And Slaters Go Plop

Please note: Spoilers in the comments section.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid and the upcoming The Skeptologists has just released a short film that serves as an introduction to critical thinking. He’s made it freely available in a number of formats including DVD. If you are a teacher looking to fill in an hour or two at the same time as giving your students a good grounding in critical thinking this might be just the ticket.

Last year a study was performed by Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth and Mark S. Cohen where they used fMRI to observe the physical responses of the brain when a person was provided with statements that were taken to be true, false or otherwise. They found that different areas of the brain showed activity depending on how the subject perceived the statement.

Here is the abstract of the original study:

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When one accepts a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.
Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.
Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as “true” or its rejection as “false” appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.

Oliver Sacks, in a review of the study said,

Harris et al. note that reactions of assent are significantly prompter than those of dissent or uncertainty. This they take to support “Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true,” an almost reflexive, if provisional, assent, to be followed by a more deliberate weighing and assessment. Human beings, in other words, are wired to “accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” This seems to us to ring true.
The most provocative suggestion made by Harris et al. relates to their finding that all reactions of assent or acceptance (or belief, if one prefers) are neurophysiologically identical, whether propositional judgments are made in the highly charged realm of ethical or religious issues or the seemingly neutral realm of arithmetical statements. If such results can be duplicated, Harris et al. will have made a fascinating discovery.

The results of this original study have led to questions of whether religious faith ‘looks’ different than belief at the level of the brain and Harris is preparing for another study that will also use fMRI to observe the physical aspects of belief and faith.

In an attempt to find questions that will best suit the upcomming study Harris has set up four surveys and is looking for people who have opinions either way regarding Christianity to participate. If you are a Christian or an atheist/agnostic and you want to help them identify the most appropriate stimuli for the study you can complete one or more of the following surveys:

• Belief Survey A
• Belief Survey B
• Belief Survey C
• Belief Survey D

Each one has around 100 questions. I did C and it didn’t take too long.

Recently Michael Shermer received an angry letter from a Jew who’d seen the film Expelled. He discussed the issue with Richard Dawkins and they decided to write an open letter in the hopes of setting the record straight for anyone else misled by Ben Stein and the deceptive film makers. Read on.

Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein’s mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don’t think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I’ll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

(more…)

Why do we buy them? We hand over $50 that could otherwise be used anywhere you like in exchange for a voucher worth $50 that can only be used at certain shops.

On a purely logical level $50 in cash is a far greater gift to give simply because it can be redeemed anywhere you like. The problem is that giving cash as a present is about as lazy as can be. When you buy someone a voucher you are saying that at least you made an effort.

You would think that shops would give you slightly more incentive to buy vouchers because at least then they’ve got a guaranteed customer (and maybe even a few unredeemed vouchers too, if they are lucky). Why don’t they sell $50 vouchers for $45? Surely they could find some way around people buying vouchers and immediately using them? How about a month’s delay before being able to redeem them to keep this in check?

Anyway. Happy Christmas and bah humbug.

Carl Sagan died eleven years ago today. His enthusiasm for the universe and everything in it was contagious and he is responsible for the sense of awe I and many, many others feel when we look up at the stars at night.

Our brains are not capable of comprehending the true vastness of space but Carl managed to help us expand our comprehension to the point of vertigo and, with it, and closer understanding of our true standing within the universe.

My thoughts are with his family and I, like many others, wish he was still here.

Just over a month ago I wrote about the shootings in Finland and, tongue-in-cheek, expressed what many in the fundamentalist blogosphere were saying.

Sadly, I spoke too soon. According to the Independent, in New South Wales an English creationist has stabbed a Scottish man to death during a heated debate about evolution. They were on a fruit-picking working holiday and had been drinking in a pub where the row broke out. The stabbing took place later that evening back at the camp ground where they were staying.

The creationist, Alexander York, was given a maximum of five years on a charge of manslaughter, not murder. The judge ruled that, while York knew he had a knife in his hand he had not thought of the consequences of his actions when he lashed out.

