Believe

[WITHTEETH]

I so enjoy your wisdom and unlimited knowledge Meta. What would we ever do without you?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Pass the endorphine gabs..... Whats going on, im so Hiiiiiiiii :D

[WITHTEETH]

Nope Meta, they want me to subscribe to view.

[metadigital]

I know, that is just the headlines. I'll post them up soon.

[WITHTEETH]

Sweet! :D

[metadigital]

*meta casts re-animate, level 7*

 

Some people believe in the weirdest things. They may be onto something, says Clare Wilson

 

IT IS five minutes past midnight and I am alone in my house. I am working

late, and the only illumination is the blue-white glow from my laptop computer. I live in a quiet London suburb, and at this time of night distractions are confined to the occasional eerie screeches and hisses from marauding urban foxes.

I pick-up the phone to call Michael Thalbourne, a psychologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. I want to talk to him about his research on chance, coincidence and the paranormal. Although the interview time has not been prearranged, we have been in contact by email, so it is disconcerting to hear a long pause when I introduce myself. When Thalbourne eventually speaks he sounds taken aback. "I was right in the middle of typing out an email to you," he says.

 

Thalbourne's instinct is to suspect some paranormal explanation for our synchronicity. My gut reaction is to suggest a more mundane alternative. It looks as if he is what some psychologists would call a sheep, while I am a goat.

 

The animal terminology stems from a passage in the Bible about a shepherd sorting

through his flock to separate the sheep - representing the nations that believe in God - from the goats, or those that do not. Thalbourne and his ilk, however, are interested

in belief in the paranormal and supernatural. And such beliefs turn out to be surprisingly common. For example, a 1998 survey of 1000 adults in the UK showed that one-third believed in fortune telling, half believed in telepathy, and a whopping two-thirds agreed with the statement that some people have powers that science cannot explain.

 

Decades of scientific research into parapsychology have produced no convincing demonstration of the paranormal that can be reliably reproduced - the acid test of scientific inquiry. So why should scientists be so interested in whether or not people believe in it? Research into the differences between sheep and goats has over the years produced some intriguing findings about how the brain works.

 

"Access to subconscious information can give the appearance of psychic abilities"

 

Until recently, sheep might have been forgiven for being cheesed off by all this research - most of the findings were less than complimentary about them. Study after study suggested that sheep saw paranormal events where there were none, simply because they were worse at judging probabilities and randomness, and even at using logical reasoning. But newer research might restore some sheepish pride. It turns out that the kind of thinking involved in belief in the paranormal helps us carry out a range of important cognitive tasks, from spotting predators to recognising familiar faces. Sheep also tend to be more imaginative and more creative. Some psychologists even think that people who believe they have paranormal powers such as telepathy, dreams that foretell the future, or other forms of extrasensory perception (ESP) might actually be accessing information stored in their subconscious without realising it.

 

Imagine, for example, that you are walking along the street with your old friend Bob, when you start thinking about a mutual college chum, Joe. "I wonder what Joe Smith is getting up to these days," you say. "That's amazing!" says Bob. "I was just thinking of Joe myself." You believe it is simply a coincidence. Bob suspects some form of telepathy. But there is a third explanation: without being consciously aware of it, both you and Bob noticed something that reminded you of Joe. Maybe you passed someone who looked just a little bit like him, or maybe it was something in a shop window that reminded you of him.

 

It was Thalbourne who first suggested that people who regularly have subconscious information such as this surfacing in their conscious mind would often seem to require the paranormal to explain their experiences. He coined the term "transliminality" for this tendency for information to pass between our subconscious and our conscious mind. He has also designed a questionnaire to measure transliminality. It asks questions such as how good people are at using their imagination, whether they have a heightened awareness of sights and sound and whether they have ever felt they have received "special wisdom". Thalbourne and others have shown in several studies that transliminality corresponds to where people fall on a sheep-goat scale. In other words, the better you are at tuning in to your subconscious, the more likely you are to believe in the paranormal.

 

 

What do you see? It all depends on whether you are a sheep or a goat

 

This correlation alone suggests Thalbourne may be onto something. And in 2002, a group at Goldsmiths College in London reported an intriguing practical demonstration of transliminality (Perception, vol 31, p 887). They asked people to take part in an apparent test of ESP with Zener cards, which display one of five symbols: a circle, a cross, a square, a star or three wavy lines. The subjects sat in front of a computer monitor displaying the back of a card. They pressed a key to choose which symbol they thought it was. Then they got to see the card's face.

