Power and Beliefs: Perspectives from Neurotheology - Article Example

Power and Beliefs Who among us does not remember 9/11 or the subsequent decisions of our country to invade Afghanistan and Iraq out of fear, revenge,economic policy, military strategy, or political proselytizing, or a combination of all of these and more? We are at war but it is not with people we see. It is between entrenched beliefs we live. Was the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq the decision of President Bush alone? Surely not! His advisers, his staff members and the people of the US were in support of this action. However it was the final decision of the president to do what he ‘believed’ was right to protect his country. The key word in the above paragraphs is ‘belief’. Beliefs are assumptions, theories, explanations, conclusions and states of mind frameworks that help us make sense out of our experiences. Beliefs are the foundation upon which we build our expectations. President Bush believed that invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was the best plan to safeguard his country. Another person in his place at that time might have made a different decision. Therefore it is said that beliefs serve a purpose. They are key components of a person’s personality and sense of identity. Many of our reactions to others are based on our beliefs and our perceptions of theirs, and it is impossible to understand racism, prejudice, religious and national conflicts without considering disagreement in basic belief systems. We join many groups because we believe the group will support our beliefs, and our participation in groups changes many of our beliefs. Even our mundane or consequential behaviors are affected by what we believe. These behaviors also have an affect on the people we come into contact with. [5] Although humans believe in more things they are able to imaging, beliefs can be classified into two major groups: individual and collective/social. Individual beliefs are represented by assumptions, conclusions, explanations, theories, schemas, states of mind, attitudes, etc. Beliefs are implicit and explicit frameworks that help us make sense of our experiences and serve as the foundation upon which humans build their short-term and long-term expectations. Beliefs and belief systems can also be scientific or psychological, religious or mystical, economic or political, cultural or social with much influence from technology and many ethical implications. [7] Power Comes From Belief There is no other more powerful directing force in human behavior than belief. A person’s beliefs have the power to create and to destroy. A belief delivers a direct command to your nervous system. Belief is a purely subjective matter. It changes time and again based on what the mind is going through. A belief system imported from another culture will be modified by the receiving polity to suit its needs and requirements. Due to the interaction between belief systems, each system borrows ideas, rituals and doctrines. No belief is right or wrong and it is either empowering or limiting. A belief is nothing but the generalization of a past incident. [7] [15] Once a person believes in something, that person automatically knows what does he wants from that belief. Ever wonder why leaders are so effecting in leading their groups of people? It is because they believe in their cause and work to motivate and guide the members towards that belief. A belief system will have an authority, a central figure, or a collective set of values dominating the explanations provided therein. This authority gives the person the power to lead and thus enabling a simple person to become a leader. A belief system does not need to have a governing hierarchy, however belief system with a governing or administrative hierarchy will be more authoritarian than others. In other words they will more power. In the case of an official belief system, the governing strata of a polity will wish to inject that belief system into the identity of the polity. [7] So therefore we can conclude that power implies control or force upon people. Sociologists usually define power as the ability to impose ones will on others, even if those others resist in some way. The ability to influence the behavior of others is the essence of practicing power in totality. When talking about spiritual power, beliefs once again play the vital role. Religion has always been one of the most important issues of human life since the dawn of modern civilization. Since god in most religions is an unseen presence, the belief in such a presence is totally in the mind. This is called faith. Scientists explain this phenomenon with experiments of all sorts through the fields of Neurotheology among others. [5] Power – Political Power For the purpose of this essay, political power will be utilized in application to power and beliefs. Political power is a type of power held by a person or group in a society. There are many ways to hold such power. Officially, political power is held by the holders of sovereignty. Political powers are not limited to heads of states, however, and the extent to which a person or group holds such power is related to the amount of societal influence they can wield, formally or informally. In many cases this influence is not contained within a single state and it refers to international power. [10] To analyze better, power is separated from influence by Macmillan [9] and can be explained as “Power is the capacity to restructure actual situations.” While influence is explained as “Influence is the capacity to control and modify the perceptions of others” Interestingly once a person gains power, that person can alter the beliefs of other others using influencing tactics. Neurotheology and Beliefs It is an established fact that beliefs are inside the human brain although they may be formed as a result of experiences and influences. Neurotheology is the study of how the brain and mind experience, interpret, generate and mediate belief phenomena. It engages meaningfully diverse understandings of reality including the physical, mental, and spiritual. Emergence of Neurotheology is an effort to close the existing gap by providing a balanced structure to study how the brain and mind experience, interpret, generate, and mediate belief phenomena. The new discipline serves as a shared approach between a range of sciences to explain and interpret the connections between beliefs and belief systems to thought, feeling, behavior, and experience Its primary objectives are the following. [2] [5] 1. Establish comprehensive, interdisciplinary approaches to understand belief phenomena. 