If not for the truly tragic nature of this news item it would almost make for a classic Gary Larson cartoon. I can just picture two scientists in a heated (excuse the pun) row about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I guess this is an example of how beliefs and reality clash on a day to day basis.

Then again, the guy may have just been a nut-job who would have flipped over another issue given the same circumstances and enough alcohol.

On the evening of October 11 this year a Maori ritual for lifting a curse was held for 22 year old Janet Moses in Wainuiomata. The ritual was attended by about 40 people and lasted until 8am the following morning where Janet finally died by drowning. She had multiple grazes on her arms and torso and a neighbour reported hearing noises like “banging on a wall” throughout the night. Her death was reported to police at 5.30pm later that day.
The family believed that there was a curse, or makutu, on Janet because some bad things had happened to people around her, i.e. a relative had become sick.

Instead of outright condemming these kinds of barbaric ceremonies, the archdecon of the Maori Anglican Church said “It’s a very difficult process. I’m personally very wary of removing them [curses]“. It appears the issue for him is not a question of whether curses exist but how difficult they are to remove.

Curses don’t exist in the real world, neither do demons, angels, tree spirits, fairies, gobblins, desert djin, ghosts or gods. They do exist however. They exist in the minds of the people who believe in them and that can make them almost as real as if they were in the physical world.

How do I know this? Two main reasons: 1. These various supernatural creatures are confined to cultural (and, often, geographical) boundaries which means they spread from mind to mind like a language or a story, and 2. There is no evidence in the physical world that they exist.

There has been a ton of study done on how the human brain is wired to personalise inanimate objects and to try to give purpose to otherwise random events. You will have experienced this for yourself if you’ve ever see a cloud or wood bark or an illusion where you immediately see a person’s face. It’s uncanny but we now realise that the tree isn’t trying to tell us something - there are lots of patterns and we’re wired to recognise faces because faces are important to us. Likewise with giving purpose to random events; a Tsunami kills quarter of a million people and we just know there had to be some reason; you win a raffle, the lottery and you get an unexpected tax refund all in the same week - someone is clearly watching over you; the eye is amazingly complex - it must have been designed by some super being, a god perhaps; bad things start happening to those around you - you must be cursed or something.

These interpretations of randomness are a result of an inbuilt pattern recognition all humans have. It’s been useful to us in our evolutionary past - our ancestors passed on these attributes in their genes because by recognising patterns and being able to recognise that other people and animals had intentions they had a greater change of survival.

We’re really very good at it but that can be our weakness. Especially when we over-recognise intentions and patterns and throw away our more recently acquired logic and reason in favour of primal fears and rituals.

So, how do we stop curse-lifting rituals from happening? Education and the teaching of critical thinking has to be of some use. Also, people like Dr Hone Kaa, the archdecon of the Maori Anglican Church, who provide safe harbour and lend authority to all forms of harmful superstition need to be re-educated or removed from their positions of influence by their seniors. If their seniors or church authorities are not willing to do this then we as a country need to stop encouraging the spread of these beliefs by removing tax breaks and any other existing privileges usually reserved to promote beneficial causes.

Superstition has been helpful to us in the distant past but it’s, literally, killing us now. Let’s drop it and move on.

I can sense the mighty stirrings of the creationist herd so let me be the first to say it. ‘Evilution’ has reared it’s ugly head again. First it was Nazi Germany and now, after a long and bloody history, in Finland a teenager has become the latest proponent of the callous hatred that is endorsed by the followers of Darwin.

From TFA:

…showing him pointing a gun and declaring himself a “social Darwinist” who would “eliminate all who I see unfit”.

This wouldn’t have happened if Intelligent Design were taught in schools. How many more children need to die?

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On a serious note though, my thoughts go out to all affected by this tragedy, including the family of Pekka-Eric who will be having to come to terms with not only the anger of their neighbours but the loss of a son.