 

Subliminal clues

 

What they did not know was that they were being given subliminal clues as to which symbol was about to appear. Before a card's back was shown, they saw a flash of its face lasting for just 14.3 milliseconds, too fast for most people to register. Some participants, however, were able to subconsciously pick up on the clue, and as a result they scored better than chance at predicting which symbol would appear. "To those participants it would appear that they had ESP abilities," says psychologist Chris French, who led the research. And people who were best at picking up the subliminal image also turned out to be the most transliminal as measured by Thalbourne's questionnaire. It was a neat demonstration of how access to subconscious information can give the appearance of psychic abilities.

 

The talents of people who believe in the paranormal don't end there. It seems that they are also better than non-believers at perceiving meaningful patterns in apparently random noise. The classic example of this trait, which is known as pareidolia, is when people claim to see images of the Virgin Mary, say, on the wall of a building or a tortilla. Pareidolia can be auditory as well as visual, as shown by the current craze for detecting electronic voice phenomena (EVP), supposed messages from the dead buried in the random noise of audio recordings.

 

Psychologists have traditionally viewed this quality as a shortcoming on the part of sheep. But Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, does not think it is a black-and-white issue. He explains that people commit what statisticians call a type 1 error when they perceive a pattern where none exists -when they are overly gullible, in other words. A type 2 error is when they fail to recognise a pattern that does exist - when they are too sceptical. Brugger points out that pattern recognition is an important aspect of human cognition, allowing us to recognise familiar faces or camouflaged predators. "From an evolutionary perspective, the price for protection against type 2 errors is a susceptibility to type l errors," Brugger says. He theorises that it may be safest to err on the side of gullibility. "If you miss the tiger hidden in the grass, then you are dead. If you always see tigers, you are always running away but you're not dead."

 

What determines our tendency to spot patterns and form associations? It turns out that a key factor is the relative dominance of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. There has been much dubious pop psychology written about the differences between "right-brain people" and "left-brain people". But most neuroscientists would accept that the left side of the brain is primarily responsible for language and logical analysis, while the right side is more involved in creativity and what might be called lateral thinking - making connections between disparate concepts.

 

"Believers have greater electrical activity in the right hemisphere of their brains"

 

Several recent studies using various techniques suggest that people who believe in the paranormal have greater right-brain dominance. In 2000 Brugger's group showed, for example, that believers have greater electrical activity in the right hemisphere than non-believers as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings (Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, vol 100, p 139). In a different approach, in 2001 they asked people to carry out word-association tasks using different sides of their brain by looking at the words with Just one eye at a time. When using their right brains, the sheep among them were faster than the goats at finding connections between distantly related words such as "lion" and "stripe" (the connection is "tiger") (Psychopathology, vol 34, p 75). In some cases, says Brugger, "the disbelievers didn't even note that there was a relationship".

 

Foretelling the future - or simply skimming off ideas as they rise to the surface?

 

But when taken to extremes, there can be a less welcome side to right-brain thinking. Brugger and others have shown that there is also relatively more right-brain activity in people with schizophrenia, particularly in those whose symptoms involve delusional beliefs. Brugger says this aspect of his research has not gone down well with the paranormal community. "I'm a very disliked person," he admits.

 

Of course neither Brugger nor anyone else is saying that people who believe in the paranormal are schizophrenic. But while an enhanced ability to spot real patterns and form connections is desirable, it could be argued that believers in the paranormal have taken this tendency too far. Then again, that depends on whether you are a sheep or a goat.

 

As a goat myself, I tend to opt for down-to-earth explanations. Here, for example, is how I account for the fact that Thalbourne was emailing me just as I phoned for that interview. Earlier that day, while it was already night-time in Adelaide, I had sent him an email asking if we could arrange a time to talk. Later I decided to chance a phone call anyway, and not wanting to stay up working any longer than necessary, I called at midnight my time, or 8.30 am in Adelaide, which I figured was probably the earliest he would arrive at his office. He had actually got to work shortly before, and started his day as many of us do by turning on his computer and was responding to the emails he received overnight - which happened to include one from me.QED.

Thalbourne, however, persists in viewing the event as one of life's intriguing little coincidences. But then he does happily admit to being a sheep. "My life is full of many small and occasionally large coincidences that suggest some unusual form of cause and effect," he says. "I believe that I can't disbelieve in it."

[Dark_Raven]

[metadigital]

Particles of faith

 

Belief seems intangible until you take a close look inside the brain, says Alison Motluk

BELIEF has never literally moved a mountain, but it can have some dramatic effects. Take Madeleine Rizan. By the time she bathed in the waters of Lourdes in 1858 she had been paralysed for 24 years, yet, according to the record, she regained her ability to move. Then there are the dozens of heart patients in the 1950s who were helped by a procedure known as internal mammary ligation -which worked just as well when patients simply believed it had been done. There are even instances of women who stop menstruating, grow a round belly and begin to lactate, in the firm but mistaken belief that they are pregnant. Equally mysterious are the paralysed people who believe their limbs are still working normally, despite the evidence of their own eyes.

