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So what... He has looked at how "believing in God affects our brains" - his idea that yawning could be a good thing is still valid and interesting. He is a neu
by amix 17y ago
So what... He has looked at how "believing in God affects our brains" - his idea that yawning could be a good thing is still valid and interesting.
He is a neuroscience professor (but then we'll fall into "Appeal To Authority"). Anyhow, I think we should stick for what he is saying now, and not what he has said or researched in the past.
- Tichy 17y agoEspecially since "believing in God affects our brains" seems entirely plausible.
- rms 17y agoGood point. It seems obvious that it does, in fact.
- codexon 17y agoThere's a world of difference between "believing in God affects our brains" and "HOW GOD CHANGES YOUR BRAIN".
- tesseract 17y agoYeah, one of them will sell more books.
- codexon 17y agoNo. One of them explicitly suggests that God exists and undertakes a non-scientific point of view while the other does not.
- amix 17y agoIf he has done experiments and research to see how belief of God affects the brain, then his approach could be scientific and he may even conclude that belief in God affects the brains of partitioners. Reading on Wikipedia he has also researched "non God" religions such as Buddhism - - and he has found out that stuff like meditation (and praying) affects the partitioner's brain. And really, as somebody has noted it above: it's very plausible that belief changes our brains, given that most humans throughout our history have had belief. And research in belief is _very_ interesting and might put light on why most of the humans today believe in something.
- theblackbox 17y agoyou mean practitioners? surely? Normally I would put aside my Grammar Nazi persona, but you make the mistake twice, so I feel compelled to intervene.
- Tichy 17y agoTo me it sounds a lot like a title fabricated to sell more books. According to the Amazon review, he also writes about techniques that atheists can use that have similar effects. He just seems to be good at marketing - the "yawn" article seems to be another incarnation of that. I remember all sorts of newspapers picking up the "belief affects the brain" stuff, and yawning makes a good story, too.