(17) Dr.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture about Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI

Transcript:
(00:00) this will be a lecture looking at a whole lot of the themes we've been considering all quarter
in here how they apply to a topic that is very close to home and what I already know from some of
the emails today was Friday's lecture looking at depression was already getting close to home some
of the themes that came out at the end of the chaos lecture some of the notions there that want some
of the stuff teaching us perhaps there are no blueprints perhaps there need not be blueprints perhaps
there may still be blueprints despite a
(00:30) theoretical demonstration that you don't need them hitting close to home also that is what all
of today's lecture is about looking at some biological underpinnings of religiosity and this one is far
and away the nerve in the lecture I am most nervous for simply because this one people wind up
having strong opinions about and I want to navigate through this one as successfully as possible
okay just to give me a sense where I'm starting off from here how many of you would characterize
yourself as religious as
(01:01) fairly religious as highly religious okay good how many would you characterize yourself as
very very comfortably accepting lean on religious lots of hands there as well okay lots of potential
differences in responding to this where we pick up on is from where we left off with a lecture last
Wednesday which was the schizophrenia lecture and where we finished with was this whole notion
that by now we have to have dealt with with every single one of these topics starting on the far right
what's the behavior look like and eventually
(01:33) getting to the far left what are the evolutionary roots and what has always been the rationale
for that is the second we're looking at anything with genes genetic influences genetic hints genetic
whatever's we're asking where these genes come from where is the evolutionary sense where is the
adaptive value for anything we're looking at how the socio biologists interpret it someone else see
our question um I should be and I don't think I understand the subject enough to know other than
something about religiosity is done in a social context and that's going to become important here
and the difference is one that puzzles me a great deal because it clearly transcends issues adjust the
social community but that seems to be a good defining point to start from ok so where we ended up
there with was this puzzle we finished at the end of depression looking at evolutionary aspects and
looking at there may be some hidden benefits that weird argument in one of the readings in your
reader creativity and aspects of manic depression going hand-in-hand but
(02:40) we were left with somewhat of a puzzle at the end of the schizophrenia lecture why might
there have been selection for these genes because once again we start off with a theme from the
very beginning who genes being selected for why did the giraffe have long necks because this is a
trait that's a death in our Darwinian terms this is a trait that's associated with leaving more copies of
your genes and future generations what is the adaptive value for genes for schizophrenia because
we looked at the fact that in this contemporary form
(03:08) schizophrenia is by definition a mal adaptive trait schizophrenic sleeve fewer copies of their
genes than their unaffected siblings it is a trait which is formally maladaptive what might be a
hidden advantage lurking there and where we left at the very end of that was just a hint that in fact
as far as anyone can tell there are no hidden advant it's just a schizophrenic there may not be any
adaptive advantage what I left you with there was the notion however that there might be another
disease lurking around related to schizophrenia which it
(03:41) does have an adaptive advantage and to begin here what we have to go back to is one of the
basic 9th grade biology concepts and in science there which is the whole notion that some of the
time a genetic trait which is god-awful in one setting may have some advantages elsewhere and we
all learn the exact same example back in ninth grade sickle cell anemia sickle cell anemia which in
one context when fully expressed is a hematological disaster absolutely bad news horrible and in
other settings can protect you against
(04:12) malaria and not by chance that versions of sickle cell anemia have evolved in sub-saharan
Africa Mediterranean areas thalassemia related diseases that this has been a frequent solution also in
passing showing us one of the truisms from this class there's no such thing as a bad gene there's
only a bad gene environment interaction okay so this theme in medical genetics comes through a lot
of times genetic traits which in one setting our bad news may have advantages in another setting
and is turning out this is a theme in lots of
(04:44) different realms of genetics other examples tay-sachs disease case acts horrible congenital
disorder predominantly found in Ashkenazi Jews what you wind up getting there is full-blown
version complete cortical failure to develop child's massively at Birth dies shortly afterward partial
version of tay-sachs disease and you're resistant tuberculosis nobody knows the mechanism for it
yet people absolutely understand why the sickle cell trait both sets you up for an anemia and
protection from malaria nobody understands it yet with Tay Sachs
(05:17) but this explains one of the phenomena back from the Middle Ages the European belief that
Jews were safe from tuberculosis because they were poisoning the Christian Wells and that was the
cause of a large number of programs back when there is a genetic explanation which is the trait for
tay-sachs disease and this partially expressed form protects from tuberculosis more examples of the
cystic fibrosis the most common congenital disorder these days that is massively life-threatening a
code anybody know a code by Wednesday
(06:01) um do you have no room hand that is are they sitting there though cystic fibrosis full-blown
version disastrous disease what you get in cystic fibrosis is inflammatory disease your lungs fill up
with fluid you often are dead by age 20 horrible disease partial version of cystic fibrosis and you are
protected against cholera and the exact same mechanism that causes an imbalance of fluids in the
lungs is the same mechanism that keeps you from losing all your fluids when you have cholera of
dehydrating highly adaptive a
(06:38) theme that keeps popping up over and over full-blown version bad news partial genetic
version good news and what you wind up getting is this basic argument a numerical argument very
similar to the I'll lay down my life for two brothers or a cousin's deal of if you got enough people
with the partial protective adaptive version you can afford the occasional cousin with the full-blown
version the trait overall will still be passed on now what this sets us up for is thinking about whether
something like this is going on with
(07:10) schizophrenia and the question to ask of course is what is a mild genetic version of
schizophrenia and this one got discovered in the 1970s back to that classic study we've heard about
in a couple of different lectures by now Keti that psychiatrist from Harvard who with his colleagues
went off to Denmark and spent a decade there looking at every single adoption case and looking at
the patterns of schizophrenia the kis schizophrenic the adoptive parents the biological parents in the
course of the doing this they discovered something
(07:40) amazing because think about what these guys did this was this team of psychiatrists who
spent a decade in Denmark what they did was interview every single family of every adoptee and
Denmark this was like 10,000 people this was a massive amount of work looking for schizophrenic
looking in the various pedigrees all that sort of thing interviewing huge numbers of people just
ahead full of these folks so they would all get the diagnostic criteria fairly similar well-designed
study blah blah what had they done by the end of the
(08:11) decade they had talked to more family members of schizophrenic s-- than any psychiatrists
in history and think about this your average psychiatrist who's got some schizophrenic patients will
you know meet once every six months with the parent if a schizophrenic is on the young side maybe
occasionally we'll also have sessions on a regular basis these people had just interviewed tens of
thousands of family members of schizophrenic s-- and they noticed something interesting they
noticed that on the average there was something a
(08:43) little bit strange about family members of schizophrenic s-- not all of them and these traits
are not only found amongst family members of schizophrenics but at a higher than expected rate
there is a weird sort of quirky personality that went with family members of schizophrenic s--
biological family members and this version of a much milder case of schizophrenia is now called
schizotypal personality this is a standard ly recognized disorder in psychiatry schizotypal ism is a
mild genetic version of schizophrenia what
(09:18) the schizotypal isn't look like first off people have somewhat loose associations not
remotely in the realm of a schizophrenic and there are standardized scales that can be given to show
this is someone out of the normal range but not in the schizophrenic range and an intermediate
range in addition you get a social withdrawal and this is not the complete dysfunctional unable to
