Dr. Robert Sapolsky's lecture about Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity

this will be a lecture looking at a whole lot of the themes we've been considering all quarter in here how they apply to a topic that is very close to home and what I already know from some of the emails today was Friday's lecture looking at depression was already getting close to home some of the themes that came out at the end of the chaos lecture some of the notions there that want some of the stuff teaching us perhaps there are no blueprints perhaps there need not be blueprints perhaps there may still be blueprints despite a theoretical demonstration that you don't need them hitting close to home also that is what all of today's lecture is about looking at some biological underpinnings of religiosity and this one is far and away the nerve in the lecture I am most nervous for simply because this one people wind up having strong opinions about and I want to navigate through this one as successfully as possible okay just to give me a sense where I'm starting off from here how many of you would characterize yourself as religious as fairly religious as highly religious okay good how many would you characterize yourself as very very comfortably accepting lean on religious lots of hands there as well okay lots of potential differences in responding to this where we pick up on is from where we left off with a lecture last Wednesday which was the schizophrenia lecture and where we finished with was this whole notion that by now we have to have dealt with with every single one of these topics starting on the far right what's the behavior look like and eventually getting to the far left what are the evolutionary roots and what has always been the rationale for that is the second we're looking at anything with genes genetic influences genetic hints genetic whatever's we're asking where these genes come from where is the evolutionary sense where is the adaptive value for anything we're looking at how the socio biologists interpret it someone else see our question um I should be and I don't think I understand the subject enough to know other than something about religiosity is done in a social context and that's going to become important here and the difference is one that puzzles me a great deal because it clearly transcends issues adjust the social community but that seems to be a good defining point to start from ok so where we ended up there with was this puzzle we finished at the end of depression looking at evolutionary aspects and looking at there may be some hidden benefits that weird argument in one of the readings in your reader creativity and aspects of manic depression going hand-in-hand but we were left with somewhat of a puzzle at the end of the schizophrenia lecture why might there have been selection for these genes because once again we start off with a theme from the very beginning who genes being selected for why did the giraffe have long necks because this is a trait that's a death in our Darwinian terms this is a trait that's associated with leaving more copies of your genes and future generations what is the adaptive value for genes for schizophrenia because we looked at the fact that in this contemporary form schizophrenia is by definition a mal adaptive trait schizophrenic sleeve fewer copies of their genes than their unaffected siblings it is a trait which is formally maladaptive what might be a hidden advantage lurking there and where we left at the very end of that was just a hint that in fact as far as anyone can tell there are no hidden advant it's just a schizophrenic there may not be any adaptive advantage what I left you with there was the notion however that there might be another disease lurking around related to schizophrenia which it does have an adaptive advantage and to begin here what we have to go back to is one of the basic 9th grade biology concepts and in science there which is the whole notion that some of the time a genetic trait which is god-awful in one setting may have some advantages elsewhere and we all learn the exact same example back in ninth grade sickle cell anemia sickle cell anemia which in one context when fully expressed is a hematological disaster absolutely bad news horrible and in other settings can protect you against malaria and not by chance that versions of sickle cell anemia have evolved in sub-saharan Africa Mediterranean areas thalassemia related diseases that this has been a frequent solution also in passing showing us one of the truisms from this class there's no such thing as a bad gene there's only a bad gene environment interaction okay so this theme in medical genetics comes through a lot of times genetic traits which in one setting our bad news may have advantages in another setting and is turning out this is a theme in lots of different realms of genetics other examples tay-sachs disease case acts horrible congenital disorder predominantly found in Ashkenazi Jews what you wind up getting there is full-blown version complete cortical failure to develop child's massively at Birth dies shortly afterward partial version of tay-sachs disease and you're resistant tuberculosis nobody knows the mechanism for it yet people absolutely understand why the sickle cell trait both sets you up for an anemia and protection from malaria nobody understands it yet with Tay Sachs but this explains one of the phenomena back from the Middle Ages the European belief that Jews were safe from tuberculosis because they were poisoning the Christian Wells and that was the cause of a large number of programs back when there is a genetic explanation which is the trait for tay-sachs disease and this partially expressed form protects from tuberculosis more examples of the cystic fibrosis the most common congenital disorder these days that is massively life-threatening a code anybody know a code by Wednesday um do you have no room hand that is are they sitting there though cystic fibrosis full-blown version disastrous disease what you get in cystic fibrosis is inflammatory disease your lungs fill up with fluid you often are dead by age 20 horrible disease partial version of cystic fibrosis and you are protected against cholera and the exact same mechanism that causes an imbalance of fluids in the lungs is the same mechanism that keeps you from losing all your fluids when you have cholera of dehydrating highly adaptive a theme that keeps popping up over and over full-blown version bad news partial genetic version good news and what you wind up getting is this basic argument a numerical argument very similar to the I'll lay down my life for two brothers or a cousin's deal of if you got enough people with the partial protective adaptive version you can afford the occasional cousin with the full-blown version the trait overall will still be passed on now what this sets us up for is thinking about whether something like this is going on with schizophrenia and the question to ask of course is what is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia and this one got discovered in the 1970s back to that classic study we've heard about in a couple of different lectures by now Keti that psychiatrist from Harvard who with his colleagues went off to Denmark and spent a decade there looking at every single adoption case and looking at the patterns of schizophrenia the kis schizophrenic the adoptive parents the biological parents in the course of the doing this they discovered something amazing because think about what these guys did this was this team of psychiatrists who spent a decade in Denmark what they did was interview every single family of every adoptee and Denmark this was like 10,000 people this was a massive amount of work looking for schizophrenic looking in the various pedigrees all that sort of thing interviewing huge numbers of people just ahead full of these folks so they would all get the diagnostic criteria fairly similar well-designed study blah blah what had they done by the end of the decade they had talked to more family members of schizophrenic s-- than any psychiatrists in history and think about this your average psychiatrist who's got some schizophrenic patients will you know meet once every six months with the parent if a schizophrenic is on the young side maybe occasionally we'll also have sessions on a regular basis these people had just interviewed tens of thousands of family members of schizophrenic s-- and they noticed something interesting they noticed that on the average there was something a little bit strange about family members of schizophrenic s-- not all of them and these traits are not only found amongst family members of schizophrenics but at a higher than expected rate there is a weird sort of quirky personality that went with family members of schizophrenic s-- biological family members and this version of a much milder case of schizophrenia is now called schizotypal personality this is a standard ly recognized disorder in psychiatry schizotypal ism is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia what the schizotypal isn't look like first off people have somewhat loose associations not remotely in the realm of a schizophrenic and there are standardized scales that can be given to show this is someone out of the normal range but not in the schizophrenic range and an intermediate range in addition you get a social withdrawal and this is not the complete dysfunctional unable to hold down a job locked up in the back of the village version of schizophrenia this is someone instead who just gravitates towards fairly solitary occupations this is the lighthouse keeper this is the fire tower launcher this is the classics gets a type-o occupation this is the person sitting alone in the projection room in the movie theater eight hours a night and the dark their classics or biscuits a title jobs socially detached very solitary the most striking feature of schizotypal is what is termed meta magical thinking and this is where things begin to get interesting Mehta magical thinking this is not someone who is thought disordered psychotic