Zap!

Four days ago, I wrote about a new study that appears to show that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation of the posterior medial frontal cortex of the brain causes a decrease in belief in god.

As I mentioned in the post, the effect was small, the sample size was small, and the whole thing is a lot flimsier than the media seemed to treat it.  Headlines like "Scientists Use Brain Stimulation to Make You Stop Believing in God" vastly overplay the actual results of the research, turning a mildly interesting psychological study into hyped, sensationalized clickbait.

But there is never a misinterpretation of scientific research so skewed that you can't respond by misunderstanding the misinterpretation, and making it way worse.  Conservative talk radio host Joe Miller, in interviewing Cornell adjunct professor of statistics William Briggs, put forth the opinion that such a technique could be used to suck religion out of the devout.

The funny thing about the piece, which is about ten minutes long and is well worth giving a listen, is that Briggs starts out by making precisely the same objections to the study that I did -- that the number of test subjects was too small to show an overall effect, that self-reporting as a means of getting data on psychology is inherently flawed, and that trying to come up with a metric for a complex behavior like religious belief is somewhere between difficult and impossible.  But instead of coming to the conclusion that because of all of this, the study probably isn't worth worrying about, Briggs and Miller went the opposite way -- that this is just the first of many attempts by evil progressives to "use any aggressive tactics" to destroy faith.

Miller also brought up the inevitable role of the "transgender agenda" in pushing such abuses of technology.  This agenda, according to Miller, involves "no parameters on sexual acts of behavior," and requires the destruction of Christianity to achieve its ends.

Notwithstanding the fact that the transgender people I know seem more concerned with living their own lives free of ridicule, criticism, and threat than they do with telling anyone else what to believe, Miller paints progressives  in general and LGBT individuals in particular as wanting to achieve a no-holds-barred attitude toward sex any way they can, up to and including "zapping people's brains with magnets" in such a way as to destroy their belief in god.  And, Miller adds darkly, along the way leaving them "incapable of adding two plus two."

So we start with a study that most likely didn't demonstrate anything of interest, and we end up with evil transgender people attaching magnets to the skulls of the devout to suck Jesus out of their brains.

What I find most interesting about this fear talk is that it glosses over one little fact that Briggs actually let slip during the interview (and Miller jetted past without a mention) -- 3/4 of the people in the United States are still Christian.  Just about every public office in the land is held by a Christian.  Despite the fact that Article VI of the Constitution states, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," one of the quickest ways not to get elected in the United States is to admit to being an atheist -- or, worse, to hint that religion might wield too much power over politics.

So the idea that even if the trans-cranial magnetic stimulation did reduce religiosity (it probably didn't), and the effect was permanent (it wasn't), you'd still have to zap something like 240 million people to produce an effect.

That, my friends, is a shitload of magnet-wielding transgender people.

But of course, it's pretty obvious why people like Miller traffic in such fact-free paranoia.  Fear tends to make people close ranks, circle the wagons, and double down on what they believe.  The surest way to get voters to espouse a view is to make them afraid of what will happen if they don't.  "Vote conservative," Miller is saying, "unless you want transgender people sneaking into your home and zapping your brain with magnets."

How someone could believe something like this is a question worth asking; but as we've seen so many times before, when you engage the emotions -- especially fear -- the logic centers of the brain pretty much go offline.

Which means that Miller has also succeeded in brain zapping, without using even a single magnet.

Dialing in belief

A recent study at UCLA has both atheists and the religious buzzing.

A paper called "Neuromodulation of Group Prejudice and Religious Belief" describes research at UCLA by Colin Holbrook, Keise Izuma, Choi Deblieck, Daniel M. T. Fessler,  and Marco Iacoboni, and appeared  in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience last week.  And what it seems to show that down-regulating part of the brain can decrease both bigotry and religious belief.  Here's how Holbrook et al. describe their research:

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat.  The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts.  Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies.  We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by down-regulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation.  The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes.  We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.

 My sense has always been that who we are -- our beliefs, personality, fears, desires -- are a result of the interplay between electrical and chemical processes in our brains.  Change those processes, and who we are changes; the idea that our selves are somehow static, independent, unchanging whatever happens to our physical body, is simply not borne out by the evidence.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But this still strikes me as a weird result.  Measuring a complex phenomenon like the strength of a person's religious belief isn't going to be easy; we don't have a ReligioMeter that points to 99.8 when you attach it to Pope Francis and 0.2 when you attach it to Richard Dawkins.  Any measurement of the intensity of belief has to be determined by self-reporting, which can be influenced by any number of things -- up to and including the tone of voice in which the researcher asks the question.  Here's how Holbrook et al. did it:

{R]eligious belief was measured using a version of the Supernatural Belief Scale (Jong et al., 2013) modified to create two scales which mirror “positive” and “negative” aspects of Western religious belief, comparable to the “positive” and “negative” immigrant authors in the ethnocentrism measure.  The items were presented in random order and rated according to the same scale employed in the immigrant ratings.  The positive scale consisted of: (a) “There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God”; (b) “There exist good personal spiritual beings, whom we might call angels”; (c) “Some people will go to Heaven when they die”; (α = .90).  The negative scale consisted of: (a) “There exists an evil personal spiritual being, whom we might call the Devil”; (b) “There exist evil, personal spiritual beings, whom we might call demons”; (c) “Some people will go to Hell when they die” (α = .93).  An overall religiosity variable combining both scales was calculated by averaging all six items (α = .95).

Which seems like a pretty simplistic measure, if you're looking for a subtle result.  Add to this the fact that there were only 38 participants, and the scale change for subjects treated with TCMS showed a statistically insignificant reduction only in their positive religious beliefs, and you have to wonder what all the hype is about.  Might it be that TCMS is simply affecting your emotional state?

Now, I'm not saying it isn't an interesting result.  Certainly, the effect on prejudice (which was greater) is fascinating in and of itself.  But both religious and atheist media are giving the impression that "if you turn off part of the brain, you lose your religious convictions," and each crowing about it for different reasons, and both seem not to have read anything more than the abstract of the paper itself.

If there's one thing that becomes clear when reading psychological research, it's that isn't simple.  We're only at the very beginning of understanding how the brain works.  That there exists a neurological underpinning to religiosity seems very likely -- just as there's almost certainly a neurological underpinning to believing in conspiracy theories.  It's just that we don't know what it is yet.

And the idea that we can now turn such beliefs on or off with a switch is entirely premature.