hold down a job locked up in the back of the village version of schizophrenia this is someone
instead who just gravitates towards fairly solitary
(09:49) occupations this is the lighthouse keeper this is the fire tower launcher this is the classics
gets a type-o occupation this is the person sitting alone in the projection room in the movie theater
eight hours a night and the dark their classics or biscuits a title jobs socially detached very solitary
the most striking feature of schizotypal is what is termed meta magical thinking and this is where
things begin to get interesting Mehta magical thinking this is not someone who is thought
disordered psychotic unable to function this is
(10:23) someone who just kind of believes in strange things this is someone who's really really into
science fiction and fantasy this is someone okay I see you some of the concern popping up here this
is someone who's into some sort of New Age stuff in a really frenzied sort of way this is someone
who believes in mental telepathy or UFOs this is a first hint this is someone who if they have a
religious structure of belief has an extremely concrete level of interpretation remembering this
seems to be quite similar to schizophrenia what
(10:58) apples aren't just having common multisyllabic words that concreteness at the level of
abstraction these are people who tend towards extremely fundamentalist concrete interpretations of
religious events seven-day creation of the world this is not a metaphor this is not a parable this
could be measured down to the minute people alive who were once dead this is not a metaphor for
keeping the spirit going this is an exact description of the event we begin to see where we're
heading here what schizotypal ism is about is it's a very
(11:31) mild version of schizophrenia in terms of the loose associations in terms of the concreteness
of associations the social detachment and most of all the meta magical thinking and this is now a
standard diagnostic category in psychiatry to have a schizotypal personality so what we then ask is
where does this come from what is this like and what we have to ask is of course our usual question
when trying to make sense of a human trait is recognizing 99% of human history was not spent with
schizotypal is being able to get jobs in
(12:05) film projection rooms what does schizotypal ism look like in traditional non westernized
human societies and the answer to that turns out to have been floating around for 60 70 years in the
Anthropology literature and this is back to the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Raiden who was
the first one to point this out was the first one of a whole tradition emphasizing what was a pretty
strong area of research and then 1840s in anthropology he was the first person who pointed out that
in traditional human societies there is a
(12:37) category of people there who count as and these are his exact words half crazy who are the
half crazies and traditional human society the shamans the witch doctors the medicine men the
medicine women these are members of society who make a living being meta magical and Ravan
was the first one to emphasize this in traditional human societies the shamans are the ones who
converse with the dead for ritualistic reasons the shamans are the ones who speak in tongues the
shamans are the ones who at the full moon turn into the hyena to
(13:14) protect the village from predators the shamans are the ones who are meta magical for a
thing for a living and this has been a theme in anthropology for quite some time one anthropologist
named actor neck referred to shamans as being healed madmen in the 1940s anthropologist named
Kruger who started the anthro department in Berkeley and was one of the grand old men in the field
this is a quote at his describing what shamanism is about the shaman displays his possession by a
spirit by publicly re-enacting his specific personal
(13:46) experience that of the man suffering from a particular mental affliction his projections his
hallucinations his journey through space and time thus became a dramatic ritual and served as the
prototype for all future concepts of the religious road of perfection and this was the recognition in
30s and 40s that what shamanism is about is a very controlled very socially contextual version of
meta magical schizotypal ism the word did not exist in the field at the time but that is what it is now
what Kroeber emphasized in his
(14:20) writing was these are not schizophrenic and what we heard about in that story in class four
days ago looking at that schizophrenic person in that Maasai village is that people in traditional
human societies are no more tolerant to the mentally ill than we are in the west and just as delighted
to find cultural means to peripheral eyes them these are not full-blown schizophrenic these are not
people who suddenly are speaking in tongues at the exact silent moment in the hunt these are people
who are speaking in tongues at the right
(14:52) time these are people who are hearing voices at the right time and you remember what the
punchline was of that story about that schizophrenic woman in that masala village was she heard
voices at the wrong time hearing voices at the right time is not schizophrenia it is a version of
schizotypal ism and what you see when you look at the human tradition of shamanism these are not
peripheral eyes people these are some of the most powerful members of society many societies have
a tradition of shamans being celibate but many of them most of
(15:24) them as it turns out do not and these are people who are anything but reproductively
maladaptive these are people who have been passing on their genes just fine throughout history
shamanism this mild version this contextually appropriate version of meta magical ism has done
wonderfully throughout human history and a great example of that the fact that you need to get it
just right was Kroeber sort of emphasizing this that in the right setting what would be an absolutely
peripheral izing set of traits instead
(15:56) makes you a very powerful very sanctioned and that's the word that he used a very
sanctioned member of society and it's not for nothing that the word sanction as a whole lot to do
with the word sanctuary this is a realm in which the exact same traits would spectacularly fail to
work in other cultural settings do it right and it works just fine and Kroeber had a wonderful
anecdote about this the sense of you gotta get it just right he apparently was at some ritual a
ceremony he spent most of his time doing his
(16:26) anthropology with Native American groups and this was some ceremony being done by the
Winnebagos and I was actually found to quite bizarre that there was a group called the Winnebago
but hanging out with the Winnebagos and this was one of his informants they're sort of explaining
this ritual and as this was apparently some really frothy really quite over-the-top ritual that the
shaman was pulling off and was speaking and tongues and rolling on the fire and all of that and this
guy said that is great we've got this shaman here this
(16:55) guy is like the best he's worth every dollar we Pam this guy is terrific we are so lucky to
have a shaman like this in our village this guy's thank God we don't have two of them though too
way too much one's just fine and you have this recognition that this is not schizophrenia you
wouldn't want a person to be schizophrenic because they will be as peripheral eyes Daz in our own
society you want to get it just right you don't want to have too many of them you got to have some
people who are some
(17:22) flame meat-and-potatoes good hunters that sort of thing and you want the ratio of that to the
shamanistic meta magical folks to be quite high but you need a few of them around and what the
anthropologists have been noting for 60 years is all human cultures traditionally have some very
meta magical folks around and these folks are anything but peripheral eyes dwith the decreased
reproductive success there's some of the most honored members of society so if you wind up getting
here is that classic partially expressed sort
(17:53) of continuum deal going on which is human societies throughout history have had such a
need for shamans that they can put up with the occasional second cousin who's fully schizophrenic
as long as you've got the ratio right and what the numbers suggest the 1 to 2 percent rate of
schizophrenia had throughout human cultures and the number average population size of human
villages and the number of shamans it works about right throughout history there has been more of
a predominance of schizotypal shamans
(18:22) than if schizophrenic you can afford to put up with the occasional cousin now where does
this wind up heading what the main point of this section is about is this is not just about the people
naked on the national Geographics with the bones and their noses and this was a critical transition
recognizing this at some point a whole lot of people and I feel were writing about the primitiveness
of non westernized religion and there was a great quote who came up with this when a guy named
Devereaux referred to primitive religion
(18:52) as being organized schizophrenia this was somebody in the 1940s exactly getting this flavor
of contextualized appropriate hearing the voices at the right time all of that but this was
overwhelming a little literature about the weird stuff those folks are up to in the night and the time-
life specials on public television and what the critical transition is is it's not just about them at some