 

What is going on inside our brains when we believe? How does that trigger physical changes in our bodies? And why would our minds believe the world is a certain way in flat contradiction to the evidence of our own senses? Or, put another way, what exactly is the biological basis of belief ? "It's a fascinating question and poorly studied," says Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neurologist at the University of California at San Diego who has spent much of his career studying "disorders of belief". Dean Hamer, from the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and author of The God Gene, goes further. "We have absolutely no idea," he says. "Nobody has any idea."

 

In brighter moments, even Hamer would admit the picture is not quite as grim as that. There seem to be at least two lines of thinking on the matter. One is that belief in the widest sense is primarily a product of rationality and reasoning. In order to believe in something, you have to know vaguely what it is and how it will play out. The other is that believing is more emotional - a sort of gut reaction. "That's why people feel belief and don't think belief," says Hamer, who is inclined towards the latter camp.

 

"Faith in medicine is almost as ubiquitous as faith in God"

 

Getting a handle on the biological basis of belief is not easy. It is extremely difficult to study how faith in God's power to heal can actually heal, for instance. Luckily, there is an alternative. Faith in medicine is almost as ubiquitous as faith in God, and the effects are far easier to control and to measure. We know, for instance, that about 80 per cent of the effect of antidepressants derives from people's faith that they will work (Prevention & Treatment, vol 5, p 23). The influence of belief may be even stronger in alternative medicine. A study out last September showed that acupuncture seems to alleviate headaches no matter where in the body you stick the needles or how you twiddle them (British Medical Journal, vol 331, p 376). And countless medical studies have used placebos to show that belief is a major player in the healing process. "The best way to understand the scientific effect of belief is to look at the literature on the placebo effect," says Herbert Benson, director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston.

 

Put simply, the placebo effect is the biological impact of believing in a medical treatment. There is no doubt that it is a real and powerful force. The question is, how exactly does it work. Last year, Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor published research that tackled the issue head-on. He gave 14 healthy men infusions to make their jaws ache. They were then given a treatment that they were told "may or may not relieve pain". In fact, it was only a saline solution, yet all the men reported less pain. And their pain relief was not just subjective. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, to scan their brains, Zubieta found that volunteers produced more endorphins, the body's own natural opioid painkillers, after receiving the placebo (Nature Neuroscience, vol 25, p 7754).

 

Combing his data for clues as to what was going on, Zubieta found differences in the way untreated pain and placebo-treated pain affected the brain. With the placebo, not only did people release more endorphins overall they also released them in additional areas of the brain. These included regions involved in higher-order cognition such as parts of the rostral anterior cingulate, which helps determine how much pain you are feeling, the insular cortex, which receives signals from the body about pain, and the nucleus accumbens, which tells you how important it is. Zubieta also found differences between people who said in advance that they expected to get a lot of relief and those who were more sceptical. In the faithful, he found more endorphins were released in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a cognitive area thought to be involved in decision making, interpretation and selective attention.

 

All this suggests that the cognitive experience of anticipating relief plays a major role in allowing it to happen. In other words, the evidence supports the hypothesis that belief is a conscious, rational process -a kissing cousin to expectation. And further evidence from behavioural studies seems to bolster this. First and foremost is the fact that to benefit, you have to know you are being treated - the placebo effect won't kick in if a sham medication is given covertly. Similarly, praying for yourself or knowing that family and friends are praying for you seems to produce some positive results, while being secretly prayed for does not (The Lancet, vol 366, p 211).

 

Experience also appears to be critical. That makes sense, as you have to derive your expectations from somewhere. A study in people with Parkinson's disease, for example, found that after taking a placebo people actually secreted dopamine, the very neurotransmitter they are short on, and at levels similar to that produced by drugs (Science, vol 293, p 1164). But all these patients had previously had positive experiences taking medicines. This is true for many of us. People with a long history of not being helped by conventional medicine, such as those with chronic pain, do not respond well to conventional placebos either. Nor do people with Alzheimer's disease, whose memory impairments or cognitive decline may make it hard to develop the kind of expectations that placebos might depend on. Likewise, children who have no preconception of a particular procedure such as acupuncture get no relief from it.