2. Explain, interpret and predict the influences of belief phenomena to thought, feeling, behavior and experience. Neurotheology – Methodology Current scholarship in Neurotheology offers perspectives from neuroscience studying spiritual practices like meditation and prayer by utilizing brain scanning technologies and researching brain trauma and seizure activity. Other perspectives include Darwinian evolution, neuropsychology, genetics, cellular biology, cognitive science, mindfulness, electromagnetic field effects, attachment theory, learning theory and conditioning. [2] Neurotheology acknowledges the complexity and diversity of human beliefs and provides a broad conceptual framework to encompass belief perspectives whether mystical or religious, economic or political, or some other. Each dimension captures a particular area of human activity and affords critical, creative study of the brain, mind, belief and belief systems to thought, feelings, behavior, and experience. Perspectives from these dimensions intersect through a four-fold methodology providing the basis to unpack and examine the complexity of their varying beliefs. [2] Eight Dimensions: 1. Mystical, Religious, Spiritual and Theological Traditions and Experiences 2. Scientific Programs and Psychological Theories 3. Philosophical Traditions 4. Economic Policies 5. Socio-Political Influences 6. Cultural Manifestations 7. Technological Developments 8. Ethical Implications The emerging methodology of Neurotheology represents an attempt to marry the empirical nature of science to purely theoretical discourses of theology. The key idea underlying the methodological basis of Neurotheology is to identify major dimensions of the discipline, map the possibilities to deal with multiple perspectives on brain, mind and beliefs and offer a way to properly understand and effectively compare research in the field of the new discipline. Currently, four major methodological principles/concepts are employed to achieve this goal providing the basis to unfold and analyze Neurotheological phenomena in their complexity. These principles are: [2] 1. Personal Ultimacy (Human Perception of Reality/Worldview/Paradigm): Each perspective has a belief structure. Metaphysics and paradigms help to order our understanding of the universe and the world. A metaphysical system is a type of philosophy or study that uses broad concepts to help define all reality, material and immaterial, subjective and objective, and our understanding of it. Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm to describe not the thoughts we have, but the mental tools or mindsets that we use to understand a situation. Paradigms inform the way we do things. Whether spoken or unspoken paradigms serve as overarching frameworks for interpreting everyday experience. 2. Sacrificial Re-birth (Typologies): To relate varying perspectives requires a typology. Within the field of science and religion Ian Barbour created a typology consisting of conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. A typology is a schema, ordering or construction of the types of relationships. Typologies serve to relate diverse often opposing views between various disciplines or schools of thought. 3. Ritual Experience (Habit): Each perspective has its own methodology and way of doing things. Whether using the scientific method to experiment or leading everyday lives, personal and communal, we participate in life sustaining and life-shaping repetitive activities. Such repetition informs our methodology. Humans are creatures of habit and like our systems of biology our systems of thought, emotion, behavior, experience, and belief can be explored and known. Beliefs follow process and procedure allowing for avenues of influence to be identified, understood and quite possibly predicted. 4. Inner life (Interiority): Human belief is complex. Perspectives offer a wide range of interpretations on belief. Rather than continuing the mind-body conflict Neurotheology acknowledges mental, physical and spiritual as human perceptual variances of life in general. We are borne by beliefs, both internal and external, with all perspectives offering something significant. Neurotheology Application – Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Neurotheology affords diverse inquiries including astronomy, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, ecology, economics, engineering, genetics, geology, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, political science, psychology, religion, and theology. Each of these has opportunity to develop distinct approaches to explain and interpret the relationship between brain, mind, and belief phenomena to thought, feeling, behavior and experience representative of their metaphysical claims and/or implicit or explicit paradigms. Neuroscience Neuroscience is a field that is dedicated to the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies may include the structure, function, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system. The scope of neuroscience has now broadened to include any systematic scientific experimental and theoretical exploration of the central