Schizophrenia, Religion, Autism and the Indian culture (alternate title: Life, The Universe and Everything)

In continuation of my focus on the Schizophrenia-Autism dichotomy, I'll like to highlight two articles that seem to support my view.

The first is a blog post by, John Horgan, speculating whether religiosity is the inverse of autism.

The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie proposes that religious experiences—and particularly those involving visions or intuitions of a personal God--may stem from our innate tendency toward anthropomorphism, “the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events.” Guthrie called his book on this theory Faces in the Clouds, but he could have called it Jesus in the Tortilla.

Recent findings in developmental psychology dovetail with Guthrie’s theory. By the age of three or four all healthy children manifest an apparently innate ability to infer the state of mind of other people.

Psychologists postulate that autism stems from a malfunction of the theory-of-mind module. Autistics have difficulty inferring others’ thoughts, and even see no fundamental distinction between people and inanimate objects, such as chairs or tables. That is why autism is sometimes called “mind-blindness.”

But many of us have the opposite problem—an overactive theory-of-mind capacity, which leads to what the psychologist Justin Barrett calls “hyperactive agent detection.” When we see squares and triangles moving around a screen, we cannot help but see the squares “chasing” the triangles, or vice versa, even when we are told that the movements are random.

This is compatible with this blog's Schizophrenia-is-the-inverse-of-Autism theory for the following reasons:

1. Too much belief in agency in Schizophrenics (the hyperactive Agent detector conceptualized above) vs too less belief in agency in Autistics - characterized by me earlier as a Fantasy/Imagination Vs Reality orientation - has a direct relevance to whether one attributes anthropomorphic agency to non-living things and events (and thus Nature or God) or even fails to attribute intention to humans and animals and assumes them to be mere automata. I believe while a schizophrenic mindset can be characterized by a suspension-of-disbelief and too much causality and intention attribution (thus leading to the mindset compatible with religious/ spiritual leanings), the autistic mindset would lead to too much skepticism, too much even-causal-happenings-are-only-coincidental mindset and a reductionist, atheistic mindset that attributes no intention to humans, least of all animals, and believes that they are just advanced machines. I guess both are extremes of delusion, in one case one characterizes that as the GOD delusion; but the other extremist who sees no role of agency or intentionality (even in humans) is hauled as a great scientist!!

2. Another prominent dimension on which the Schizophrenics and autistic differ is the Literal-Metaphor dimension. I would like to frame that in terms of a Reference-Meaning use of a linguistic word and the consequent distinction in linguistics between a symbol as a referent of something and a symbol as signifying a meaning. For an excellent commentary on this difference, please do read this classical paper.

Meaning, let us remember, is not to be identified with naming. Frege's example of 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' and Russell's of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly', illustrate that terms can name the same thing but differ in meaning. The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms. The terms '9' and 'the number of the planets' name one and the same abstract entity but presumably must be regarded as unlike in meaning; for astronomical observation was needed, and not mere reflection on meanings, to determine the sameness of the entity in question.

It is my contention that while the Schizophrenics are meaning obsessed; the Autistics are more reference obsessed, and thus have problems with metaphorical and figurative speech. From linguistics one can stretch the Meaning-Reference distinction and conceive of too much meaning orientation in schizophrenics ( and a meaningful life requires a GOD that gives a meaning to our lives) versus a nihilistic orientation in autistics that views the life/ evolution as purposeless. As many evolutionists famously claim - there is no meaning inherent in evolution, life or humans - rather that the question of meaning is invalid. Life just is.

3. Many schizophrenic delusions can be explained by an extreme manifestation of religiosity/ spirituality. As Szasz famously said, " If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you you have schizophrenia". Both a belief in GOD and his ability to listen to our prayers (the religious belief) and the converse belief that God can talk to us , many times in symbolic ways, but sometimes in the form of actual auditory hallucinations are a manifestation of the same cognitive mechanism that attributes too much agency, causality and meaning. Many schizophrenics, indeed do suffer from delusion of Grandeur, whereby they think of themselves as GOD-like; or the delusion of persecution and paranoia whereby they are persecuted by Satan like evil figures. thus both hallucinations as well as the common delusions are explainable by the religiosity orientation. this time the GOD delusion is different - one believes that one is a god-head. In non-religious cultures, these being-GOD delusions may take the non-religious forms of being a famous historical person (who had great agency and effect on Human history and is presumably now active via the agency of the deluded schizophrenic), and the persecution delusions may not refer to Satan- but to their non-secular counterparts- the CIA and the government!! Of course the pathological forms of an Autistic mindset, that may have nihilistic orientations, and out of boredom and feelings of meaninglessness, may resort to meaningless acts of violence like the Columbine Massacres is one direction which needs further study.