unable to function this is someone who just kind of believes in strange things this is someone who's really really into science fiction and fantasy this is someone okay I see you some of the concern popping up here this is someone who's into some sort of New Age stuff in a really frenzied sort of way this is someone who believes in mental telepathy or UFOs this is a first hint this is someone who if they have a religious structure of belief has an extremely concrete level of interpretation remembering this seems to be quite similar to schizophrenia what apples aren't just having common multisyllabic words that concreteness at the level of abstraction these are people who tend towards extremely fundamentalist concrete interpretations of religious events seven-day creation of the world this is not a metaphor this is not a parable this could be measured down to the minute people alive who were once dead this is not a metaphor for keeping the spirit going this is an exact description of the event we begin to see where we're heading here what schizotypal ism is about is it's a very mild version of schizophrenia in terms of the loose associations in terms of the concreteness of associations the social detachment and most of all the meta magical thinking and this is now a standard diagnostic category in psychiatry to have a schizotypal personality so what we then ask is where does this come from what is this like and what we have to ask is of course our usual question when trying to make sense of a human trait is recognizing 99% of human history was not spent with schizotypal is being able to get jobs in film projection rooms what does schizotypal ism look like in traditional non westernized human societies and the answer to that turns out to have been floating around for 60 70 years in the Anthropology literature and this is back to the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Raiden who was the first one to point this out was the first one of a whole tradition emphasizing what was a pretty strong area of research and then 1840s in anthropology he was the first person who pointed out that in traditional human societies there is a category of people there who count as and these are his exact words half crazy who are the half crazies and traditional human society the shamans the witch doctors the medicine men the medicine women these are members of society who make a living being meta magical and Ravan was the first one to emphasize this in traditional human societies the shamans are the ones who converse with the dead for ritualistic reasons the shamans are the ones who speak in tongues the shamans are the ones who at the full moon turn into the hyena to protect the village from predators the shamans are the ones who are meta magical for a thing for a living and this has been a theme in anthropology for quite some time one anthropologist named actor neck referred to shamans as being healed madmen in the 1940s anthropologist named Kruger who started the anthro department in Berkeley and was one of the grand old men in the field this is a quote at his describing what shamanism is about the shaman displays his possession by a spirit by publicly re-enacting his specific personal experience that of the man suffering from a particular mental affliction his projections his hallucinations his journey through space and time thus became a dramatic ritual and served as the prototype for all future concepts of the religious road of perfection and this was the recognition in 30s and 40s that what shamanism is about is a very controlled very socially contextual version of meta magical schizotypal ism the word did not exist in the field at the time but that is what it is now what Kroeber emphasized in his writing was these are not schizophrenic and what we heard about in that story in class four days ago looking at that schizophrenic person in that Maasai village is that people in traditional human societies are no more tolerant to the mentally ill than we are in the west and just as delighted to find cultural means to peripheral eyes them these are not full-blown schizophrenic these are not people who suddenly are speaking in tongues at the exact silent moment in the hunt these are people who are speaking in tongues at the right time these are people who are hearing voices at the right time and you remember what the punchline was of that story about that schizophrenic woman in that masala village was she heard voices at the wrong time hearing voices at the right time is not schizophrenia it is a version of schizotypal ism and what you see when you look at the human tradition of shamanism these are not peripheral eyes people these are some of the most powerful members of society many societies have a tradition of shamans being celibate but many of them most of them as it turns out do not and these are people who are anything but reproductively maladaptive these are people who have been passing on their genes just fine throughout history shamanism this mild version this contextually appropriate version of meta magical ism has done wonderfully throughout human history and a great example of that the fact that you need to get it just right was Kroeber sort of emphasizing this that in the right setting what would be an absolutely peripheral izing set of traits instead makes you a very powerful very sanctioned and that's the word that he used a very sanctioned member of society and it's not for nothing that the word sanction as a whole lot to do with the word sanctuary this is a realm in which the exact same traits would spectacularly fail to work in other cultural settings do it right and it works just fine and Kroeber had a wonderful anecdote about this the sense of you gotta get it just right he apparently was at some ritual a ceremony he spent most of his time doing his anthropology with Native American groups and this was some ceremony being done by the Winnebagos and I was actually found to quite bizarre that there was a group called the Winnebago but hanging out with the Winnebagos and this was one of his informants they're sort of explaining this ritual and as this was apparently some really frothy really quite over-the-top ritual that the shaman was pulling off and was speaking and tongues and rolling on the fire and all of that and this guy said that is great we've got this shaman here this guy is like the best he's worth every dollar we Pam this guy is terrific we are so lucky to have a shaman like this in our village this guy's thank God we don't have two of them though too way too much one's just fine and you have this recognition that this is not schizophrenia you wouldn't want a person to be schizophrenic because they will be as peripheral eyes Daz in our own society you want to get it just right you don't want to have too many of them you got to have some people who are some flame meat-and-potatoes good hunters that sort of thing and you want the ratio of that to the shamanistic meta magical folks to be quite high but you need a few of them around and what the anthropologists have been noting for 60 years is all human cultures traditionally have some very meta magical folks around and these folks are anything but peripheral eyes dwith the decreased reproductive success there's some of the most honored members of society so if you wind up getting here is that classic partially expressed sort of continuum deal going on which is human societies throughout history have had such a need for shamans that they can put up with the occasional second cousin who's fully schizophrenic as long as you've got the ratio right and what the numbers suggest the 1 to 2 percent rate of schizophrenia had throughout human cultures and the number average population size of human villages and the number of shamans it works about right throughout history there has been more of a predominance of schizotypal shamans than if schizophrenic you can afford to put up with the occasional cousin now where does this wind up heading what the main point of this section is about is this is not just about the people naked on the national Geographics with the bones and their noses and this was a critical transition recognizing this at some point a whole lot of people and I feel were writing about the primitiveness of non westernized religion and there was a great quote who came up with this when a guy named Devereaux referred to primitive religion as being organized schizophrenia this was somebody in the 1940s exactly getting this flavor of contextualized appropriate hearing the voices at the right time all of that but this was overwhelming a little literature about the weird stuff those folks are up to in the night and the time-life specials on public television and what the critical transition is is it's not just about them at some point this anthropologist Akron Eck who is quite leftist in his orientation wrote a long essay saying how incredibly culturally chauvinistic it was of the Western art anthropologist to write all these articles about how shamans are half healed Mad Men and how condescending that was to talk about those cultures as being so irrationally based in contrast to us and what's the obvious punchline is the problem isn't saying that they're irrational when we're saying that we aren't but it's saying that we're equally irrational we are equally irrational in some of the tenants that we have here a quote from a quranic' at the time was our culture is unique and out long the irrational let me give you some recent statistics from a survey what's the name of the survey the main national survey people who yes Gallup poll that guy the Gallup poll a recent Gallup poll survey I know about you guys but these numbers astonished me 25% of Americans say they believe in ghosts 36% believe in mental telepathy 47% believe in UFOs and more than 50% of Americans believe in the devil and a belief that the devil influences daily activities these are people who can vote these are people who can serve on juries these are people who can operate motor vehicles these are people making decisions about medical interventions I for one in