I normally don't even bother reading articles like this - they tend to be of such zealous, anti-religious crusading mindset that the bias is unbearable. While I have some quibbles, and this is sure to be abused by those unable to understand their own antitheist bigotry, the basic point is, I think, well made. There is apparently a region of the brain important for cognitive flexibility, and if damaged it becomes harder to change thinking between topics. The authors of this study are careful to state that this can lead only indirectly to religious fundamentalism, and is only a small but significant contributing factor.
I would presume that such a mindset is important in any kind of fundamentalist, dogmatic attitude. In my view this is a very different behaviour to religious thinking in general, though there does seem to be a significant cultural component to this. Interestingly there's a note at the end that indoctrination might play a role in the development of this region of the brain, making it harder to shift fundamentalist opinions and also not requiring external, physical effects to damage the brain.
The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/scientists-established-link-brain-damage-religious-fundamentalism/
I would be careful to link any sort of fundamentalism to neuroscience. For me it is more relevant to consider it as a social phenomenon. Re-iterating on your comment- how we learn, and how much social contexts empower the learning of a way to learn is the actual question behind the click-bite. Looking at the way your societies have grown I don't believe this question has a single answer, but a virtual domain of solvers each of which enables measurable converging entropy in regards of internal dynamics and non-defined sub-state networks.
ReplyDeleteGiven that I don't think we should exclude religion as one of the valid 'solvers' promoted from social systems. The fanatical aspects are more of end-conditions that help the system to calibrate itself, but as the society grows in complexity those tend transform into seeds for new solvers on their own, reducing the overall capacity of the system by rendering it down to the volume that a sub-system can handle.
It is a cool topic to model, given you get the parameters in a way that enables computation, but again I would rather push neuroscience out of it. It tends to give too simple conclusions which although not completely false are addressing systems that are already complicated enough to give us an actually functional statement compared to a nice, but mostly dysfunctional interpretation.
I'm no expert but logically it seems to me that functional impairment of a region of the brain important for cognitive flexibility would be correlated with a higher indices for conservatism and reactionary inclinations.
ReplyDeleteMeaning that cognitive flexibility is important to cope with change.