point this anthropologist Akron Eck who is quite leftist in his orientation wrote a long essay saying
how incredibly culturally chauvinistic
(19:23) it was of the Western art anthropologist to write all these articles about how shamans are
half healed Mad Men and how condescending that was to talk about those cultures as being so
irrationally based in contrast to us and what's the obvious punchline is the problem isn't saying that
they're irrational when we're saying that we aren't but it's saying that we're equally irrational we are
equally irrational in some of the tenants that we have here a quote from a quranic' at the time was
our culture is
(19:52) unique and out long the irrational let me give you some recent statistics from a survey
what's the name of the survey the main national survey people who yes Gallup poll that guy the
Gallup poll a recent Gallup poll survey I know about you guys but these numbers astonished me
25% of Americans say they believe in ghosts 36% believe in mental telepathy 47% believe in UFOs
and more than 50% of Americans believe in the devil and a belief that the devil influences daily
activities these are people who can vote
(20:30) these are people who can serve on juries these are people who can operate motor vehicles
these are people making decisions about medical interventions I for one in this outpost of not
terribly extreme irrationality in this corner of the country am astonished we live in a world that is
highly irrational and the punchline of this is this is not simply about non-western traditional human
societies the exact same thread of schizotypal ism runs throughout all of the belief systems of
human societies including Western ones we are permeated
(21:04) by irrationality some of the versions of it that we have in the West are utter nonsense ones
ones that have just been like invented out of thin air in recent years which is kind of like fast food
for these sort of Nouveau sort of medieval peasants and their hot tubs up and this is the world of
crystals and channeling and things of that sort but some of the versions of our westernized
irrationality go back millennia and organize some of our most cherished values the same
irrationality and the same valuing of those who invent the
(21:36) appropriate versions of the irrationality runs throughout the West okay just to show you that
I am NOT being overly hostile or will try to pull in my own sort of tradition that I was raised and is
not normally considered a sign of robust mental health to hear voices coming out of burning bushes
this is considered a worrisome sign this is considered diagnostic it is not a good thing to be
reporting that you just spent the night wrestling an angel it is usually a very disturbing sign if you
were reporting you've had a conversation
(22:07) with someone who is dead and has risen from the grave these are diagnoseable problems in
our secular Western realm these are the backbones of our belief systems we in the West as well as
we humans and non westernized settings schizotypal ism runs through all of human history what
you wind up having then is this obvious question who invented this stuff who came up with the
notion that the world was invented in seven days or snakes with apples are up to something no good
or it's possible to give birth and you're still a virgin these were not
(22:40) designed by committees these were designed by extremely formative extremely influential
schizotypal throughout history yes yep it's genetic evidence those same studies showed that it runs
through the adoption studies showed it's a biological trait it runs through the biological side of the
adoptive pedigrees it's ace it's a g8 it's a genetic trait with the new studies are now the unis show is
mild tendency towards increased dopamine tone mild tendency towards most of the biology we
heard about what we're seeing is totally
(23:16) artificial bucket to say schizophrenia up to here past the side non schizophrenic we have this
in-between zone like everything else we've been thinking about it's on a continuum and seems to be
the same biology in a much milder form question somewhere there yep same sort of stuff okay so
what do you wind up y'all question yep no because the the critical thing there is they will very
readily tell you much as people will tell you here in their own schizotypal experiences that you need
the right person to lead it they
(24:08) can't get that going without the right shaman starting it off you need them as a catalyst yeah
okay why do we need this why do we value this okay we'll come to this probably in about two days
but this is tapping into all of the you know why why do we search for some fairly unlikely answers
to the big questions that plague all of us we'll come to this in two days but you know this is getting
at the core of some of the basic questions here okay let me push on here what you wind up seeing
with this is that this is on a continuum
(24:46) and who invented this stuff and you look throughout the history of religious leaders those
who have invented some of the theology and we will come to different variants of religious leaders
shortly as you see those who invented the theology that there is very often a thread of meta magical
thinking that goes through this and this is meta magical thinking of a type that falls readily into the
spectrum of schizotypal ISM now one of the themes we've endlessly come back to in this class is
appropriate context appropriate context
(25:17) and this is a perfect realm to see this because what we wind up getting is you got to get it
just right if you hear voices it's got to be during the ceremony if you're speaking in tongues it can't
be in the middle of the silent part of the hunt you don't want to have too many of them thank god
we've got this shaman but not two of them around here you've got to get the context right and what
we've seen throughout human history and Western history as well is get it wrong and we have
names for these
(25:44) things get it wrong and these are a board of religious fringe groups these are cults and you
look at some versions of this in our own recent time you look at David Koresh in Waco you look at
someone like James Jim Jones in Jonestown you look at someone like Charles Manson and these
are people who were highly meta magical in their thinking highly charismatic but hit a wall at the
point where we still classify them as cults Manson is a diagnosed schizophrenic with the other two
there's only post hoc sort of sort
(26:16) of forensic psychiatry that you can do what you got wind up getting is get it wrong and we
call it a cult get it right in the right time in the right place and maybe for the next couple of
millennia people won't have to go to work on your birthday if you get it exactly right in that setting
so what I think we see here is a setting here for making sense the exact same traits in a different
context to use Croaker's words in a cultural context that is not sanctioned the exact same traits count
as psychiatrically
(26:46) suspect these days what this is about is not only if you get it in the right context is it okay it
is highly honored tapping into the question that came in before that all human societies have a
strong need for a certain degree of these folks around you need to get the ratios right okay picking
up on this theme a transition to the next point in a sense this is talking about sort of the structural
steel of religious belief what are the basic beliefs you have there's no god but one he is Allah that
you know
(27:19) whatever versions of the central formats you have there is a Trinity I am Who I am any of
these variants these are sort of the building blocks the structural steel of religion but what religion is
often often also about is lots of other things we have a very modern very westernized view of
religion these days what religion is often about is a social community that it brings you what
religion is often about is the motivation for good works throughout most of history what religion is
about in one very Orthodox variant is the
(27:52) carrying out of rituals the daily performance of ritualistic behaviors in the context of
religion and this transitions us to the next subject in here and this whole notion of ritualism as a
backbone of religion wonderful quote to that effect Henry Ward Beecher father of Harriet Beecher
Stowe famous Protestant preacher in New England I think the 1830s or so had this quote at the time
religion is daily bread religion is not just cake on Sunday the notion that what religion is about is
the small acts God is in the detail
(28:26) religion is amiss small acts of the daily rituals now beginning to look not at the large
theological notions our religion believes there are multiple gods there are virgin births that God can
speak through a burning bush but instead religion as the daily practice ritual now what is interesting
about this what comes through with this is another theme another subtype of a very mild version of
a psychiatric disorder which once again works spectacularly when you get it just right not now with
the meta magical big theology building
(29:01) blocks of religion but the daily bits and pieces of ritualism and this brings in another
psychiatric disorder one we haven't talked about much in class so far okay I guarantee on a regular
basis all of us in this room getting to some point where it's some anxious period you've got some
major deadlines you're applying for some summer something rather if you really want to get your
totally uptight about it you're sitting down and you're writing the essay and before you can write the
essay you've got to get your