this outpost of not terribly extreme irrationality in this corner of the country am astonished we live in a world that is highly irrational and the punchline of this is this is not simply about non-western traditional human societies the exact same thread of schizotypal ism runs throughout all of the belief systems of human societies including Western ones we are permeated by irrationality some of the versions of it that we have in the West are utter nonsense ones ones that have just been like invented out of thin air in recent years which is kind of like fast food for these sort of Nouveau sort of medieval peasants and their hot tubs up and this is the world of crystals and channeling and things of that sort but some of the versions of our westernized irrationality go back millennia and organize some of our most cherished values the same irrationality and the same valuing of those who invent the appropriate versions of the irrationality runs throughout the West okay just to show you that I am NOT being overly hostile or will try to pull in my own sort of tradition that I was raised and is not normally considered a sign of robust mental health to hear voices coming out of burning bushes this is considered a worrisome sign this is considered diagnostic it is not a good thing to be reporting that you just spent the night wrestling an angel it is usually a very disturbing sign if you were reporting you've had a conversation with someone who is dead and has risen from the grave these are diagnoseable problems in our secular Western realm these are the backbones of our belief systems we in the West as well as we humans and non westernized settings schizotypal ism runs through all of human history what you wind up having then is this obvious question who invented this stuff who came up with the notion that the world was invented in seven days or snakes with apples are up to something no good or it's possible to give birth and you're still a virgin these were not designed by committees these were designed by extremely formative extremely influential schizotypal throughout history yes yep it's genetic evidence those same studies showed that it runs through the adoption studies showed it's a biological trait it runs through the biological side of the adoptive pedigrees it's ace it's a g8 it's a genetic trait with the new studies are now the unis show is mild tendency towards increased dopamine tone mild tendency towards most of the biology we heard about what we're seeing is totally artificial bucket to say schizophrenia up to here past the side non schizophrenic we have this in-between zone like everything else we've been thinking about it's on a continuum and seems to be the same biology in a much milder form question somewhere there yep same sort of stuff okay so what do you wind up y'all question yep no because the the critical thing there is they will very readily tell you much as people will tell you here in their own schizotypal experiences that you need the right person to lead it they can't get that going without the right shaman starting it off you need them as a catalyst yeah okay why do we need this why do we value this okay we'll come to this probably in about two days but this is tapping into all of the you know why why do we search for some fairly unlikely answers to the big questions that plague all of us we'll come to this in two days but you know this is getting at the core of some of the basic questions here okay let me push on here what you wind up seeing with this is that this is on a continuum and who invented this stuff and you look throughout the history of religious leaders those who have invented some of the theology and we will come to different variants of religious leaders shortly as you see those who invented the theology that there is very often a thread of meta magical thinking that goes through this and this is meta magical thinking of a type that falls readily into the spectrum of schizotypal ISM now one of the themes we've endlessly come back to in this class is appropriate context appropriate context and this is a perfect realm to see this because what we wind up getting is you got to get it just right if you hear voices it's got to be during the ceremony if you're speaking in tongues it can't be in the middle of the silent part of the hunt you don't want to have too many of them thank god we've got this shaman but not two of them around here you've got to get the context right and what we've seen throughout human history and Western history as well is get it wrong and we have names for these things get it wrong and these are a board of religious fringe groups these are cults and you look at some versions of this in our own recent time you look at David Koresh in Waco you look at someone like James Jim Jones in Jonestown you look at someone like Charles Manson and these are people who were highly meta magical in their thinking highly charismatic but hit a wall at the point where we still classify them as cults Manson is a diagnosed schizophrenic with the other two there's only post hoc sort of sort of forensic psychiatry that you can do what you got wind up getting is get it wrong and we call it a cult get it right in the right time in the right place and maybe for the next couple of millennia people won't have to go to work on your birthday if you get it exactly right in that setting so what I think we see here is a setting here for making sense the exact same traits in a different context to use Croaker's words in a cultural context that is not sanctioned the exact same traits count as psychiatrically suspect these days what this is about is not only if you get it in the right context is it okay it is highly honored tapping into the question that came in before that all human societies have a strong need for a certain degree of these folks around you need to get the ratios right okay picking up on this theme a transition to the next point in a sense this is talking about sort of the structural steel of religious belief what are the basic beliefs you have there's no god but one he is Allah that you know whatever versions of the central formats you have there is a Trinity I am Who I am any of these variants these are sort of the building blocks the structural steel of religion but what religion is often often also about is lots of other things we have a very modern very westernized view of religion these days what religion is often about is a social community that it brings you what religion is often about is the motivation for good works throughout most of history what religion is about in one very Orthodox variant is the carrying out of rituals the daily performance of ritualistic behaviors in the context of religion and this transitions us to the next subject in here and this whole notion of ritualism as a backbone of religion wonderful quote to that effect Henry Ward Beecher father of Harriet Beecher Stowe famous Protestant preacher in New England I think the 1830s or so had this quote at the time religion is daily bread religion is not just cake on Sunday the notion that what religion is about is the small acts God is in the detail religion is amiss small acts of the daily rituals now beginning to look not at the large theological notions our religion believes there are multiple gods there are virgin births that God can speak through a burning bush but instead religion as the daily practice ritual now what is interesting about this what comes through with this is another theme another subtype of a very mild version of a psychiatric disorder which once again works spectacularly when you get it just right not now with the meta magical big theology building blocks of religion but the daily bits and pieces of ritualism and this brings in another psychiatric disorder one we haven't talked about much in class so far okay I guarantee on a regular basis all of us in this room getting to some point where it's some anxious period you've got some major deadlines you're applying for some summer something rather if you really want to get your totally uptight about it you're sitting down and you're writing the essay and before you can write the essay you've got to get your favorite pen it's got to be right there and you got to rearrange your desk and you've got to get everything sorted out and finally efficient you go mail off the application you put it in the mailbox and you check again to make sure it went down and this is really important I want to see a check again is to make sure and you're all set for that and you finally there's no one else around so you go and you look in front of it and looking back at it and that's everything I mean we all do this actually maybe we all do this and I'm embarrassing myself horribly okay my bet is most of us do this sort of thing we fall into obsessive little rituals during times of anxiety we also have rituals intrusive thoughts that just invade our heads at times where they are of no obvious purpose they are at the cost of thinking anything more clearly it's totally maddening and you can't stop the thoughts for example today I am working on a paper that's involving all sorts of very deep roomin of thought and figuring out all sorts of data stuff and I've made no progress on it at all this morning because for some reason that I don't understand that all all of today I've had the damn theme song from Teletubbies going through my head and I can't stop but especially the part where Lala leaps up and says while all the really cute partner and I can't stop doing this and I don't know what's going on I did not plan to lose today's productivity because the Teletubbies but we get this some stupid jingle that's stuck in your head you find yourself going up a flight of stairs and you can't stop yourself from counting the steps we do this we all do this and we tend to do it more often during periods of anxiety and the interpretation of that is that we impose this totally arbitrary useless destructive structure at a time when everything else feels like you're walking on quicksand we all do this as some sort of adaptation to periods of anxiety