 

Perhaps it is not so surprising that expectation and experience are bound up with the placebo effect, which by its very nature is all about the belief that a treatment will or will not work. But underlying this effect is a more stable set of beliefs in the power of medicine in general. There's a direct parallel with other basic beliefs such as religious belief and belief in the evidence of our senses. Myriad such beliefs form the foundations of the way we see the world, and they tend to be very stable. We would be basket cases if every bit of conflicting evidence caused us to alter our world view. Imagine, for example, that you have slept in an awkward position and wake up with no feeling in your arm. You don't immediately assume that you are paralysed.

 

Yet sometimes we are forced to reassess our deep-held beliefs, and in some cases resistance to change can cause medical oddities. It is these strange conditions that Ramachandran studies to get an insight into the nature of belief.

 

Among the patients he has observed are a group with a condition known as anosognosia, usually caused by stroke. These people deny facts about their bodies, such as that they are paralysed. They will stare at an immobile arm, for example, while insisting they are throwing a ball with it. Ramachandran recalls one case in which he managed to get a woman in denial about the fact that her arm was paralysed to briefly admit it. He did this by providing her with an acceptable way to believe: he told her that he was injecting her arm with an anaesthetic and that it would be temporarily paralysed. After he injected her with a saline solution she did indeed notice that her arm couldn't move. To rule out mere suggestibility, he injected the other arm too, whereupon she complained that the anaesthetic wasn't working.

 

Ramachandran has studied many such patients. Not all are as resolute as this one. Most anosognosics make excuses, explaining why they don't want to move their paralysed limb - that they have arthritis, for instance, or that the other doctors have already poked and prodded so much that they are fed up. But he has noticed that only patients who have had damage to the right side of their brain confabulate in this way. People with left-side damage, by contrast, are acutely aware of their paralysis and tend to talk about it non-stop.

 

Such observations have led Ramachandran to suggest that in healthy brains there is a back and forth between believing the old and accepting the new. The left hemisphere, he maintains, tries to impose consistency, whereas the right hemisphere plays devil's advocate, trying to get us to question our beliefs in the light of new evidence. In people with anosognosia, he suspects that brain damage caused by the stroke somehow impairs the right hemisphere's natural scepticism. The left hemisphere is left on its own to uphold the status quo no matter what - even at the risk of becoming delusional.

 

Much more common examples of such disorders of belief, he suspects, are illnesses

Belief is real. It has measurable physical effects in our brains" such as anorexia and bipolar disorder. People who have anorexia can be completely emaciated yet still look in the mirror and see themselves as fat. In bipolar disorder, the mania phase is often characterised by grandiose and apparently unchecked beliefs. The depressive phase is the opposite, a collapse of self-belief. It is generally accepted that these illnesses disrupt the emotions, so Ramachandran's suggestion that they also have to do with impaired belief systems chimes with the second hypothesis about belief - that it is emotional and akin to longing.

 

Hamer has raised this idea, arguing that belief - be it in God, medicine or whatever -slightly alters our emotional state. Just as feeling joy has chemical consequences in the brain, so, he speculates, does feeling faith. "Belief," he suggests, "is changing the tenor of the brain." Hamer thinks that belief is mediated by the same neurotransmitters -for example, dopamine and serotonin - that mediate other emotions. He has found, for instance, that there is a variant of a gene called VMAT2 that may be associated with greater spirituality. The VMAT2 protein seems to control the flow in the brain of monoamines, a class of neurotransmitters that includes serotonin and dopamine.

 

Interestingly, Zubieta's study also indicates a role for emotions. One of his most intriguing findings was that the more people suffered from the pain he induced, the more placebo effect they got. In other words, the greater their longing for relief, the more the endorphins flowed. Zubieta's working hypothesis is that placebos piggyback on the brain's innate painkilling ability, so believing that a treatment will bring relief merely engages this natural system more fully.

 

Perhaps belief is both a rational process and an emotional one. The picture is still very hazy but, at the very least, attempts to discover the biological underpinnings of belief highlight the fact that it is real: it does have measurable physical effects in our brains. More intriguingly, these effects have the potential to influence the outcome of events. This may even go some way towards explaining the role that self-belief has in helping us achieve our goals in life. If belief in our own abilities can actually bring success, then belief becomes a virtuous circle, a self-fulfilling prophesy. No wonder people are often so often so eager to believe in the first place.

[Dark_Raven]

Point not found?

[Blank]

It was about belief, which means it is on-topic, so, in WoT that is good enough.

[Musopticon?]

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

X-box pills? X-box kills!

Edited April 17, 2006 by Musopticon?

[metadigital]

Point not found?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Even after I highlighted it for you?