(29:28) favorite pen it's got to be right there and you got to rearrange your desk and you've got to
get everything sorted out and finally efficient you go mail off the application you put it in the
mailbox and you check again to make sure it went down and this is really important I want to see a
check again is to make sure and you're all set for that and you finally there's no one else around so
you go and you look in front of it and looking back at it and that's everything I mean we all do this
(29:50) actually maybe we all do this and I'm embarrassing myself horribly okay my bet is most of
us do this sort of thing we fall into obsessive little rituals during times of anxiety we also have
rituals intrusive thoughts that just invade our heads at times where they are of no obvious purpose
they are at the cost of thinking anything more clearly it's totally maddening and you can't stop the
thoughts for example today I am working on a paper that's involving all sorts of very deep roomin
of thought and
(30:21) figuring out all sorts of data stuff and I've made no progress on it at all this morning because
for some reason that I don't understand that all all of today I've had the damn theme song from
Teletubbies going through my head and I can't stop but especially the part where Lala leaps up and
says while all the really cute partner and I can't stop doing this and I don't know what's going on I
did not plan to lose today's productivity because the Teletubbies but we get this some stupid jingle
that's
(30:48) stuck in your head you find yourself going up a flight of stairs and you can't stop yourself
from counting the steps we do this we all do this and we tend to do it more often during periods of
anxiety and the interpretation of that is that we impose this totally arbitrary useless destructive
structure at a time when everything else feels like you're walking on quicksand we all do this as
some sort of adaptation to periods of anxiety and what we transition into now is talking about a
psychiatric disorder
(31:20) where people do this all the time and it not only gets in the way of them getting some work
done on a project that requires some concentration this is a disorder that absolutely destroys their
lives this is OCD obsessive compulsive disorder and the full-blown version of it there's so little
resemblance to what any of us do when we are having to get the pen right and checking the mailbox
the third time and having the jingle go through your head for a while it is of such a scale larger it is
so much more destructive it is virtually unimaginable
(31:54) from our perspective people with OCD have their lives completely destroyed by this
disorder people with OCD in the full-blown version spent six hours a day washing their hands the
characteristic that's always at the top of the list with OCD is this obsessive focusing on hygiene this
worry that you are constantly in some way sold six hours a day of washing these are people who
cannot hold down jobs their marriages come apart their relationships are destroyed because they
cannot stop washing and you have in the reader one
(32:29) profile of somebody with OCD from a book entitled the boy who couldn't stop washing this
is the symptom that always pops up at the top of the list and the actual washing process is ritualistic
beyond belief these are people who have bought seven different kinds of antibacterial soap they go
through this whole sequence the water has to be a certain temperature for the first level of washing
then a certain type of towel that they dry themselves off with that towel has to be put out of the
room because it's dirty then then the next
(33:01) layer of washing with the next so go through two hours of this they're finally done turn to
leave to go to their job go to their whatever and on the way out brush their elbow against the door
and they have to start all over again and you will stop them at that point and say you will miss this
interview you will not get this job and they will say yes I know but I'm not going to be able to
function and I'm just its dirty I know my elbow I know I'm going to touch it then and then I'll get in
my face and I just have to start
(33:31) over I'm not going to be able to get anything done today anyway so I need to go wash if I
don't wash I'm not going to be Aleut and back they go and hours and hours of this people with OCD
spent half their waking hours doing this people with OCD just have constant sequences of numbers
going in their head constant jingles intrusive thoughts they cannot stop thinking what if I don't stop
the car at the next stop sign what if I run down this person they have the intrusive thoughts of I'm
absolutely sure I struck
(34:02) somebody at that street crossing back there I've got to go back and check ok they don't see
anybody there they drive on five miles down the road probably the person flew off into the bushes I
have to go back and check I have to go back and check they can never leave their home because
they've left the door unlocked they go back they check the doors lock they have to go back they left
the gas on they left the light on this is absolutely paralyzing intrusive thoughts what if I leaned over
and struck the person next to me what if
(34:33) somebody kills my loved ones you can't stop the thoughts they just keep coming at these
people they cannot enter or leave a place there is a paralysis about entering and leaving built around
this sort of almost magical exclusionary power that you get a transition into a place they cannot
enter a room until they do a prime number of tappings on wall before entering they can then not
enter the room until if that's prime number and then a different prime number with their left foot
shaking completely arbitrary symptoms of having to enter
(35:06) and leave numerology these people cannot begin a meal until the utensils are absolutely
symmetrical and lined up and they're never perfectly symmetrical and the entering and leaving
ritual has never done right and they certainly can't enter the classroom unless the number of steps
from here to the door is two times an interval that's with this and very mathematical quality to it and
it's never quite right and you've got to do it all over again and what's been pointed out one of the
really
(35:35) interesting sort of insight as to what OCD is about is that this is an anxiety disorder this is a
pathological attempt to impose structure to impose predictability to impose control and a world
where everything is pathologically provoking of a sense of disease and uncertainty and anxiety and
the absolute horrifying version of OCD that I've heard described is this metaphor where this is
straight out of ethology this is a fixed action pattern we all know the fixed action pattern of a dog is
settling down at night on its blanket
(36:11) and what is the dog do it circles a few times before it settles down but then it circles a
couple more times and just as its rated it and then it circles a few more and fine and you can see at
some point the dog doesn't even want to do this anymore then it takes a while longer in another 30
seconds before the dog can finally escape from this fixed action pattern and sit down in OCD the
person never ever escapes the person spends forever circling on the blanket being unable to finally
lie down and rest because they
(36:42) are just consumed with these rituals with these obsessive intrusive thoughts and what you
get is this is completely paralyzing okay here's an example of an obsessive belief that we all have
okay can anybody identify this okay here's what it is this is an aerial view in fact it's a satellite
photograph up here this is a tray of rice krispie treats and you've just walked into the room and it
looks like this and for a huge percentage of us within a minute or so it's going to look like this
because
(37:19) we all feel this compulsive need to take a knife and cut off that edge okay let me just canvas
you on all of that okay how many of you okay how many of you do this for starters I certainly do
okay how many of you of those who do this cut off this bit here because it doesn't really count on
your diet okay couple of hands how many of you cut it off because what's perfectly obvious is going
from this to this decreases the total perimeter so that it will stay fresher that way okay problems
how many of you
(37:52) why they're doing it because it's just getting at you that it's the knife's just there and you just
have to cut it off and smooth out the edge yes that's why we all do it and then what you then decide
is that there's this little bump here which requires you to trim this out and then there's the little bump
and off you go with that and we all wind up doing that but if this is what you did around the clock
for your entire life it would destroy it and what is most striking with people with OCD is you can
(38:21) never go through the sequence I just did there's no insight the person does not sit there and
say help there's something wrong with me I feel this need to wash my hands six hours a day they
say help there's something wrong with me I can never get clean I'm just so dirty everything I do
makes me dirty there's no insight into it okay so where does this fit in again our modern version of
religion our modern very secular Lee influenced version of religion so often involves an emphasis
on what religion is about is counseling
(38:57) the trouble what religion is about is holding the hands of the newlyweds and making sure
they understand what they're getting into what religion is about is comforting the distant the
