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Hearing prayer shuts off believers' brain activity
- cilantro 17y agoYou can't take that statement at face value. Part of the point of prayer is to focus your mind and block out irrelevant thoughts and stimuli. (Is it not?) I'd like to see how brain activity of people praying compares to those in meditation.
- thrdOriginal 17y agoteilo is right: this really has nothing to do with the act of praying, but rather people's brain reactions to those whom they intrinsically believe to be in a position of authority/power. Related to your question, I remember reading a few articles about this in the past. Essentially, brains deep in prayer == brains deep in meditation. (Quick search - this might be one of those articles: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465-6,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465-6,00...)
- teilo 17y agoExcept, that's not what the article is talking about. It was not the person praying that had their activity shut down, but the person hearing prayers. And not prayers in general, but only when coming from someone they perceived to be a "healer", but not prayers by an "ordinary" Christian.
- cilantro 17y agoAh good point. I would just suggest that listening to someone pray and praying may be quite similar for very religious people.
- FlorinAndrei 17y agoIf they go into a light meditative trance when hearing the prayer, that may explain it. The changes in the brain's functioning during meditation are pretty amazing. This has been researched pretty well with buddhist monks, etc.
- alexyim 17y agoRight.. I don't really like the wording of the statement. But the article makes sense though. If already believe in someone, your "doubt" mental processes shouldn't be firing.
- lotharbot 17y agoI'd like to see how the brain activity of people reading the article compares across religions. Do Skeptics become more or less skeptical when presented with a claim that seems to reflect negatively on religion? Are Christians more or less likely to be skeptical when reading the same claim? What's the actual phenomenon being measured here? Is it a shutting down of skepticism due to prayer, or due to trust, or something else?
- baddox 17y ago" ... the regions of their brains involved in skeptical thinking and vigilance appear to shut down." Believers not being skeptical is a bit redundant.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Helianthus 17y agoBit of a misleading headline. The article suggests that we are less skeptical of people we already agree with and in particular of people in positions of perceived authority.
- gaius 17y agoExactly like a well-known blogger posting an article to pander to his readership.
- aphyr 17y agoThe comments ask whether physicists at lectures would be susceptible to the same phenomenon. I'm inclined to doubt that. It's a rare speaker indeed who makes it through even a five minute session without blistering Q&A. "Mr. Wilson, ve at za Max Planck Institute for Kernphysic invented zis field, and you are doing it vrong! You have neglected ze contribution of higher order terms without grounds, and as results from Bergen, et al show..." Sometimes, I wonder what a religion would be like with rapid-fire talks anyone could speak at, poster sessions, and critique for every presenter.
- smokinn 17y agoSometimes, I wonder what a religion would be like with rapid-fire talks anyone could speak at, poster sessions, and critique for every presenter. Science? EDIT: Figured I should explain myself lest I get voted down for being snarky. In science, to me at least, a lot seems to be taken on faith. There are many stories of a wrong result being published and scientists later not publishing their own research because it didn't agree with that wrong result. Combine that with the fact that a scientist with lots of published history accumulates more and more credibility and, from the outside, it starts to look like a religion with a self-correcting facility.
- ErrantX 17y agoFrom the outside the scientific community can often look a little like that; but on the inside it things are very disengaged from ritual observance and faith. Of course at certain times assumptions are made or theories wrongly rejected :) but, in the words of a great man, "it all comes right in the end".
- aphyr 17y agoI don't agree. Science is explicitly concerned with natural phenomena. Anything supernatural must be the domain of superstition, spirituality, or religion. We suffer somewhat from salience bias: cases where the scientific process is successful are frequent and expected. Cases where the method failed but eventually corrected itself are spectacular. There are literally hundreds of thousands of papers published each year. Quick, can you name two researchers involved in the discovery of the electron's discrete charge? What were their methods? Now, how about Millikan? As for religions, I would be more likely to believe in one where challenges and debate were frequent, as opposed to something more rigid like, say, Catholicism.
- jamesbressi 17y agoThere seems to be more to the study that you might find interesting--just wish there was a way for us "lay people" to access the paper without paying a huge fee for access =/ Link to study abstract "The power of charisma--perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer" http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/12/scan.nsq023 http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/12/scan...
- a-priori 17y agohttp://dl.dropbox.com/u/2779/Schjoedt%20et%20al%2C%202010.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2779/Schjoedt%20et%20al%2C%202010.pd...
- jamesbressi 17y agoyou devil; you just made my day! Do tell the trick, because I run into this all the time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- albemuth 17y agoAlternate title: Reality distortion field explained
- eplanit 17y agoOr, in other words, the believers become relaxed and content. Never thought of prayer-time as being a time of needing to having one's guard up. Is the suggestion that prayer is bad?
