opinions about religion. So we shouldn’t be surprised if these 40 peoples’ brains light up, albeit in response (as I read the article) to different questions depending on their individual opinions.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to generalize on the basis of 40 people living in what used to be a predominantly Protestant country. It’s pretty difficult to define religion anthropologically, religion(s) being a pretty good example of a polythetic category. It doesn’t make much sense to speak with many Buddhists or Confucians, say, about G-d as such. Nor, so goes the old observation about Chinese religions, it make sense to think of religions as being exclusive when one can be Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian all at the same time, or Buddhist and Shinto if one is Japanese. Much religion of classical Mediterrean antiquity was tied to specific cities and therefore was not universal, of course it didn’t make sense to fight over my Athena versus yours.
Even if we grant that religion preceded settling down and agriculture in the Mideast (as the finds at Gobleki Tepe indicate, i.e. @ 13,000 years ago) we really can’t say much with any degree of certainty about the evolution of religion certainly prior to that, especially while the arguments about so-called anatomically modern human beings and Neanderthal continue (what’s at stake there–the invention of death and art among much else). Folks might wish to look at Colin Renfrew’s book on neurology and archaeology when it comes out this Fall to see what that eminent archaeologist has to say about the state of the evidences.