bereaved where religion is about is the good works but this is not what religion has often been about
throughout history often the religious leaders are not necessarily the ones who are most
psychotherapeutic ly minded or the most galvanizing of people into the good works often religious
leaders have been the ones at the head of a crusade often
(39:26) religious leaders have been the ones with the most vivid images what hell and damnation
would be like but often what religious leaders have been are the people who are best at doing the
rituals and that has been another thread of religious practice throughout history of religious leaders
as often being among the most fervent the most accomplished at carrying out of rituals now let me
give you a sense of this because as I began to read more on this this absolutely astonished me
because I knew very little about this stuff just the
(39:57) scale of this and starting off with what will probably be a fairly alien religion for most of
you in here and then moving into examples closer to home looking at Orthodox very traditional
Hinduism looking at the behaviors of a Brahmin an individual who devotes their entire life to
ritualistic practice in pursuit of their religion a Brahmin a highly observant Brahmin spends six
hours a day in cleansing rituals and there are detailed rules as to which hand you wash in what
sequence how many times you wash each hand separately how many each one
(40:33) together the sequence with which you wash out one side of your mouth versus the other
with water there are set rules for Brahmins as to how you were supposed to lie down at night
dictating what your first sight is in the morning there are set rules as to what direction you must face
when defecating in terms of what you are looking at at a time there are set rules for rituals you have
to do when entering a temple when leaving a temple there are set rules for how many breaths you
take through each nostril you close one nostril during your
(41:05) prayers for certain number of breaths then you close the other and all of these are very
carefully stipulated the number of mouthfuls of food the number of times you cheaper mouthful the
number of prayers you have to say per day sequences of magic numbers all of this is absolutely
spelled out and Orthodox Brahmins consume their entire days doing this okay next example
Orthodox Judaism spectacularly your question great okay hang on for a while we will come to that
that's a superb question as to why they seem to have
(41:43) lots to do with cleansing and food preparation Wow thank you okay do you want to why
don't we take a five-minute break right now and you can all storm the frontier for handouts lots of
opinions here lots of thoughts once again that same thing I mentioned two days ago three days ago
whenever this is very provocative stuff take advantage of the course website put up some of your
opinions get dialogues going on this because people lots of times have extremely strong opinions on
this and very interesting ones take
(42:22) advantage of this couple of questions that just came up how come people with OCD don't
come down with learned helplessness why aren't they depressed because part of the fuel behind
OCD is you're always convinced aha one more now I know instead of doing it 17 times 18 if I do it
18 then it's going to be perfect you've always just figured out not only do I have to do the six hours
of washing but make sure I never step on a crack and then I won't break my mother's back you're
always
(42:51) figuring out the next step then pointing out we're about to go in a direction where what are
the advantages of a mild version of OCD and we're discussing this in a religious context I should
point out in a secular context there's a tremendous advantage to a mild version of OCD what it does
is get you into a place like Stanford what it does is work to a tremendous advantage given how
regimented and disciplined a lot of folks are in here get it in the right context blah blah that theme
that we have again and again okay shifting over
(43:23) just seeing Orthodox Brahman belief and Hinduism absolutely dominated virtually full time
with ritualistic behaviors Orthodox jewelry a spectacular number of laws built around food
preparation the kosher laws very detailed rules as to how long of a time interval between eating one
type of food and another type of food if you inadvertently mix up the silverware with different types
of food ritualistic cleansing rituals that you have to go through involving putting the utensils in dirt
for months on end and special prayers that have to be said
(43:59) rules about how you enter and leave a holy place involving certain prayers involving a
certain ritualistic touching that you have to make on the door jamb there all sorts of magic numbers
that no number 18 has magical powers and Orthodox Judaism and it's built around numbers of times
you have to say a prayer multiples of 18 you have these prayer shawls that have strings on the end
which have 18 knots in them and they have to be pulled a certain number of times here's one of the
amazing examples of ritualism okay
(44:32) these numbers have magical powers and Orthodox Judaism and you will note 365 is the
number of days in the year 248 is the number of bones that people believed were in the bodies
during the Middle Ages when this evolved and together 613 according to the holy books there are
613 rules for daily behaviors 365 prohibitions every day 248 things that have to be done every day
the preponderance of the prohibitions leading one clearly fairly depressive rabbi back when to be
saying obviously it would have been better if none of us
(45:08) were born given the fact that there were more things that we could mess up by doing but
what you see here is that she's highly ritualistic the number of prohibitions equalling number of
days of the year the number of ritual constraints be equally the number of bones in the body 613 is
the magic number okay where did these numbers come from very often in religious rituals what you
find is a number has symbolic value because it's got a certain appeal for making learning easier it is
not by chance that a base-10 society came up
(45:39) with 10 commandments because 10 commandments that are much easier to remember the
nine or eleven what are these about you would say okay well there's some sort of ritualistic content
here God the number of things God doesn't want us to do each day is equal to the number of days of
the year the number thing God wants us to do is equal to the number of bones in the body okay
great device for remembering the rules but here's the amazing thing nobody knows the rules you
look through thousands of pages of commentary
(46:08) stretching back centuries and the rules aren't written down and various rabbis have made a
living arguing over what are the 365 things you aren't supposed to do each day in other words the
numbers are more important than the content is less critical than the fact that whatever they are
there's 365 things that God doesn't want you to do and whatever they are there's 248 that God wants
you to do the number that you are attributing to God is more important in that case than the content
okay
(46:41) classic classic obsessive numerology switching over traditional Orthodox Islam what you
find there is very detailed rules as to what foods you can eat what the first food is you're supposed
to eat each day there are rules as to how you enter and leave a holy place there are rules for very
ornate cleansing after relieving yourself very very detailed rules when you were washing out your
mouth how many mouthfuls of water which hands you wash in which sequence the exact same
thing exact same rules is with an OCD person
(47:17) after the showering explicitly written down when a man is washing himself at the ends of
the clay at the end of the cleansing should you happen to touch his penis he has to do the whole
sequence all over again magic numbers thought to have powers there 710 70 and a hundred
apparently have magical powers in Islam and you have very explicit concrete instructions about
them Muhammad himself wrote down that a man who says a prayer with clean teeth gets 70 times
the brownie points as a man saying his prayers without them multiples of magic
(47:53) numbers with all of that and probably for most of you by now what will be the most
familiar is looking at Orthodox Christianity and you have rosaries and the counting of rosaries you
have three as a magic number you have very detailed numbers of times you are supposed to say
prayers you have rules for entering and leaving churches even in Christian groups that are viewed as
some of the least ritualistic some of the most cerebral in some ways you look at the Lutheran's
Lutheran's have set rules for prayers that are only said during even
(48:24) year's prayers that are only said during odd years all of these versions of Orthodoxy are
absolutely shot through with rituals built around cleansing of the body food preparation entering
and leaving of significant places and numerology it's the exact same list as you find with OCD and
Freud 100 years ago came up with this amazing quote to that regard Freud described obsessive-
compulsive disorder OCD quote as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional
compulsion he absolutely linked the two now just when you're
(49:03) thinking that I'm standing here and I'm started going to start pathologizing religious belief
from sort of a medical psychiatric standpoint the exact same conclusion has been reached by
religious leaders over the centuries as well in the 15th century there was Saint Loyola no st.