and what we transition into now is talking about a psychiatric disorder where people do this all the time and it not only gets in the way of them getting some work done on a project that requires some concentration this is a disorder that absolutely destroys their lives this is OCD obsessive compulsive disorder and the full-blown version of it there's so little resemblance to what any of us do when we are having to get the pen right and checking the mailbox the third time and having the jingle go through your head for a while it is of such a scale larger it is so much more destructive it is virtually unimaginable from our perspective people with OCD have their lives completely destroyed by this disorder people with OCD in the full-blown version spent six hours a day washing their hands the characteristic that's always at the top of the list with OCD is this obsessive focusing on hygiene this worry that you are constantly in some way sold six hours a day of washing these are people who cannot hold down jobs their marriages come apart their relationships are destroyed because they cannot stop washing and you have in the reader one profile of somebody with OCD from a book entitled the boy who couldn't stop washing this is the symptom that always pops up at the top of the list and the actual washing process is ritualistic beyond belief these are people who have bought seven different kinds of antibacterial soap they go through this whole sequence the water has to be a certain temperature for the first level of washing then a certain type of towel that they dry themselves off with that towel has to be put out of the room because it's dirty then then the next layer of washing with the next so go through two hours of this they're finally done turn to leave to go to their job go to their whatever and on the way out brush their elbow against the door and they have to start all over again and you will stop them at that point and say you will miss this interview you will not get this job and they will say yes I know but I'm not going to be able to function and I'm just its dirty I know my elbow I know I'm going to touch it then and then I'll get in my face and I just have to start over I'm not going to be able to get anything done today anyway so I need to go wash if I don't wash I'm not going to be Aleut and back they go and hours and hours of this people with OCD spent half their waking hours doing this people with OCD just have constant sequences of numbers going in their head constant jingles intrusive thoughts they cannot stop thinking what if I don't stop the car at the next stop sign what if I run down this person they have the intrusive thoughts of I'm absolutely sure I struck somebody at that street crossing back there I've got to go back and check ok they don't see anybody there they drive on five miles down the road probably the person flew off into the bushes I have to go back and check I have to go back and check they can never leave their home because they've left the door unlocked they go back they check the doors lock they have to go back they left the gas on they left the light on this is absolutely paralyzing intrusive thoughts what if I leaned over and struck the person next to me what if somebody kills my loved ones you can't stop the thoughts they just keep coming at these people they cannot enter or leave a place there is a paralysis about entering and leaving built around this sort of almost magical exclusionary power that you get a transition into a place they cannot enter a room until they do a prime number of tappings on wall before entering they can then not enter the room until if that's prime number and then a different prime number with their left foot shaking completely arbitrary symptoms of having to enter and leave numerology these people cannot begin a meal until the utensils are absolutely symmetrical and lined up and they're never perfectly symmetrical and the entering and leaving ritual has never done right and they certainly can't enter the classroom unless the number of steps from here to the door is two times an interval that's with this and very mathematical quality to it and it's never quite right and you've got to do it all over again and what's been pointed out one of the really interesting sort of insight as to what OCD is about is that this is an anxiety disorder this is a pathological attempt to impose structure to impose predictability to impose control and a world where everything is pathologically provoking of a sense of disease and uncertainty and anxiety and the absolute horrifying version of OCD that I've heard described is this metaphor where this is straight out of ethology this is a fixed action pattern we all know the fixed action pattern of a dog is settling down at night on its blanket and what is the dog do it circles a few times before it settles down but then it circles a couple more times and just as its rated it and then it circles a few more and fine and you can see at some point the dog doesn't even want to do this anymore then it takes a while longer in another 30 seconds before the dog can finally escape from this fixed action pattern and sit down in OCD the person never ever escapes the person spends forever circling on the blanket being unable to finally lie down and rest because they are just consumed with these rituals with these obsessive intrusive thoughts and what you get is this is completely paralyzing okay here's an example of an obsessive belief that we all have okay can anybody identify this okay here's what it is this is an aerial view in fact it's a satellite photograph up here this is a tray of rice krispie treats and you've just walked into the room and it looks like this and for a huge percentage of us within a minute or so it's going to look like this because we all feel this compulsive need to take a knife and cut off that edge okay let me just canvas you on all of that okay how many of you okay how many of you do this for starters I certainly do okay how many of you of those who do this cut off this bit here because it doesn't really count on your diet okay couple of hands how many of you cut it off because what's perfectly obvious is going from this to this decreases the total perimeter so that it will stay fresher that way okay problems how many of you why they're doing it because it's just getting at you that it's the knife's just there and you just have to cut it off and smooth out the edge yes that's why we all do it and then what you then decide is that there's this little bump here which requires you to trim this out and then there's the little bump and off you go with that and we all wind up doing that but if this is what you did around the clock for your entire life it would destroy it and what is most striking with people with OCD is you can never go through the sequence I just did there's no insight the person does not sit there and say help there's something wrong with me I feel this need to wash my hands six hours a day they say help there's something wrong with me I can never get clean I'm just so dirty everything I do makes me dirty there's no insight into it okay so where does this fit in again our modern version of religion our modern very secular Lee influenced version of religion so often involves an emphasis on what religion is about is counseling the trouble what religion is about is holding the hands of the newlyweds and making sure they understand what they're getting into what religion is about is comforting the distant the bereaved where religion is about is the good works but this is not what religion has often been about throughout history often the religious leaders are not necessarily the ones who are most psychotherapeutic ly minded or the most galvanizing of people into the good works often religious leaders have been the ones at the head of a crusade often religious leaders have been the ones with the most vivid images what hell and damnation would be like but often what religious leaders have been are the people who are best at doing the rituals and that has been another thread of religious practice throughout history of religious leaders as often being among the most fervent the most accomplished at carrying out of rituals now let me give you a sense of this because as I began to read more on this this absolutely astonished me because I knew very little about this stuff just the scale of this and starting off with what will probably be a fairly alien religion for most of you in here and then moving into examples closer to home looking at Orthodox very traditional Hinduism looking at the behaviors of a Brahmin an individual who devotes their entire life to ritualistic practice in pursuit of their religion a Brahmin a highly observant Brahmin spends six hours a day in cleansing rituals and there are detailed rules as to which hand you wash in what sequence how many times you wash each hand separately how many each one together the sequence with which you wash out one side of your mouth versus the other with water there are set rules for Brahmins as to how you were supposed to lie down at night dictating what your first sight is in the morning there are set rules as to what direction you must face when defecating in terms of what you are looking at at a time there are set rules for rituals you have to do when entering a temple when leaving a temple there are set rules for how many breaths you take through each nostril you close one nostril during your prayers for certain number of breaths then you close the other and all of these are very carefully stipulated the number of mouthfuls of food the number of times you cheaper mouthful the number of prayers you have to say per day sequences of magic numbers all of this is absolutely spelled out and Orthodox Brahmins consume their entire days doing this okay next example Orthodox Judaism spectacularly your question great okay hang on for a while we will come to that that's a superb question as to why they seem to have lots to do with cleansing and food preparation Wow thank you okay do you want to why don't we take a five-minute break