and peripheral nervous system of biological organisms. The methodologies employed by neuroscientists have been enormously extended, from biochemical and genetic analysis of dynamics of individual nerve cells and their molecular constituents to imaging representations of perceptual and tasks in the brain. [2] Cognitive Operators According to Newberg, there are two central cognitive operators which function together in the brain/mind process of transforming internal stimuli into reality. The causal operator is involved in identifying and processing the causes of incoming stimuli in the moment-by-moment flow of consciousness, while the binary operator arranges the incoming stimuli into a sort of order opposing them: “This interpretive function of brain/mind draws from the most primitive parts of the brain, interprets data on a survival continuum, and is decidedly dualistic”. [11] Leaders have a strong sense and awareness of both cognitive operators in themselves and they can sense them in others as well. To influence others on a specific point, these leaders apply the property of binary operator to reason others into accepting what they are being offered. Psychoanalytic Theory Psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud was the first attempt to create a comprehensive picture of personality and human development. Freud emphasized the crucial role of the early years of childhood. The first six years of the child shape the personality and whatever happens to a person later in life is nothing but “a mere ripple on the surface of a personality structure” [6]. As a result, the basic idea of psychoanalysis is that behavior is determined by unconscious forces like early childhood experiences and innate drives. People who usually are in the position to use political power have a defining personality and have a generally more mature mind. Behavioral Theory Behavioral theory is concerned with the behavior of people, i.e. how people learn to behave in particular ways in particular situations. This approach can equally be termed the learning theory: learning is the main determinant of human behavior. The main concern of behaviorists is establishing a direct association between two events: environmental influence and behavioral response. This property is found especially in people who have the power to influence others. These people know exactly how to behave in every situation which in turn can lead them to achieve their goals. [14] Social Cognition Cognitive science is a rapidly evolving field that deals with complex cognitive processes, intelligent systems, and the emergent behavior of large-scale real-world computational systems. It is an interdisciplinary study. It draws from converging evidence and methodology of diverse fields, including psychology, physics, neuroscience, philosophy, information science, computer science, anthropology and linguistics. [12] According to Tesser, "Social cognition is simply thinking about people. How do people think about other people and make sense of them? How do people think about themselves in social situations? The conceptual definition implies, first, an interest in thinking strategies and, as a corollary, not so much interest in affect (i.e., feelings, evaluations, and emotions). Nor has the field focused so much on actual, overt behavior. While social cognition researchers have been figuring out the thinking, they have not always gotten around to its link to affect and behavior, but they will”. [16] Prejudice in Mental Thinking According to Mitchell, social psychologists have long known that people engage different mental criteria when thinking about the possible thoughts and actions of people within their own ethnic, cultural or political group, vs. those outside that group. One theory thats gained credence among social neuroscientists is that people look to themselves when thinking about people they already include in their "group." Previous studies have shown that an area toward the front of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), always lights up when people think about themselves or people they consider similar to themselves. This is how people try to understand what goes around them and how they are connected to the society. [4] Human Behavior and Decision Making Researchers are investigating connections between pictures created by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and their depictions of “unfairness” in the brain to further illuminate the neurological basis of moral decision-making. If a person is treated unfairly, the imaging shows that negative emotions are created while the brain uses more oxygen. fMRI is a very crude instrument and its results are limited as it can only tell you what large populations of neurons are doing, and in a very indirect way. It is very good at telling you where in the brain things are happening, but it’s not very good at telling us what, exactly, those happenings are. [3] Rhythm and Brain Activity Suppes and other researchers are now working to study some of those brain rhythms as part of a growing interdisciplinary field called “brainwave entrainment.” Recent evidence has shown that if people listen attentively to a rhythmic stimulus, such as tribal drumming, mantra chanting or repetitive prayer, gradually their brain waves will begin to pulse in time with the tempo. The hypothesis is that this response, which spreads from the auditory cortex to other parts of the brain, can cause changes in mood, arousal and attention. By slowing down or speeding up brain wave activity, scientists such as Harold Russell, a clinical psychologist and adjunct research professor in the department of gerontology and health promotion at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, believe they can systematically alter these mental states and improve brain functioning. [8] Political bias affects brain activity Belief plays an important part in the bias one has in specific situations. When someone believes in something, they tune out the side of the brain that deals with reason. A brain-scan technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, revealed a consistent pattern in an experiment done on political parties during elections. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. The belief that their candidate is the best even against contradictory evidence, is the result of the positive influence of the candidate on the party members. [13] Schemas Schemas are memories activated consciously or unconsciously. Schemas work well for the routine and familiar providing prediction, interpretation and quick reference for information. Cultural schemas inform group and individual citizen about their beliefs and behaviors. Their theoretical rationale is that social organization directs the field to some aspects rather than others; what we attend to influences overarching beliefs about the world; what we believe influences what we come to know/belief and how we go about knowing or believing it; what we believe dictates what cognitive processes we develop and apply. [1] Criticism There have been quite a few criticisms associated with the study of human mind. The problem with Neurotheology is that it attempts to unify two different perspectives on human being within one discipline. The inconsistency between the theological and scientific perspectives has received much attention both domestically and internationally and thus more opposition. [2] The conflicting relation between science and religion is arguably the most important concern in regard to Neurotheology currently. Religion and science have been at each others throats since times immemorial with religion trying to thwart science’s attempt to explain things. With technological advancements now science has become an able adversary for religion. [2] Since Neurotheology involves a collaborative multidisciplinary approach contributing to better understanding of each discipline encompassed by it, some authors believe that even if neuroscience and theology are brought together within the discipline of Neurotheology, the differences will inevitably lead to one discipline, namely theology, dominating the other. [2] Conclusion Study of the human mind is indeed a complexity for humans at the time being. With advancements in technology and better understanding to the mind with subjects such as Neurotheology, it might be possible to explain the complex brain system. With three distinct dimensions: physical, mental and spiritual, humans are strongly influenced in lives and experiences. Neurotheology emerges as a highly dynamic approach that attempts to establish a bridge between the scientific approaches and the world of human mind and spirituality represented by beliefs and belief systems. Although our knowledge on the neural bases of spirituality and beliefs is far from being comprehensive, a number of studies have confirmed the notion of biological foundations underlying these phenomena. On the other hand, the methodological framework employed by Neurotheology allows relating the neurological phenomena to spirituality and beliefs, in this case mystical and religious. The four methodological concepts of personal Ultimacy, sacrificial re-birth, ritual experience, and inner life serve as an effective tool to connect science and religion in such a way to address the wide range of issues associated with the brain/mind relationship, internal and external religious responses, etc. Despite validity, at least partial, of the criticism, Neurotheology still remains the only perspective to provide a unified structure to study and inter-relate the mental, physical and spiritual variances of human existence. The applications on the human mind to find out exactly how the mind believes in something and how some people may exert power to influence others to believe in something can be a farfetched idea to understand. However with the right approach to limitations of Neurotheology, this perspective may serve humankind well far into the future. Works Cited 1. Brian C. Alston, “How leaders find their followers and followers make their leaders” and “WHAT IS NEUROTHEOLOGY?” [Lecture], Argosy University – Sarasota. 2. Brown, W.S., N. Murphy, and H. N. Malony (Eds.), “Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature”, Minneapolis, MA: Fortress Press, 1998. 3. Carolyn Meinel (May 16, 2006), “Brain imaging sheds new light on decision making” [Internet], St News, Available at , Accessed on July 19, 2007. 4. E.J. Mundell (2006), “Brain Scans Get at Roots of Prejudice”, Spine Health, Available at , Accessed on July 19, 2007. 5. Gilbert, D. T. (1991), ‘How mental systems believe”, Psychological Review, 46, 107-119. 6. Gleitman, H., A. Friedlund, and Reisberg, D., “Basic Psychology”, W.W. Norton and Co., 2000: 140. 7. H.B. Paksoy, “Identity of Belief Systems” [Lecture]. 8. Heather Wax (August 8, 2006), “We got the beat” [Internet], St News, Available at , Accessed on July 19, 2007. 9. I.C. MacMillan (1978) “Strategy Formulation: political concepts”, St Paul, MN, West Publishing. 10. Ludwig, Arnold M. (2002), “King of the mountain: the nature of political leadership”, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. 11. Newberg, A., and E. D’Aquili, “Why God Won’t Go Away”, NY: Ballatine Books, 2001: 50-51. 12. Nisbett, Richard E. (2001), “Cultural systems of thought: holistic vs. analytic cognition”, Psychological Review, 108(2) 291-310. 13. “Political bias affects brain activity, study finds” (Jan. 24, 2006), Live Science, Available at , Accessed on July 19, 2007. 14. Post, Jerrold M. (2004), “Leaders and their followers in a dangerous world: the psychology of political behavior”, New York: Cornell University Press. 15. Santosh Babu (2000), “No belief is right or wrong. It is either empowering or limiting” [Internet], Life Positive, Available at Read More