- jrockway 17y agoThere is probably a similar effect in Apple fans listening to a Jobs keynote, and so on. If you like what you are hearing, you are not going to be skeptical about it.
- ugh 17y agoPirates of Silicon Valley captured your sentiment nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflXMZL2stU#t=2m55s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflXMZL2stU#t=2m55s (Take a close look at the auditorium :)
- cesare 17y agoWrong! The effect is exactly the same because Apple is a religion. :-)
- jackfoxy 17y agoYou probably intended this at least half tongue-in-cheek,but I imagine this study opens a door to scientific verification of determining what constitutes religous experience, and some very non-religous themed things may qualify for some people.
- elblanco 17y ago
- teilo 17y agoFrom the article: "The brain activity changed only in response to prayers they were told came from the healer." In other words, it's not the perception of prayer. It's the perception of supernatural intervention. Totally misleading title.
- DrSprout 17y agoActually, it's less than that. It's your perception of the healer. In other words, people don't think skeptically about people they trust. Essentially a tautology, only confirming that those are the regions of the brain involved in skepticism.
- gills 17y agoWell I liked your comment but the droid screen isn't as accurate as i'd like on those tiny voting arrows. Sorry about that.
- meelash 17y agoThe second comment on that page is the first thing I thought of. Sensational headline, obvious results. Nothing much to see here, folks...
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoSensational[ist] headline - agreed. Obvious result. Not so sure as I don't agree that the interesting result is that being spun from the paper (of which I've only read a detailed review and an abstract as it's paywalled). The takeaway point for me, that harkened back to Milgram's Experiments and the like, was that the person running the experiment was able to induce in the subjects entirely different behaviour simply by saying the level of authority that the people they were hearing [supposedly] had. To recapitulate they alter their critical consideration according to the level of authority claimed for the speaker by a third party. It is the authority of the scientist that swings the whole thing.
- meelash 17y agoBut aren't these conclusions already in widespread use 24 hrs of the day, from infomercial and advertisements, to talking heads in news and media?
- Isamu 17y agoI suppose I'm in the believer category, and boy does my mind wander when I hear prayer. And during sermons, and pretty much when anybody is speaking. Sometimes I wish I could focus on what somebody else is saying, but usually it's only in the narrow context of somebody speaking directly to me. How do normal people manage it? If somebody was praying TO ME, maybe I could focus better.
- alanh 17y agoAccording to the article, only devout believers experience this effect. If you "suppose" you are a believer, that probably doesn't include you. Be glad you can still reason!
- fendrak 17y agoHa, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's mind wanders during those things! I've come to believe that it's more a function of having an extremely active mind that prefers to interact over simply receiving information passively. Same thing happens to me during lectures in class. I try to engage my mind with what's being said, looking up relevant passages and asking myself questions about the validity of what's being said. Also, there's no incompatibility between believing in a higher power and being able to reason. I'm a Christian in his third year of a Computer Science degree at a major university, and I like to think I have some capacity for reason :p
- barnaby 17y agoWhat does this have to do with hacking, tech, or startups? Why was this posted on HN?
- jodrellblank 17y agoPlease read the guidelines for the answer: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- barnaby 17y agoAmazing they didn't mention religion as off-topic. I don't see how this is interesting to a hacker. It's interesting to a redditor, but that's why I don't go there.
- what 17y agoThere are better articles to complain about. Like the one about a recall on children's Tylenol or how many iPads have been sold.
- alanh 17y agoReligion installs a backdoor in devout believers' minds that allow advanced-stage mind-virus hosts to deliver virus upgrades without resistance. I challenge anyone to find a major problem with this summary of the study.
- pyre 17y agoIt's politically charged to no apparent reason. You might as well say "Hierarchal organizations produce figures with perceived/real authority that cause some people to stop filtering information based on their trust in the individual transmitting (information) and/or the organization as a whole."
- alanh 17y agoExcept that overly generalizes the study. It was more specific. Avoiding hurt feelings doesn’t justify misrepresenting the limited data.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Luc 17y ago> It's not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians. Could this be how hypnosis works? Patients for whom hypnosis is effective have a mental model of 'the power of the hypnotist', and effectively anaesthetize their critical thinking faculties to follow the hypnotists commands?
- anigbrowl 17y agoIf you are interested in the philosophical implications of this, then the following book is a favorite of mine (and may have indirectly inspired this research). http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072 http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
- jacquesm 17y agoThey should do a repeat with a bunch of troopers reacting to the voice of their sergeant to see if it comes up the same.