right now and you can all storm the frontier for handouts lots of opinions here lots of thoughts once again that same thing I mentioned two days ago three days ago whenever this is very provocative stuff take advantage of the course website put up some of your opinions get dialogues going on this because people lots of times have extremely strong opinions on this and very interesting ones take advantage of this couple of questions that just came up how come people with OCD don't come down with learned helplessness why aren't they depressed because part of the fuel behind OCD is you're always convinced aha one more now I know instead of doing it 17 times 18 if I do it 18 then it's going to be perfect you've always just figured out not only do I have to do the six hours of washing but make sure I never step on a crack and then I won't break my mother's back you're always figuring out the next step then pointing out we're about to go in a direction where what are the advantages of a mild version of OCD and we're discussing this in a religious context I should point out in a secular context there's a tremendous advantage to a mild version of OCD what it does is get you into a place like Stanford what it does is work to a tremendous advantage given how regimented and disciplined a lot of folks are in here get it in the right context blah blah that theme that we have again and again okay shifting over just seeing Orthodox Brahman belief and Hinduism absolutely dominated virtually full time with ritualistic behaviors Orthodox jewelry a spectacular number of laws built around food preparation the kosher laws very detailed rules as to how long of a time interval between eating one type of food and another type of food if you inadvertently mix up the silverware with different types of food ritualistic cleansing rituals that you have to go through involving putting the utensils in dirt for months on end and special prayers that have to be said rules about how you enter and leave a holy place involving certain prayers involving a certain ritualistic touching that you have to make on the door jamb there all sorts of magic numbers that no number 18 has magical powers and Orthodox Judaism and it's built around numbers of times you have to say a prayer multiples of 18 you have these prayer shawls that have strings on the end which have 18 knots in them and they have to be pulled a certain number of times here's one of the amazing examples of ritualism okay these numbers have magical powers and Orthodox Judaism and you will note 365 is the number of days in the year 248 is the number of bones that people believed were in the bodies during the Middle Ages when this evolved and together 613 according to the holy books there are 613 rules for daily behaviors 365 prohibitions every day 248 things that have to be done every day the preponderance of the prohibitions leading one clearly fairly depressive rabbi back when to be saying obviously it would have been better if none of us were born given the fact that there were more things that we could mess up by doing but what you see here is that she's highly ritualistic the number of prohibitions equalling number of days of the year the number of ritual constraints be equally the number of bones in the body 613 is the magic number okay where did these numbers come from very often in religious rituals what you find is a number has symbolic value because it's got a certain appeal for making learning easier it is not by chance that a base-10 society came up with 10 commandments because 10 commandments that are much easier to remember the nine or eleven what are these about you would say okay well there's some sort of ritualistic content here God the number of things God doesn't want us to do each day is equal to the number of days of the year the number thing God wants us to do is equal to the number of bones in the body okay great device for remembering the rules but here's the amazing thing nobody knows the rules you look through thousands of pages of commentary stretching back centuries and the rules aren't written down and various rabbis have made a living arguing over what are the 365 things you aren't supposed to do each day in other words the numbers are more important than the content is less critical than the fact that whatever they are there's 365 things that God doesn't want you to do and whatever they are there's 248 that God wants you to do the number that you are attributing to God is more important in that case than the content okay classic classic obsessive numerology switching over traditional Orthodox Islam what you find there is very detailed rules as to what foods you can eat what the first food is you're supposed to eat each day there are rules as to how you enter and leave a holy place there are rules for very ornate cleansing after relieving yourself very very detailed rules when you were washing out your mouth how many mouthfuls of water which hands you wash in which sequence the exact same thing exact same rules is with an OCD person after the showering explicitly written down when a man is washing himself at the ends of the clay at the end of the cleansing should you happen to touch his penis he has to do the whole sequence all over again magic numbers thought to have powers there 710 70 and a hundred apparently have magical powers in Islam and you have very explicit concrete instructions about them Muhammad himself wrote down that a man who says a prayer with clean teeth gets 70 times the brownie points as a man saying his prayers without them multiples of magic numbers with all of that and probably for most of you by now what will be the most familiar is looking at Orthodox Christianity and you have rosaries and the counting of rosaries you have three as a magic number you have very detailed numbers of times you are supposed to say prayers you have rules for entering and leaving churches even in Christian groups that are viewed as some of the least ritualistic some of the most cerebral in some ways you look at the Lutheran's Lutheran's have set rules for prayers that are only said during even year's prayers that are only said during odd years all of these versions of Orthodoxy are absolutely shot through with rituals built around cleansing of the body food preparation entering and leaving of significant places and numerology it's the exact same list as you find with OCD and Freud 100 years ago came up with this amazing quote to that regard Freud described obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD quote as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional compulsion he absolutely linked the two now just when you're thinking that I'm standing here and I'm started going to start pathologizing religious belief from sort of a medical psychiatric standpoint the exact same conclusion has been reached by religious leaders over the centuries as well in the 15th century there was Saint Loyola no st. Ignatius of Loyola and what this guy did was he wrote this long tract describing scrupulous 'ti scrupulous 'ti is not a common word in English anymore but it's opposite certainly is being unscrupulous being scrupulous having scrutiny of scrupulosity at the time was defined as someone who is going through religious ritual for its own sake someone who was not thinking about the content but was just doing the ritual and he wrote this long track to Catholic priests saying watch out for people like these people who were coming and being super devout but you will notice they're just doing the rituals without thinking of the content your job is to recognize them and guide them back into actually focusing on the content they shouldn't be doing the rituals for their own sake there's a danger of people like that showing up in the Talmud and Orthodox Judaism the exact same thing there is a law in there that when you read the holy book of Judaism the Torah you were not allowed to do it by heart you have to actually read the words because there's an injunction to think about the content don't do it in a roadway and Muhammad himself in Islam wrote down that people who give prayers without thinking about the content the prayers don't count even religious leaders for centuries for millennia have recognized the pole of religious ritual for its own sake to have to admonish religious adherents to pay attention to the content because the ritual takes life of its own where the numbers the content the ritual is more important than the actual thought behind it yeah exactly and that was that point that transition talking about schizotypal ism there's much more resemblance to the large theological building blocks of religion of spirituality what are our military's principles what do we believe we believe you always follow orders you never follow orders you don't agree with what's more important value sort of stuff this is instead in the realm of religious practice and this is the realm of very Orthodox religious practice absolutely completely different realm so where am i heading with this obviously emphasizing the similarity of the traits and that whole business that once again have a six hour compulsion to wash your hands each day and have it occur in the secular context of OCD it destroys your life you cannot function in society you are peripheral eyes you are mentally ill and that exact same theme get it right in the right context and this is protective this is honored this is rewarded get it in the right setting now nothing about being able to do rituals and turn them from your own private OCD into the religious setting this is not a process for making the anxiety go away it's very important when people are pulling off these rituals in the religious setting it's not to make the anxiety go away it's to share it it's to share it over time and space with a larger community it's to take this nameless dread and to give it a name and to have that name come with feeding instructions and all sorts of rules for how to please the source of the named dread at this point it's not to make the anxiety go away it's to make the anxiety shared now from this transitioning