Neuroscience and religion | W.R. Klemm | TEDxTAMU

well as you can see from this opening slide I'm going to talk about the conflict between science and religion in the conflict actually I've had a lot of time to think about this by the way because I've been a scientist for over 50 years and I was baptized as a Methodist when I was 12 so over the years it's caused me to think deeply about these issues the conflict course actually began in 1859 when Charles Darwin wrote his famous book origin of the species but since that time we now have neuroscience presenting a challenge to religion because the neuroscience is showing that mind and brain are the same functional substance actually this conflict was originally framed by a philosopher named Rene Descartes well that slides missing for some reason but anyway decart is the decart who created cartesian geometry but he was also a philosopher a religious philosopher and he argued that brain and mind are separate and in fact if they'd known about electromagnetic fields back then he probably would have thought of the brain as some sort of antenna that picks up the mind out of outer space however science is showing that that brain and mind are the same functional substances I said and it leads to many people especially some scientists to become atheist now I'm not an atheist and I'm not an agnostic in fact the more I've learned about science and the more I've learned about life science in particular convinces me that the laws of chemistry and physics are so sophisticated so elegant magical even that they could not have created themselves so the issue arises who why should we link neuroscience and religion and and the obvious reason is that our religious beliefs come out of the brain and we have created as a culture some four thousand two hundred religions today all of which differ in many ways and all of which have really been generated by human minds notice I'm calling science as a domain of faith we all know that religion is but science is - this is what theories and hypotheses do these are beliefs based on incomplete evidence well that's that's what religious faith is like - so that is the definition of faith namely believing certain things in the absence of complete evidence and that's what the real world is like whether it's in the domain of faith or in the domain of science so to summarize the rationale for making this linkage you can see that we have several elements one of which by the way is the fact that neuroscience is a very hot science these days the decade of the 90s was declared the decade of neuroscience and a lot of exciting new things are happening in neuroscience which have religious implications now one of the key factors is that all of us have innate tendencies to believe certain things in the absence of complete evidence we would have to or otherwise would be paralyzed into inaction if we couldn't make certain assumptions and beliefs because that's the way the real world is we don't have complete evidence for many things we also know that beliefs are learned and they are created by the experiences we have and what we're taught and how we're raised and that sort of thing but in my experience people don't think very deeply about science or religion and certainly not in the same context now I'd like to point out that science and religion especially neuroscience and religion have shared values and you can see that from reading this list that these are basic needs that people have that both neuroscientists and people of faith are trying to address they do it in different ways and for different reasons maybe a good analogy would be like policemen and social workers they're both trying to help people but they do it for different reasons in in different ways so this brings me to the issue of the scholarship of neuroscience and religion what scholarship I don't know of any university that teaches both subjects in the same course there are golf course universities that have religious studies programs we we had that here at Texas A&M and most universities have courses in psychology but psychology is not equivalent to neuroscience so for those reasons I decided to create a course a college course for upper level undergraduates in neuroscience and religion now this course is not designed to teach students answers to put on a multiple-choice exam the this is an essay course and the course is designed to require students to find or search papers either in neuroscience or on religious topics and then write essays on them and present them to the class and lead class discussion and debate in the I first taught this course last fall and in the post class surveys the students on a scale of 0 to 10 rated two items that they like the best and that was writing the essays and leading the class discussion and they rated those at nine point three on a 10-point scale with the range of eight to ten that's a new experience for me one student by the way wrote he was a senior science major Heaney said of all the science courses I've ever had this is the one where I learned the most about what matters most and that sort of gave me a goosebumps because I did the same to me so why don't colleges teach this kind of a course I don't know maybe they didn't think about it but I think it'd be a good idea in in this course it's 15 week course and we have a lecture one lecture each week on different topics here's some examples of the topics we begin with evolution but in this case evolution of the brain is what I want to focus on and then there's a topic on how the brain works how it processes information in learning and memory sleep and dreaming you can see these and it won't take the time to tell you all 15 topics but it should be fairly apparent that these topics are basic to our humanity and have overlap with religion so what are the students right about as I said they find a scholarly article and they're far more of them than I thought they don't have any trouble finding relevant papers to write about in each week each student either writes an essay on his scholarly paper or he writes a summary summary in the assignment rotates each week so that they're not overburdened with too much writing and so that I'm not overburdened with too much baiting of papers their objective when they write the essay is to introduce the topic and briefly summarize what the papers about but they have have to show how it in forms either religion or neurosciences the case may be and I'm looking for new ideas and creative thinking and critical thinking which they they present in the essay and we discussed in class so ground rules for this process is that it has to be academically oriented and they must not proselytize it turns out that wasn't a problem nobody really tried to do that they have to explain the data