(49:23) Ignatius of Loyola and what this guy did was he wrote this long tract describing scrupulous
'ti scrupulous 'ti is not a common word in English anymore but it's opposite certainly is being
unscrupulous being scrupulous having scrutiny of scrupulosity at the time was defined as someone
who is going through religious ritual for its own sake someone who was not thinking about the
content but was just doing the ritual and he wrote this long track to Catholic priests saying watch
out for people like these people who were coming and being
(49:54) super devout but you will notice they're just doing the rituals without thinking of the content
your job is to recognize them and guide them back into actually focusing on the content they
shouldn't be doing the rituals for their own sake there's a danger of people like that showing up in
the Talmud and Orthodox Judaism the exact same thing there is a law in there that when you read
the holy book of Judaism the Torah you were not allowed to do it by heart you have to actually read
the words because there's
(50:23) an injunction to think about the content don't do it in a roadway and Muhammad himself in
Islam wrote down that people who give prayers without thinking about the content the prayers don't
count even religious leaders for centuries for millennia have recognized the pole of religious ritual
for its own sake to have to admonish religious adherents to pay attention to the content because the
ritual takes life of its own where the numbers the content the ritual is more important than the actual
thought behind it yeah
(50:55) exactly and that was that point that transition talking about schizotypal ism there's much
more resemblance to the large theological building blocks of religion of spirituality what are our
military's principles what do we believe we believe you always follow orders you never follow
orders you don't agree with what's more important value sort of stuff this is instead in the realm of
religious practice and this is the realm of very Orthodox religious practice absolutely completely
different realm so
(51:44) where am i heading with this obviously emphasizing the similarity of the traits and that
whole business that once again have a six hour compulsion to wash your hands each day and have it
occur in the secular context of OCD it destroys your life you cannot function in society you are
peripheral eyes you are mentally ill and that exact same theme get it right in the right context and
this is protective this is honored this is rewarded get it in the right setting now nothing about being
able to do rituals and turn them from your own private OCD
(52:20) into the religious setting this is not a process for making the anxiety go away it's very
important when people are pulling off these rituals in the religious setting it's not to make the
anxiety go away it's to share it it's to share it over time and space with a larger community it's to
take this nameless dread and to give it a name and to have that name come with feeding instructions
and all sorts of rules for how to please the source of the named dread at this point it's not to make
the
(52:51) anxiety go away it's to make the anxiety shared now from this transitioning from this notion
that okay and the right setting the same exact trait that can ruin your life can be enveloped rewarded
welcomed it's protected in the context religious belief now taking it one step further yeah question
sure no it definitely doesn't but from that standpoint this is speaking to one aspect of what it's doing
and we still haven't come to the question that was up there before isn't there an ecological reason
why
(53:45) there should be these rituals about cleansing and food preparation we'll come to that shortly
but the other point you brought up maybe this is to foster a sense of community but this comes back
to the question around there before why should people in a communal sense feel better why should
we all feel better when we do rituals and our rituals of counting the stairs and making sure the
application really went down the mailbox why do we feel even better when we do it in the context
of the community you're
(54:12) absolutely right that these are meant to foster the group shared features of religiosity and
spirituality the question then becomes why does it work why do we respond to it why do we need
shamans and why do we respond to this ability to share these customs why is it the trade of 18 year
olds all over the world to try to invent a whole bunch of generationally shared rituals that lets the
world know I have nothing whatsoever to do with those appalling people who embarrass me my
parents what's that whole separation that goes in why is it
(54:45) that individuation is very often going hand in hand with I need a community to do this
individual with that in a sense is the question and that kind of brings us to this next issue looking at
sort of a next scale of this application of this ritualism by far one of the weirdest stories that Franz
Kafka ever wrote was The Hunger artist and this is a story about a person who performs starving his
performance is he comes into a town and he's locked up in a cage in the middle of town and he
entertains he performs feat
(55:17) performs there by starving himself and people come and watch him starve and initially you
read this and this sounds like one of the more bizarre parables that Kafka has come up with until
you read that during the Middle Ages there were hunger artists there were people who performed in
European cities starving themselves in a ritualistic way for people to come and watch suddenly we
now look at the next level the notion of performing rituals and people who are very good at it once
again what our religious leaders about mostly these
(55:50) days we think of them in terms of people who are empathic people who are able to use the
religious tradition they come from to make people treat each other better to comfort people during
troubled times but back to that issue that some of the time what a religious leader is about is
someone who is excellent at doing rituals and when you look at the history of religion not only do
you have the capacity for somebody to suddenly lose themselves to finally have these same life
destroying rituals being sanctioned and protected you have people
(56:22) who could make a living performing the rituals you can have people who are amply
rewarded for doing so some examples starting off with traditional Hinduism there is a mantra there
called the Gayatri mantra which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing but in traditional Brahmanism you are
supposed to say this mantra two million four hundred thousand times in a lifetime to guarantee a
good afterlife and what happens is you have these ageing captains of industry who were worried
that may not have quite gotten the right number and there and
(56:54) are feeling the years catching up with them and what do you do you hire yourself a bunch of
Brahmins to come and say the prayer two million four hundred thousand times for you and you say
it in appropriate multiples there are set rules you hire two hundred forty of them so each of them
says ten thousand hundred thousand one thousand ten thousand each of them says a whole lot of
them and they all say the same number and there are rules for what sort of tent city you put up for
them in your backyard and what sort of feasts you
(57:23) throw for them you hire people to come and do the rituals for you that get you you're after
switching over to Judaism these rules of Orthodox food preparation there is an entire job you can
get built around ritualistic preparation of food now there is a certain primary level of this which is
people who make a living making sure food is prepared in a kosher way that they slaughter animals
things of that sort but there's a whole second level people who make a living watching the folks
who prepare the food
(57:54) you have rabbis who make a living sitting around in slaughterhouses and making sure the
animals are slaughtered in a ritualistically appropriate way these guys don't do anything with their
own hands their entire job is to watch and make sure the rituals are done right so that you can
produce like at free tofu hotdogs that would bring a smile to the lips of the patriarchs it's done so
ritualistically correctly these guys make a living doing this and then the version probably we are
most familiar with the American experience you have
(58:23) the high school graduation you have the opening of the new town whatever and what
happens the local clergyman comes out and does a convocation says a prayer is invited to come and
do a ritual to mark this community transition and our response here is well you know of course
that's the guys job and that's exactly the point you could make a living doing these rituals and you
can do that job these days complete with health insurance and a retirement package and a 401k and
all of that you make a living doing rituals and when you look at the
(58:58) history of religion suddenly what you see is an inevitable outcome of that if there's
somebody who's spending all his time washing his hands ritualistically for the good of the
community there's some peasant out there who's got to work by the sweat of his brow to make bread
for two people instead of one and there's an amazing novel a science fiction novel and absolutely
caught this which struck me is like one of the truly horrible novels in terms of writing style almost
as bad as Azzam of but in
(59:24) there was this brilliant idea book called Xenocide by a writer named Orson Scott Card and
had this brilliant idea that absolutely caught this and this was on as always a multiplanetary Empire
and the people running the evil empire figured out the people on some planet were biologically very
very prone towards being extremely smart we could dissect that lots of ways perhaps the particular
prenatal environment on that planet but they nonetheless worried that this planet had great danger
for producing revolutionaries that were to lead the
(59:56) overthrow the Empire so what they did was invent a virus a virus which caused obsessive-
compulsive disorder and they infected a subset of people on this planet with the virus and the virus
integrated into the DNA so who could be passed on multi-generationally and suddenly you had a
subset of people who were paralysed with OCD with counting rituals and all of that and what did
they manage to foist off on the rest of the population these were religious experiences they were
having and within a few generations this had become a priestly class who sat
(1:00:30) around all day carrying out their obsessive rituals and the rest of the population couldn't
begin to think of revolting against the Empire because they were spending all day long having to
come up with enough food to feed the priestly class and what you suddenly had was a paralysis and