from this notion that okay and the right setting the same exact trait that can ruin your life can be enveloped rewarded welcomed it's protected in the context religious belief now taking it one step further yeah question sure no it definitely doesn't but from that standpoint this is speaking to one aspect of what it's doing and we still haven't come to the question that was up there before isn't there an ecological reason why there should be these rituals about cleansing and food preparation we'll come to that shortly but the other point you brought up maybe this is to foster a sense of community but this comes back to the question around there before why should people in a communal sense feel better why should we all feel better when we do rituals and our rituals of counting the stairs and making sure the application really went down the mailbox why do we feel even better when we do it in the context of the community you're absolutely right that these are meant to foster the group shared features of religiosity and spirituality the question then becomes why does it work why do we respond to it why do we need shamans and why do we respond to this ability to share these customs why is it the trade of 18 year olds all over the world to try to invent a whole bunch of generationally shared rituals that lets the world know I have nothing whatsoever to do with those appalling people who embarrass me my parents what's that whole separation that goes in why is it that individuation is very often going hand in hand with I need a community to do this individual with that in a sense is the question and that kind of brings us to this next issue looking at sort of a next scale of this application of this ritualism by far one of the weirdest stories that Franz Kafka ever wrote was The Hunger artist and this is a story about a person who performs starving his performance is he comes into a town and he's locked up in a cage in the middle of town and he entertains he performs feat performs there by starving himself and people come and watch him starve and initially you read this and this sounds like one of the more bizarre parables that Kafka has come up with until you read that during the Middle Ages there were hunger artists there were people who performed in European cities starving themselves in a ritualistic way for people to come and watch suddenly we now look at the next level the notion of performing rituals and people who are very good at it once again what our religious leaders about mostly these days we think of them in terms of people who are empathic people who are able to use the religious tradition they come from to make people treat each other better to comfort people during troubled times but back to that issue that some of the time what a religious leader is about is someone who is excellent at doing rituals and when you look at the history of religion not only do you have the capacity for somebody to suddenly lose themselves to finally have these same life destroying rituals being sanctioned and protected you have people who could make a living performing the rituals you can have people who are amply rewarded for doing so some examples starting off with traditional Hinduism there is a mantra there called the Gayatri mantra which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing but in traditional Brahmanism you are supposed to say this mantra two million four hundred thousand times in a lifetime to guarantee a good afterlife and what happens is you have these ageing captains of industry who were worried that may not have quite gotten the right number and there and are feeling the years catching up with them and what do you do you hire yourself a bunch of Brahmins to come and say the prayer two million four hundred thousand times for you and you say it in appropriate multiples there are set rules you hire two hundred forty of them so each of them says ten thousand hundred thousand one thousand ten thousand each of them says a whole lot of them and they all say the same number and there are rules for what sort of tent city you put up for them in your backyard and what sort of feasts you throw for them you hire people to come and do the rituals for you that get you you're after switching over to Judaism these rules of Orthodox food preparation there is an entire job you can get built around ritualistic preparation of food now there is a certain primary level of this which is people who make a living making sure food is prepared in a kosher way that they slaughter animals things of that sort but there's a whole second level people who make a living watching the folks who prepare the food you have rabbis who make a living sitting around in slaughterhouses and making sure the animals are slaughtered in a ritualistically appropriate way these guys don't do anything with their own hands their entire job is to watch and make sure the rituals are done right so that you can produce like at free tofu hotdogs that would bring a smile to the lips of the patriarchs it's done so ritualistically correctly these guys make a living doing this and then the version probably we are most familiar with the American experience you have the high school graduation you have the opening of the new town whatever and what happens the local clergyman comes out and does a convocation says a prayer is invited to come and do a ritual to mark this community transition and our response here is well you know of course that's the guys job and that's exactly the point you could make a living doing these rituals and you can do that job these days complete with health insurance and a retirement package and a 401k and all of that you make a living doing rituals and when you look at the history of religion suddenly what you see is an inevitable outcome of that if there's somebody who's spending all his time washing his hands ritualistically for the good of the community there's some peasant out there who's got to work by the sweat of his brow to make bread for two people instead of one and there's an amazing novel a science fiction novel and absolutely caught this which struck me is like one of the truly horrible novels in terms of writing style almost as bad as Azzam of but in there was this brilliant idea book called Xenocide by a writer named Orson Scott Card and had this brilliant idea that absolutely caught this and this was on as always a multiplanetary Empire and the people running the evil empire figured out the people on some planet were biologically very very prone towards being extremely smart we could dissect that lots of ways perhaps the particular prenatal environment on that planet but they nonetheless worried that this planet had great danger for producing revolutionaries that were to lead the overthrow the Empire so what they did was invent a virus a virus which caused obsessive-compulsive disorder and they infected a subset of people on this planet with the virus and the virus integrated into the DNA so who could be passed on multi-generationally and suddenly you had a subset of people who were paralysed with OCD with counting rituals and all of that and what did they manage to foist off on the rest of the population these were religious experiences they were having and within a few generations this had become a priestly class who sat around all day carrying out their obsessive rituals and the rest of the population couldn't begin to think of revolting against the Empire because they were spending all day long having to come up with enough food to feed the priestly class and what you suddenly had was a paralysis and built around an entire class that does nothing other than carry out these rituals and that planet was no worry to the rest of the Empire at that point what you wind up seeing is that truly involved ritualistic religious belief is often at the cost of doing anything else there's a spectacular example of this historically and this is a 16th century Augustinian monk in Germany named ludar and this guy happened to left a lot of written records and this guy is a classic example of this he was the son the only son of a very aggressive very violent father there was some suggestion that the father in fact killed somebody wants and a brawl the son was absolutely terrified of him and was extremely obedient to him very anxious very psychosomatic young man one day he is out for a walk gets caught in a lightning storm out in an open field has a panic attack there because the lightning storm makes a devotional agreement at that point if he can survive this lightning storm he will become a monk he promises God that he survives he becomes a monk and he is absolutely paralyzed with his ritualistic training NEADS records about when he had his first mass he fainted beforehand he was so nervous about doing it wrong the mass went on three times the length that was supposed to because he kept having to stop and start over again because he was sure he had done something wrong he spent approximately five hours a day in confession with his priestly mentor there his sort of advisor there confessing to everything this is a guy who lived in a monastery he didn't have a chance to do anything sinful but he'd be in there five hours a day when I said this prayer I wasn't mindful enough about it I did it by rote when I did this I wasn't thinking enough about this I pretty sure I couldn't wash my hands enough before doing this prayer I did this wrong God is angry at me for doing this I'm sure God is angry at me for doing this and records his mentor this elderly priest eventually in exasperation said one of the most astonishingly modern psychoanalytically insightful things imaginable he said enough already God isn't angry with you for some reason you are very angry with God God doesn't care about how many times you're washing your hands and the most definitive thing about this young man this young priest was something he left in his records he washed hours and hours a day an exact quote from him the more I wash the dirtier I get and this is OCD and why do we know so much about this man because we know him 500 years later not by