[Nartwak]

She meant tl;dr.

[metadigital]

That's the point of topics: they are voluntary.

[Dark Moth]

Hey, you changed your sig!

Edited April 17, 2006 by Mothman

[Blarghagh]

Athiest's have just as much faith in their belief as people who believe in a gad have.  As far as I have seen, it can not be proven.

 

And what, pray tell, do atheists have to prove? I can see that, to prove a religion, one must prove that the deity exists. However, to prove atheism, you would have to prove that a deity doesn't exist. The problem herein lies in the fact that you cannot, and I stress this word, you CANNOT prove that something is a non-entity. There is nothing about atheism that you can prove, just things you can disprove. Even if nobody on earth believed in a religion, there would still not be any proof that atheism is true.

Edited April 17, 2006 by TrueNeutral

[Nartwak]

[WITHTEETH]

*meta casts re-animate, level 7*

 

Some people believe in the weirdest things. They may be onto something, says Clare Wilson

 

 

But when taken to extremes, there can be a less welcome side to right-brain thinking. Brugger and others have shown that there is also relatively more right-brain activity in people with schizophrenia, particularly in those whose symptoms involve delusional beliefs. Brugger says this aspect of his research has not gone down well with the paranormal community. "I'm a very disliked person," he admits.

[WITHTEETH]

That is sweet that they can tap into their subconcious more readily, i wish i could do that. Yet, i do tend to have great guesses when it comes to numbers, and people, but thats because of necessity and practice perhaps.

[kumquatq3]

There is nothing about atheism that you can prove, just things you can disprove.

 

You're kind of playing with words. You can prove that someone is wrong or that something is false. It has the same meaning as being able to disprove a claim, in fact, here is one online definition of disprove: "to prove to be false".

 

but I am unsure if you meant all that in terms of you can't say it in wording or if you couldn't get the proof. So I'll leave it there.

 

Even if nobody on earth believed in a religion, there would still not be any proof that atheism is true.

 

The burden of proof does not rest with the Atheist. It is not necessary, to an atheist, to disprove god anymore than I feel the need to disprove that there is a invisible dinosaur sitting in front of me.

 

Religion is what is asking for your faith, not atheism, and for that reason and because the nature of the claims, the burden of proof relies with the believers. I know the silly way you can try to reverse this, lets not bother.

 

So, assuming no one on earth believes in religion, then there isn't anything to prove or disprove anyways. It's irrelevant.

[WITHTEETH]

The last article has potential to scare me. Its great that we have the potential to heal and ease ourselves through belief and rationalizations but wouldn't it be freaky if the goverment put somtehing in our water to make us believe in everything they say!

 

I wonder if believeing in many things has an effect in how easy we can believe in other ideas. I guess the more you beleive would add to the minds complexity, making it easier to believe more ideas, possibly as long as the subject is right side dominant of the brain i think.

[WITHTEETH]

Even if nobody on earth believed in a religion, there would still not be any proof that atheism is true.

The remix

Even if nobody on earth was an atheist, there would still not be any proof that god is true.

Besides I believe in

And why am i an atheist but not a aunicorn, afsm, aelve, and asanta? whats up with the negative annotations?

Edited April 17, 2006 by WITHTEETH

[kumquatq3]

all about burden of proof.

 

If I claim that I am the second coming of Jesus, it's not up to other people to disprove me, it's up to me to show I'm right.

 

It's not up to me to prove that God doesn't exist, it's up to his fans to prove to me (and themselves I guess) that he does.

 

Of course, the counter arguement is: You can't. You have to have faith.

 

Then you have to argue common sense v. faith, and it gets ugly there.

Edited April 17, 2006 by kumquatq3

[Judge Hades]

I have no faith.

[WITHTEETH]

I have no faith.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That can be fixed.

Hot Girl Saves!

Your Healed!

[metadigital]

That is sweet that they can tap into their subconcious more readily, i wish i could do that. Yet, i do tend to have great guesses when it comes to numbers, and people, but thats because of necessity and practice perhaps.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Derren Brown has performed some brilliant demonstrations of "psychic power"; the most recent of which he explained as he televised the preparation and live results, on the weekend.

 

Basically he used techniques to winnow out those who were the most suggestible in the group of ordinary people (who had applied for a standard sales and marketing course), whilst teaching them some useful skills (like body language).

 

He set them up by romanticizing crime (gave them a tangible reminder, that would serve a purpose later on: a replica handgun), associating some triggers (the colour green and a Michael Jackson song). Then he tested them with two tasks: firstly to steal some small items from a local corner store, and secondly to do the Milgram experiment (over 50% followed orders and administered