built around an entire class that does nothing other than carry out these rituals and that planet was
no worry to the rest of the Empire at that point what you wind up seeing is that truly involved
ritualistic religious belief is often at
(1:01:01) the cost of doing anything else there's a spectacular example of this historically and this is
a 16th century Augustinian monk in Germany named ludar and this guy happened to left a lot of
written records and this guy is a classic example of this he was the son the only son of a very
aggressive very violent father there was some suggestion that the father in fact killed somebody
wants and a brawl the son was absolutely terrified of him and was extremely obedient to him very
anxious very psychosomatic young man one
(1:01:34) day he is out for a walk gets caught in a lightning storm out in an open field has a panic
attack there because the lightning storm makes a devotional agreement at that point if he can
survive this lightning storm he will become a monk he promises God that he survives he becomes a
monk and he is absolutely paralyzed with his ritualistic training NEADS records about when he had
his first mass he fainted beforehand he was so nervous about doing it wrong the mass went on three
times the length that was supposed to because he kept having to
(1:02:06) stop and start over again because he was sure he had done something wrong he spent
approximately five hours a day in confession with his priestly mentor there his sort of advisor there
confessing to everything this is a guy who lived in a monastery he didn't have a chance to do
anything sinful but he'd be in there five hours a day when I said this prayer I wasn't mindful enough
about it I did it by rote when I did this I wasn't thinking enough about this I pretty sure I couldn't
wash my hands
(1:02:33) enough before doing this prayer I did this wrong God is angry at me for doing this I'm
sure God is angry at me for doing this and records his mentor this elderly priest eventually in
exasperation said one of the most astonishingly modern psychoanalytically insightful things
imaginable he said enough already God isn't angry with you for some reason you are very angry
with God God doesn't care about how many times you're washing your hands and the most
definitive thing about this young man this young priest was
(1:03:06) something he left in his records he washed hours and hours a day an exact quote from him
the more I wash the dirtier I get and this is OCD and why do we know so much about this man
because we know him 500 years later not by his Latin name of leader we know him by his more
westernized name of Martin Luther this was Martin Luther the founder Protestantism and these
were the transitional events in his life and talk about somebody who takes his personal affliction
and turns it into perhaps the most influential event of the last
(1:03:41) thousand years in Western European history this is someone who turned it into the biggest
display of failing to obey his father that anybody is seen in the history of Catholicism and this was a
person paralyzed by obsessive-compulsive disorder so what we get here at this point is the obvious
question who invented knocking on wood for good luck who's the Hindu who had some sort of
obsession with the number 24 or the Jew with an obsession with the number 18 who got this belief
that God was completely obsessed with the numbers of
(1:04:15) bones in the body and that's how many things you should do what we have here is not
only the recognition that if you are OCD religion can provide a sanctuary if you are OCD in the
right setting you can in fact make a living by being religiously ritualistic but the recognition that
probably people with strong obsessive compulsive tendencies had something to do with the
invention of many of these rituals I suspect historically that's where this come from so that brings
up the issue that was brought up before why should
(1:04:47) these rituals be so similar you look at the prohibitions for example in Judaism more than
200 of these have to do with food preparation and cleansing you see the sequence in any of these
and the top four in OCD are identical to the top four in all of these religions cleansing of the body
food preparation entering and leaving significant religious places and numerology numbers why
should that be basically two types of explanations one is we may be seeing some sort of
convergence it's not by chance that people are highly ritualistically
(1:05:23) concerned with making sure their bodies are cleaned and that their food is correctly
prepared and I suspect that has part to do with it but I suspect what we're also seeing and with
records of people like Martin Luther what we're also seeing is because some of the people who
invented some of these religious rituals had a background of OCD maybe not fully paralytic
versions but nonetheless somebody spending five hours a day washing his hands and five hours a
day confessing about how he didn't wash his hands enough this does
(1:05:54) not seem to be a mild version the more I wash the dirtier I get okay what I think he wind
up seeing is that historically all sorts of folks generating rituals OCD is estimated to have an
incidence anywhere from one to ten percent of the population depending on how you define at the
continuum and what you have is I suspect in periods of religious crisis cultural crisis during a
period of person during the period where whatever is currently in shape is not working the right
person at the right moment comes forward and in effect says this is how I
(1:06:31) have been privately honoring our Lord all these years and I am offering it to all of you to
see this is what I have been doing and in the right place and time it catches on and it turns into the
thing that is the ritual for the rest of the community within decades okay so what I've been
suggesting here and what I also emphasize is none of this is original with me except for the notion
that the OCD has something to do with the invention of these rituals these ideas go back in decades
go back centuries that there is a parallelism
(1:07:02) between the symptoms of what we call schizotypal ism and the meta magical backbone of
religious theology there is a parallelism between what we call obsessive compulsive disorder and
the ritualism of mainstream Orthodox religion and this key point that the exact same behaviors
which in one context destroys your life as you peripheral eyes do it right do it in the right context
and it is not peripheral izing it makes you very honoured and powerful there are more themes yeah
wonderful question would you'd expect to
(1:07:44) see different incidences of OCD type traits in different cultures depending on how secular
the society is how ritualistic the religion is you look at for example Catholicism or high
Episcopalian ISM highly ritualistic compared to Lutheran's or Unitarians or Quakers at the other
end would you expect to see different different instances absolutely I don't know if anybody's
studying that that would be exactly a prediction you would expect ok a related one which taps into
the lecture on Friday would you expect to
(1:08:16) see differences in the incidence of depression depending on religiosity and boy do you see
that with a vengeance one of the healthiest things you could do with your life is to be religious and
to be highly religious it is a very strong protector against major depression religious belief extends
your life expectancy and that's after you control for it changes risk factors you are less likely to
drink to excess all of that what is the big issue in that field is do the health benefits of religiosity
merely come from the social community
(1:08:50) that you get typically by being religious the question early in the lecture today religiosity
versus spirituality that might be a realm to dissociate them spirituality if it's a very personal one you
wouldn't get the community do you still get the health benefits nobody knows at this point but those
are studies that people are doing but absolutely one of the greatest things you can do out there to
buffer yourself from depression is to be religiously believing and walk through all the steps at the
end of the lecture
(1:09:19) the other day elements of control predictability explanation outlet and you will see exactly
how religion taps into that okay couple more threads here in terms of making sense of some of the
covariance between biological phenomena and behavior that we can explain and patterns of
religious belief back to something we talked about earlier in the course take a hungry pigeon and
put it in a cage and instead of the behaviorist circumstance where it has to press a lever on 10 times
to get food you randomly reward it and what we discussed
(1:09:53) there was a pigeon has a strong psychic need to come up with an attribution what did I do
to caused this food to appear and what we went through was the fact that if the pigeon is hungry
enough and the reward is both big enough and random enough the pigeon has a prepared learning
state to make it think ah whatever I just did is what caused that to occur and then you suddenly have
superstitious conditioning the capacity to get pigeons doing the most outlandish ly ritualistic things
over and over and over in the belief that that's the cause
(1:10:28) of the food appearing and what we heard was take a room full of hungry pigeons and
randomly reward all of them with food at different points and come back a few days later and every
pigeon is going to be having its own private belief system built around in order to get food I have to
do X the enforcement of superstitious belief and that is the term that is used in psychology and as
we often have here is a question of is this word a metaphor is this word an inappropriate metaphor
or what a superstitious belief and to go back to
(1:11:01) the question that came up here before why do we have a societal need for shamans why
do we have a societal need for much of this because we are trying to explain the unexplainable we
are trying to look for causal links of things that may or may not be associated this is basically a way
of describing superstition how tight of a link do you need between cause and effect to believe that
there has been cause and effect and this is coming down to statistical relations and if you allow
yourself to believe that this prayer could be
(1:11:32) answered but it wasn't this time because I wasn't concentrating enough I need to do it a bit
more fervently all of that you have a system that allows us very readily to see causal links that may
not be there now what is the next interesting neurobiological piece of this is that take animals take
rats and damage their hippocampus and what you get with hippocampal damage then is you have