his Latin name of leader we know him by his more westernized name of Martin Luther this was Martin Luther the founder Protestantism and these were the transitional events in his life and talk about somebody who takes his personal affliction and turns it into perhaps the most influential event of the last thousand years in Western European history this is someone who turned it into the biggest display of failing to obey his father that anybody is seen in the history of Catholicism and this was a person paralyzed by obsessive-compulsive disorder so what we get here at this point is the obvious question who invented knocking on wood for good luck who's the Hindu who had some sort of obsession with the number 24 or the Jew with an obsession with the number 18 who got this belief that God was completely obsessed with the numbers of bones in the body and that's how many things you should do what we have here is not only the recognition that if you are OCD religion can provide a sanctuary if you are OCD in the right setting you can in fact make a living by being religiously ritualistic but the recognition that probably people with strong obsessive compulsive tendencies had something to do with the invention of many of these rituals I suspect historically that's where this come from so that brings up the issue that was brought up before why should these rituals be so similar you look at the prohibitions for example in Judaism more than 200 of these have to do with food preparation and cleansing you see the sequence in any of these and the top four in OCD are identical to the top four in all of these religions cleansing of the body food preparation entering and leaving significant religious places and numerology numbers why should that be basically two types of explanations one is we may be seeing some sort of convergence it's not by chance that people are highly ritualistically concerned with making sure their bodies are cleaned and that their food is correctly prepared and I suspect that has part to do with it but I suspect what we're also seeing and with records of people like Martin Luther what we're also seeing is because some of the people who invented some of these religious rituals had a background of OCD maybe not fully paralytic versions but nonetheless somebody spending five hours a day washing his hands and five hours a day confessing about how he didn't wash his hands enough this does not seem to be a mild version the more I wash the dirtier I get okay what I think he wind up seeing is that historically all sorts of folks generating rituals OCD is estimated to have an incidence anywhere from one to ten percent of the population depending on how you define at the continuum and what you have is I suspect in periods of religious crisis cultural crisis during a period of person during the period where whatever is currently in shape is not working the right person at the right moment comes forward and in effect says this is how I have been privately honoring our Lord all these years and I am offering it to all of you to see this is what I have been doing and in the right place and time it catches on and it turns into the thing that is the ritual for the rest of the community within decades okay so what I've been suggesting here and what I also emphasize is none of this is original with me except for the notion that the OCD has something to do with the invention of these rituals these ideas go back in decades go back centuries that there is a parallelism between the symptoms of what we call schizotypal ism and the meta magical backbone of religious theology there is a parallelism between what we call obsessive compulsive disorder and the ritualism of mainstream Orthodox religion and this key point that the exact same behaviors which in one context destroys your life as you peripheral eyes do it right do it in the right context and it is not peripheral izing it makes you very honoured and powerful there are more themes yeah wonderful question would you'd expect to see different incidences of OCD type traits in different cultures depending on how secular the society is how ritualistic the religion is you look at for example Catholicism or high Episcopalian ISM highly ritualistic compared to Lutheran's or Unitarians or Quakers at the other end would you expect to see different different instances absolutely I don't know if anybody's studying that that would be exactly a prediction you would expect ok a related one which taps into the lecture on Friday would you expect to see differences in the incidence of depression depending on religiosity and boy do you see that with a vengeance one of the healthiest things you could do with your life is to be religious and to be highly religious it is a very strong protector against major depression religious belief extends your life expectancy and that's after you control for it changes risk factors you are less likely to drink to excess all of that what is the big issue in that field is do the health benefits of religiosity merely come from the social community that you get typically by being religious the question early in the lecture today religiosity versus spirituality that might be a realm to dissociate them spirituality if it's a very personal one you wouldn't get the community do you still get the health benefits nobody knows at this point but those are studies that people are doing but absolutely one of the greatest things you can do out there to buffer yourself from depression is to be religiously believing and walk through all the steps at the end of the lecture the other day elements of control predictability explanation outlet and you will see exactly how religion taps into that okay couple more threads here in terms of making sense of some of the covariance between biological phenomena and behavior that we can explain and patterns of religious belief back to something we talked about earlier in the course take a hungry pigeon and put it in a cage and instead of the behaviorist circumstance where it has to press a lever on 10 times to get food you randomly reward it and what we discussed there was a pigeon has a strong psychic need to come up with an attribution what did I do to caused this food to appear and what we went through was the fact that if the pigeon is hungry enough and the reward is both big enough and random enough the pigeon has a prepared learning state to make it think ah whatever I just did is what caused that to occur and then you suddenly have superstitious conditioning the capacity to get pigeons doing the most outlandish ly ritualistic things over and over and over in the belief that that's the cause of the food appearing and what we heard was take a room full of hungry pigeons and randomly reward all of them with food at different points and come back a few days later and every pigeon is going to be having its own private belief system built around in order to get food I have to do X the enforcement of superstitious belief and that is the term that is used in psychology and as we often have here is a question of is this word a metaphor is this word an inappropriate metaphor or what a superstitious belief and to go back to the question that came up here before why do we have a societal need for shamans why do we have a societal need for much of this because we are trying to explain the unexplainable we are trying to look for causal links of things that may or may not be associated this is basically a way of describing superstition how tight of a link do you need between cause and effect to believe that there has been cause and effect and this is coming down to statistical relations and if you allow yourself to believe that this prayer could be answered but it wasn't this time because I wasn't concentrating enough I need to do it a bit more fervently all of that you have a system that allows us very readily to see causal links that may not be there now what is the next interesting neurobiological piece of this is that take animals take rats and damage their hippocampus and what you get with hippocampal damage then is you have more trouble making causal sequential links and events what you wind up seeing and this next sentence is meant to be as provocative visible sound is when you have rats hippocampal damage they are more vulnerable to superstitious conditioning essentially what that is staying is that as you have a damaged kippa campus you have less of the capacity to tell the difference between accurate cause-and-effect linkages and ones that are merely statistically hinting of that or ones that may not be in the slightest bit connected with each other hippocampal damage and rats have a lower threshold for superstitious conditioning and we can very readily run with that one in terms of what the implications of that might be going our usual sequence from in order to appreciate a biological effect big gross lesion sort of stuff - once again the much more subtle realm we all differ in our number of hippocampal neurons in the amount of this enzyme in the amount of myelin and all the biology we know all the individual differences a last disorder that winds up being interesting there is a type of epilepsy which when you have it something happens to your religious belief system and this is one of its characteristic features epileptic seizures as I think we've discussed in here have characteristics as to what part of the brain they originate in and this is epilepsy that originates in the temporal lobe the temporal lobe containing the hippocampus the amygdala it's a big limbic area the temporal lobe temporal lobe epilepsy and about 30 years ago a neurologist named Geschwind who was at Harvard he was probably the most influential neurologists of the 20th century Geschwind published a paper first describing what is now called temporal lobe personality which is a cluster of personality traits that become far more common in people with temporal lobe epilepsy once again not everybody with this personality profile has epilepsy lurking there not everybody with temporal lobe epilepsy gets this profile but statistically at a higher than