in the cited article and they have to incorporate neuroscience concepts whether the paper was neuroscience or or a theology paper and they have to show how they relate the two domains of thought relate and of course I want the students voice I want to know what the student thinks not what the author of the scholarly paper things and then they have to formally cite the the paper that they got the information from I was surprised that most of them who would provide four or five or more citations you know only what just one was required and that tells me that they were really engaged with these topics and I think they're engaged because it's personal you know they're writing about things they care about here's some examples from the different topics and you can check these we won't take the time to discuss them in detail but when we were talking them about the neuroscience of agency I would present these topics in lecture you can see what some of them are and at the same time show some corresponding related ideas that come from religion and this would help students get an idea about what to write their essays on here's an example when when we were covering sensation the neuroscience of sensation and and you can see that there are related religious topics here's an example from the week when we were talking about neural drives and emotions and again the the overlap is pretty feather noon when we covered consciousness you can see on the left hand side the topics that we covered in there in the neuroscience lecture and then you can see what corresponding topics are in religion and in the like lives here in the case of social neuroscience well we did this for 15 topics you know won't show them show them all to you but I hope it makes the point clear that there are areas in both neuroscience and religion that should be informing each other and they're not usually so what about people that can't take this course I wish everybody could in fact I would like to see seminaries offer such a course I'm not sure they're ready for that yet but I certainly suggested and I'm trying to structure this course so that I can transport it to other neuroscience professors here at Texas A&M but also professors elsewhere now at this point I would like to bring up a topic that neurosciences needs to deal with in recognize starting to recognize that they have to deal with this in and in science does not have an explanation for this so-called near-death experience several hospitals around the world have reported that about 10% of the people who died on the operating table and are resuscitated have this experience of dying in what happens when you die and I mean since they survive they can tell us about it and they they all have the same report they see themselves hovering over their body they see bright lights very often is they going through a tunnel and you know the emerge into a bright light and the this overwhelming overwhelming feeling of being loved to research groups and you see in this slide are currently studying this and they to show about 10% of the survivors of dying report these experiences and they all have the same report now by the way I haven't decided I haven't defined what near-death is near death is when your heart stops your breathing stops and your brain electrical activity stops you know in a hospital setting they're usually monitoring your brainwaves at the same time and when all this shuts down you're technically dead and in some cases physicians and surgeons can resurrect you so to speak and and you survive and about 10 percent of these people have the same it reports now a skeptic will say well these are just hallucinations but there's a problem with that if the hallucination is occurring before death the memory of it can't consolidate that's the way memory works in the brain one has to be electrically active to consolidate a memory and and since the brain is shut down in this near-death experience you can't you can't form a memory of this hallucination to be recalled when they when they recover if the hallucination is occurring after they've been revived why is it they all have the same report these are independent reports you know these people don't even know each other well there's some spooky things in science too you remember Einstein was the one who said that quantum mechanics is spooky physics well it's a mine Stein stuff it's pretty spooky do like having wormholes where people can in theory go through this universe to another universe it faster than the speed of light through a wormhole quantum mechanics has spooky ideas like entangle and and tunneling and even the advocates of quantum mechanics say we don't really understand it Richard Feynman who was a pioneer in this field says not only do my colleagues to not understand it I don't understand it either then there's string theory which is designed to express concil relativity with quantum mechanics now the problem of string theory is there are no observables it's all math anyway that's pretty spooky to me and and in the last decorative so they've discovered what's called dark matter in this colored photograph you know they've color-coded it to reflected a big area of space that is bending light but you don't see anything there and yet to bend light you've got to have a terrific amount of mass and so they call this dark matter we know it must be there because it's bending light is also by the way the explanation for why galaxies spiral hmm and they can't explain them we also know that the universe is expanding in the galaxies even though the galaxies are staying intact because of their own gravity they're being pushed further and further apart and the most astonishing thing is it's accelerating that means the energy that's pushing it is accelerating where's that coming from nobody knows they call it dark energy well the point is that of all the stuff in the universe we only know about 4.6 percent of it everything else is dark matter and dark energy so I think you can see that there are a lot of things yet to be discovered and maybe a lot of things that we call spiritual or actually material things we just don't understand so I thought I conclude with these two final questions and Socrates made the statement that the unexamined life is not worth living well I would remind you that both neuroscience and religion are legitimate ways to examine the truth of one's life in our conclude with the statement of Jesus of Nazareth who said seek the truth and you will find it [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 29,921

Keywords: ted talk, Science (hard), ted x, United States, Neuroscience, Religion/Spirituality, TEDxTalks, tedx talk, tedx, English, tedx talks, ted, ted talks

Id: XWIf6mOSPkQ

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 03 2014