Prof. Robert Sapolsky talks about the biological roots of religion through schizophrenia (hearing the voice of a god), OCD (ritual), and temporal lobe epilepsy (mystical experiences):
There’s a condensed version of some of these thoughts in Sapolsky’s essay “Belief and Biology.”
(via)
4,000 subscribers. 10,000 daily views.
Erp: Interesting. Many years ago I helped my aunt sort out some of her late mother-in-law’s... The Most Blasphemous Book Ever Written
Peter Cross: The Age of Reason is sometimes published and sold without Part 3: Examination of the... The Most Blasphemous Book Ever Written
Mark D: Let Ed sell his plane and give the money to the Red Cross Ed Young’s Lavish Lifestyle
nomad: You’d love it, Custador. It looks and tastes just like it sounds. Nomnom. Would I Still Be an Atheist?
Matt: I find it very interesting that there are so many people out there with such sad lives as to sit... Kent Hovind’s Doctoral Dissertation
Tyrrlin: Wow… I’d like to buy apostrophes for most of those commenters. Apparently belief in a... My Favorite Christian Is An Atheist!!!
Mathurine: I’m not so sure that they wouldn’t have. The father in the case is... Turkish girl, 16, buried alive for talking to boys
JonJon: I agree. Would I Still Be an Atheist?
|
|
|
11 Comments
I fell asleep to this last night :-)
I blogged in the middle of a temporal lobe seizure, last week, I think.
It does feel like god touching you, or at least it can. Then the seizure’s over, your all postictal tired and cranky, and god’s gone away. And that’s to say nothing of the occasional hallucination of basketball sized spiders.
There’s a reason that epileptics are/were thought to be touched by the divine!
the divine is a basketball-sized spider?
no, having a seizure feels like *god touching you* (apparently, I don’t know personally)
Sapolsky is the bomb. Seriously. He is one of the *premiere* neuroscientists in America, and his research focus is on neurodegenerative mechanisms in the brain. He was at the Salk for a while, but now he’s at Stanford. Thanks, Dan for posting this!!!
Seconded. The neurological roots of religious impulse are fascinating.
I watched this vid last week when somebody on this blog mentioned it. It’s absolutely fascinating. So many implications. But you may want to have 90 minutes to kill when you watch it – I tried watching in two sessions, but couldn’t fast-forward to the middle, so I had to watch the whole thing over again. Well worth the effort, I’d say. Highly recommended.
I feel much more educated than I did two hours ago.
I guess it is comforting to find out I’m only “half” crazy…..just kidding.
This was like riding on a bullet trail. Terrific presentation.
I also just read “The God Virus” by Darrel Ray. If you enjoyed this video, you will enjoy Dr. Rays book.
It’s so cool that even a total layman (like myself) now has access to some of these ideas that are beginning to explain why we are/were so vulnerable to religious kookyness.
I’ve been wanting to read that book….
2 Trackbacks
[...] (Via unreasonable faith) [...]
[...] Biological Roots of Religion. Worth a look over at Unreasonable Faith: The Biological Roots of Religion. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)No TitleAn [...]