- Troubled by xenophobic attitudes
and a pesky belief in a higher power?
Well, don't worry, science can zap
those vibes right out of your brain
with a little transcranial
magnetic stimulation.
(gentle instrumental music)
According to a new study
published in the journal
Social, Cognitive and
Effective Neuroscience,
a little tender loving TMS
to the brain's posterior
medial frontal cortex
can result in 32.8% less belief
in God, angels or heaven,
as well as 28.5% boost
in positivity towards
an immigrant who criticized your country.
Let's break this down.
First, the posterior medial
frontal cortex is associated
with identifying obstacles and triggering
appropriate responses.
TMS allows researchers to shut down
or stimulate specific
portions of the brain
in order to see how they effect
our overall cognitive
experience of reality.
In this experiment,
psychologist Dr. Keise Izuma
and a team of UCLA researchers
strapped two groups
of subjects into the brain
coils of a TMS machine.
One group received a
low energy placebo zap,
and the other got enough of a jolt
to lower brain activity.
Then, the researchers
chatted the subjects up
about death, as this tends to summon
contemplations on religion,
followed by specific questions
about religious beliefs and immigrants.
Now, those might seem like
drastically different categories,
but they both revolve
around personal ideology.
And this research explores
ideology's function
as a sort of human complication
of basic threat response.
When we're threatened, we tend
to double-down on our ideological stances,
even falling back on older ideologies,
the faith of your childhood,
your father's politics,
something like that.
Now, there's still a lot
of work to be done here,
especially as far as the
link between religious
and ethnocentric beliefs or concern.
But, the study illuminates
the paradoxical complexity,
and simplicity, of human cognition.
The brain is like a
multi-scoop ice cream cone
with each progressively complex flavor,
theology, politics, racial attitudes,
all plopped atop factory-made wafer cone
cognitive architecture.
If you have half a brain,
the front half anyway,
then you probably have an opinion on this,
so reach out to us.
Touch faith, and if you're looking
for more weird scientific wonder,
be sure to check in over
at now.howstuffworks.com everyday.