expected rate what do you see the temporal lobe personality first off the person becomes extremely serious and humorless okay you might say I would become extremely serious and humorless if I suddenly came down with epilepsy what's the appropriate control looking at other types of epilepsies of equivalent severity it's specific to temporal lobe so you get the seriousness next thing you get is what is termed neophobia you don't like new things you'd like to just do very familiar sorts of stuff the same small circle of friends the same very realm relatively limited range of experiences okay if I had epilepsy I would suddenly get a lot more sort of involute in my lifestyle once again the controls or other types of epilepsies next thing you see is this bizarre trait called hypergraphia which is people with temporal lobe personality begin to write obsessively they feel a pressure need to write forth trade and the most interesting one of all is people with temporal lobe personality become obsessively interested in religious and philosophical subjects and these are not people with uncontrolled seizures happening all the time these are people whose seizures are relatively well controlled with medication and once again well if I have this horrible neurological disease I suddenly start getting more introspective I once again control for with the other types of epilepsy and the classic temporal lobe patient that you see is somebody who is meeting a new neurologist and says oh hi great to meet you you know I very strongly believe that a patient should be more than just their symptoms so I've prepared this 60 page document here which is my philosophy about life meaning and that the next week's appointment comes back with a 40 page addendum this is what you want of seeing and there's this fabulous story told showing that it's not that you get religious you get interested in religious and philosophical subjects this great story showing this and this was apparently shortly after Geschwind first published this paper and he had some neurology resident who one day all the residents were in there in the neurology resident was summarizing some patient this was some thirteen year old boy in there with temporal lobe epilepsy and he went through the meds and all of that and how the kid was doing and at the end said oh by the way I just read your paper on that personality stuff this kid doesn't fit at all doesn't fit in the slightest clearly doing some chest thumping kind of territory stuff but the big man there and guess when says oh yeah really how come and he said because I asked him if he's religious he said no he's not guess mine says the median out of my way cousin goes storming down Hall and the residents running after him bursts into this kid's room and says oh hi I'm dr. Josh will any person through a neurological exam all of that and goes through and asked them do you like baseball how's the weather all of that and then offhandedly says well by the way are you religious and the voices no I'm not and then guess when asks the critical question he says oh how come and this 13 year old kid gives this hour-long lecture about the internal inconsistencies of Christ's Sermon on the mountain the epic of gilgamesh and sort of ank abuse treatment of this and Bertrand Russell's critique of Christ and and like Geschwind just leaves the residents in their torture to listen to this kid for an hour and it's not becoming religious it's becoming fascinated with the subject and there's even been a paper published in a neurology journal doing the sort of Paleo forensic neurology by a neurologist speculating someone who in history had temporal lobe epilepsy and this was st. Paul st. Paul who had seizure or ins as documented no evidence that the guy was particularly humorous the guy was hyper graphic as hell and clearly had a very strong interest in religious and philosophical subjects and you know this is fun but what do you make of the fact that somebody has an uncontrolled seizure in this part of the brain for 30 seconds once every six months and they become more interested in religious subjects and at the end of the handout I cite a novel that was published a couple years ago called lying awake fabulous novel by Mark salzman talking about a nun who is in the middle of a rather disputing life experience as a nun it has not been what she was hoping for it has mostly been empty ritual and in the last few years she's been having religious visions and this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her what she also has to admit is she has kind of become a star of her convent after being this very peripheral nobody and they're publishing books about her visions and people are coming to see her and what becomes apparent halfway through the book is that she has a tumor in her temporal lobe which is causing temporal lobe C years and suddenly what does it mean that this is what these visions have been about what does it mean that this is something that somebody in a white coat would call a disease is this a disease and do I want my disease cured do I want this taken away from me and it's extraordinary novel absolutely getting these features of temporal lobe personality and getting at this issue which now is the core of what this whole lecture has been what do we do with something like this what do we do with the possibility that have an uncontrolled burst of action potentials and one part of your brain for 30 seconds every six months and in a somewhat deterministic way that makes you more interested in religious subjects now summarizing here what I think's really important for me to emphasize is what I'm not saying because that I kind of learned the hard way over the years and touching on the subject in this class what things I am NOT saying I am NOT saying who some snotty you got to be crazy to be religious that's nonsense nor am I saying even that most people who are are psychiatrically suspect I'm not saying that in the slightest what I'm saying is it is absolutely fascinating that the same exact traits which in a secular context are life destroying separate you from the community and in the right setting are at the very core of what is protected what is sanctioned what is rewarded what is valued in religious settings so often and that there could be an underlying biology to this and what do we do with this what's most interesting here is even if this describes one single person I mean to put cards on the table I was raised in an extremely religious Orthodox upbringing and I had a complete break with it when I was about 14 and that process of completely breaking to the point now where I have no religion I have no spirituality I'm utterly atheist and in passing it is probably the thing I most regret in my life but is something I appear not to be able to change the process of getting to that point I view in retrospect as one of the most defining things in my life the process of turning into that person from who I was what to make of the possibility that each one of us goes through some equivalent version in our life deciding how religious or irreligious we are going to be for a lot of us that are among the most defining features of who we are where we have wound up with this and how we got there what do we make of the fact that even if there's one case in all of human history of someone who got to wherever they were instead because of a neurotransmitter hiccup because of a genetic influence because of something that we would see as deterministic as your visions are due to a tumor in your temporal lobe what are we to do with this what I am also saying here is it is just this interesting to ask this question about why some of us lose faith has to ask this about why some of us gained faith it is just as biological it is simply much less studied because there are fewer examples of it the study out there but it is just as biological in the process and it is just as interesting if it has only been one person in law of history once again coming to this issue what are we to make of who we are if even in one case somebody has arrived at that point because of just a storm of neurotransmitter abnormalities rather than the journey that all of us associate with helping to define who we are now this now is a segue to Wednesday's lecture which is going to look at all of these issues in a much more subtle realm of this biology of what makes our personalities personalities and this is finally moving outside of the realm of them and their diseases for what makes us us and at the core of this is what does it mean that biology may have as much to do with it as I will hopefully convince you of on Wednesday so let's pick up them

Channel: Raul Soto

Views: 326,035

Rating: 4.9127469 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Genetics, Sapolsky, Religion, Origins, biology, behavior, behaviour

Id: 4WwAQqWUkpI

Length: 82min 46sec (4966 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

A mistake: Henry Ward Beecher was Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, not her father.

[u/mavaction]

To get this theory off the ground you need to show that these meta-magical shamans are the gene carriers of schizophrenia. I don't know if he gets to that but so far he is just saying the two, the genes and the shamans, have the same relative frequency in the population.

A relevant question at roughly 22:45.

Another claim that only schizotypals come up with myth. I see no evidence for that in what he's saying.

But also the whole idea fails to explain the almost universal acceptance of superstition and myth.

I find the theory that there are adaptive benefits to religion very sound, BUT, I think it is simply explained by Daniel Dennett. Religion has adaptive power that it extends to groups who hold the beliefs of that religion.

Here's a talk that covers his main points Daniel Dennett: Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

edit: further I'd like to see how Sapolsky explains the higher incidence of schizophrenia in females than males...(Considering that shamanism similar to religion is a male dominated activity.)