more trouble making causal sequential links and events what you wind up seeing and this next
sentence is meant to be as provocative visible sound
(1:12:06) is when you have rats hippocampal damage they are more vulnerable to superstitious
conditioning essentially what that is staying is that as you have a damaged kippa campus you have
less of the capacity to tell the difference between accurate cause-and-effect linkages and ones that
are merely statistically hinting of that or ones that may not be in the slightest bit connected with
each other hippocampal damage and rats have a lower threshold for superstitious conditioning and
we can very readily run with that
(1:12:41) one in terms of what the implications of that might be going our usual sequence from in
order to appreciate a biological effect big gross lesion sort of stuff - once again the much more
subtle realm we all differ in our number of hippocampal neurons in the amount of this enzyme in
the amount of myelin and all the biology we know all the individual differences a last disorder that
winds up being interesting there is a type of epilepsy which when you have it something happens to
your religious belief system and this
(1:13:14) is one of its characteristic features epileptic seizures as I think we've discussed in here
have characteristics as to what part of the brain they originate in and this is epilepsy that originates
in the temporal lobe the temporal lobe containing the hippocampus the amygdala it's a big limbic
area the temporal lobe temporal lobe epilepsy and about 30 years ago a neurologist named
Geschwind who was at Harvard he was probably the most influential neurologists of the 20th
century Geschwind published a paper first
(1:13:44) describing what is now called temporal lobe personality which is a cluster of personality
traits that become far more common in people with temporal lobe epilepsy once again not
everybody with this personality profile has epilepsy lurking there not everybody with temporal lobe
epilepsy gets this profile but statistically at a higher than expected rate what do you see the temporal
lobe personality first off the person becomes extremely serious and humorless okay you might say I
would become extremely serious and humorless
(1:14:18) if I suddenly came down with epilepsy what's the appropriate control looking at other
types of epilepsies of equivalent severity it's specific to temporal lobe so you get the seriousness
next thing you get is what is termed neophobia you don't like new things you'd like to just do very
familiar sorts of stuff the same small circle of friends the same very realm relatively limited range
of experiences okay if I had epilepsy I would suddenly get a lot more sort of involute in my lifestyle
once again the
(1:14:49) controls or other types of epilepsies next thing you see is this bizarre trait called
hypergraphia which is people with temporal lobe personality begin to write obsessively they feel a
pressure need to write forth trade and the most interesting one of all is people with temporal lobe
personality become obsessively interested in religious and philosophical subjects and these are not
people with uncontrolled seizures happening all the time these are people whose seizures are
relatively well controlled with medication and once
(1:15:27) again well if I have this horrible neurological disease I suddenly start getting more
introspective I once again control for with the other types of epilepsy and the classic temporal lobe
patient that you see is somebody who is meeting a new neurologist and says oh hi great to meet you
you know I very strongly believe that a patient should be more than just their symptoms so I've
prepared this 60 page document here which is my philosophy about life meaning and that the next
week's appointment comes back with a 40
(1:15:54) page addendum this is what you want of seeing and there's this fabulous story told
showing that it's not that you get religious you get interested in religious and philosophical subjects
this great story showing this and this was apparently shortly after Geschwind first published this
paper and he had some neurology resident who one day all the residents were in there in the
neurology resident was summarizing some patient this was some thirteen year old boy in there with
temporal lobe epilepsy and he went through the meds and all of
(1:16:24) that and how the kid was doing and at the end said oh by the way I just read your paper on
that personality stuff this kid doesn't fit at all doesn't fit in the slightest clearly doing some chest
thumping kind of territory stuff but the big man there and guess when says oh yeah really how come
and he said because I asked him if he's religious he said no he's not guess mine says the median out
of my way cousin goes storming down Hall and the residents running after him bursts into this kid's
room and says oh hi I'm dr.
(1:16:49) Josh will any person through a neurological exam all of that and goes through and asked
them do you like baseball how's the weather all of that and then offhandedly says well by the way
are you religious and the voices no I'm not and then guess when asks the critical question he says oh
how come and this 13 year old kid gives this hour-long lecture about the internal inconsistencies of
Christ's Sermon on the mountain the epic of gilgamesh and sort of ank abuse treatment of this and
Bertrand Russell's critique of Christ
(1:17:15) and and like Geschwind just leaves the residents in their torture to listen to this kid for an
hour and it's not becoming religious it's becoming fascinated with the subject and there's even been
a paper published in a neurology journal doing the sort of Paleo forensic neurology by a neurologist
speculating someone who in history had temporal lobe epilepsy and this was st. Paul st.
(1:17:38) Paul who had seizure or ins as documented no evidence that the guy was particularly
humorous the guy was hyper graphic as hell and clearly had a very strong interest in religious and
philosophical subjects and you know this is fun but what do you make of the fact that somebody has
an uncontrolled seizure in this part of the brain for 30 seconds once every six months and they
become more interested in religious subjects and at the end of the handout I cite a novel that was
published a couple years ago called lying awake fabulous novel by Mark
(1:18:10) salzman talking about a nun who is in the middle of a rather disputing life experience as a
nun it has not been what she was hoping for it has mostly been empty ritual and in the last few years
she's been having religious visions and this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her
what she also has to admit is she has kind of become a star of her convent after being this very
peripheral nobody and they're publishing books about her visions and people are coming to see her
and what becomes apparent halfway through the
(1:18:42) book is that she has a tumor in her temporal lobe which is causing temporal lobe C years
and suddenly what does it mean that this is what these visions have been about what does it mean
that this is something that somebody in a white coat would call a disease is this a disease and do I
want my disease cured do I want this taken away from me and it's extraordinary novel absolutely
getting these features of temporal lobe personality and getting at this issue which now is the core of
what this whole lecture has been what do we do with
(1:19:14) something like this what do we do with the possibility that have an uncontrolled burst of
action potentials and one part of your brain for 30 seconds every six months and in a somewhat
deterministic way that makes you more interested in religious subjects now summarizing here what
I think's really important for me to emphasize is what I'm not saying because that I kind of learned
the hard way over the years and touching on the subject in this class what things I am NOT saying I
am NOT saying who some snotty you got to
(1:19:46) be crazy to be religious that's nonsense nor am I saying even that most people who are are
psychiatrically suspect I'm not saying that in the slightest what I'm saying is it is absolutely
fascinating that the same exact traits which in a secular context are life destroying separate you
from the community and in the right setting are at the very core of what is protected what is
sanctioned what is rewarded what is valued in religious settings so often and that there could be an
underlying biology to this and what do we do with
(1:20:22) this what's most interesting here is even if this describes one single person I mean to put
cards on the table I was raised in an extremely religious Orthodox upbringing and I had a complete
break with it when I was about 14 and that process of completely breaking to the point now where I
have no religion I have no spirituality I'm utterly atheist and in passing it is probably the thing I
most regret in my life but is something I appear not to be able to change the process of getting to
that point I view in retrospect as one of the most
(1:20:54) defining things in my life the process of turning into that person from who I was what to
make of the possibility that each one of us goes through some equivalent version in our life
deciding how religious or irreligious we are going to be for a lot of us that are among the most
defining features of who we are where we have wound up with this and how we got there what do
we make of the fact that even if there's one case in all of human history of someone who got to
wherever they were instead because of a
(1:21:26) neurotransmitter hiccup because of a genetic influence because of something that we
would see as deterministic as your visions are due to a tumor in your temporal lobe what are we to
do with this what I am also saying here is it is just this interesting to ask this question about why
some of us lose faith has to ask this about why some of us gained faith it is just as biological it is
simply much less studied because there are fewer examples of it the study out there but it is just as
biological in the process and it is just as
(1:21:58) interesting if it has only been one person in law of history once again coming to this issue
what are we to make of who we are if even in one case somebody has arrived at that point because
of just a storm of neurotransmitter abnormalities rather than the journey that all of us associate with
helping to define who we are now this now is a segue to Wednesday's lecture which is going to look
at all of these issues in a much more subtle realm of this biology of what makes our personalities
personalities and this is finally moving
(1:22:30) outside of the realm of them and their diseases for what makes us us and at the core of this
is what does it mean that biology may have as much to do with it as I will hopefully convince you
of on Wednesday so let's pick up them