I would now like to now draw focus on the Cultural differences post where I had speculated on the different incidences rates of Schizophrenia and Autism in the East Asian and American cultures based on the differential emphasis on holistic and contextual versus analytical and local processing and cognition and also presented some supporting evidence. The well documented religious/spiritual inclination of Oriental cultures versus the Scientific/materialistic orientation of the American and western cultures may be another factor that would affect and explain the relative incidences of Schizophrenia and Autism in these cultures.

In a culture like India, in which the people believe in 18 crore (180 billion) Gods and Deities, believe in reincarnation and believe that every human being is potentially divine, if a human errs towards an extreme and starts developing funny ideas of being a God herself, then that may not ring the alarm bells immediately. Rather some form of that delusion may even be encouraged (that is why in India names are kept after the Gods and Deities; while its rare to find the name Jesus in West, you can find millions of Rams in India). If the same GOD-delusion develops in an American, then his idea of being Jesus (or an angel) would definitely be detected early, lead to an earlier 'label' and an earlier hospitalization.

That said, I would now like to draw attention to an article today in the Times Of India, that pointed me to some more literature that unequivocally shows that not only are the incidence rates of schizophrenia less in India (and other third world (Asian) countries), the prognosis is manifold better in Indian patients as compared to American patients.

The success story of schizophrenics in India was propagated by mental health professionals based on the WHO research DOSMeD in 1979. This was carried out in 10 countries including developing ones such as India, Nigeria and Columbia. The findings showed striking differences in the prognosis of schizophrenia between developed and developing countries. The underlying causes for the diversity were associated more with family and social variables than clinical determinants. Majority of patients in developing countries showed remission over two years; only 50 per cent of them had a single relapse though around 15 per cent never recovered. Patient outcome in developing countries was superior to that in developed economies.

This difference has been hypothesized to be due to the strong family structure (and I do believe that it is an important factor) and the social cushion, support and acceptance that a family provides to the patient and shields him/her from stressful situations that may trigger a relapse.

This theory of a family-protective-advantage has come under attack recently, but I think the attack is flawed because it clubs countries not according to Cultures, but according to developmental status. Indeed, the other factor that may be affecting a better outcome in schizophrenic patients may be the cultural differences like the different cognitive/perceptual styles and a more tolerance for religious/spiritual/ mystical ideas. By shielding a person from stigmatization and isolation, based on eccentricities exhibited along these dimensions, one may be preventing or delaying relapse, and ensuring better outcome by not pushing the person over the edge. In the pats, it was not infrequent, for those who had psychotic experiences to be labeled as shamans and to be treated with respect, rather than stigma and isolation; thus ensuring that they were not exposed to social stresses in the future.

I have taken a somewhat deprecating attitude towards the extreme autistic orientation characterized by no intentionality, causality, spiritual beliefs, but I am a strong believer in the fact that though the extreme manifestation of Autism/Schizophrenia makes one dysfunctional, a pronounced autistic/ schizophrenic orientation does endow one with creative faculties - either to understand and manipulate the world (the Sciences) or to understand and manipulate the subjective experiences (the Arts) . In particular, as the readers of this blog would most likely be scientists, and because I belong the the scientific community and have failed to see how a scientific orientation is incompatible with an artistic/symbolic/spiritual orientation , I have taken a harder line for the extreme Atheist and nihilism zealots.

I believe one can, and must, utilize the different types of cognitive abilities these extreme manifestations and disorders caricature. Do let me know what your think!

Tags: schizophrenia, autism, culture, cognition, intelligence

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Badcock on Edge: the imprinted gene theory of ASD/ PSD

This edition of Edge features an article by Christopher Badcock, about the imprinted gene theory of Autism Spectrum disorders and the psychotic spectrum disorders that he has been developing with Crespi.  It is a must read and has been very nicely done.

He goes on to list the differences between autism and psychosis in a tabular form and then extends this to list the differences between mentalistic and mechansitic cognitions.

Autism/Asperger's syndrome	Psychosis/Paranoid schizophrenia
gaze-monitoring deficits	delusions of being watched/spied on
apparent deafness/insensitivity to voices	hallucination of and hyper-sensitivity to voices
deficits in interpreting others' intentions	erotomania/delusions of persecution
deficits in appreciating shared-attention/groups	delusions of conspiracy
theory of mind deficits	magical ideation/delusions of reference
deficit in sense of personal agency/episodic memory	megalomania/delusions of grandeur
literalness/inability to deceive	delusional self-deception
pathological single-mindedness	pathological ambivalence
early onset	late onset

Mentalistic Cognition	Mechanistic Cognition
psychological interaction with self and others	physical interaction with nature and objects
uses social, psychological, and political skills	uses mechanical, spatial, and engineering skills
deficits in autism, augmented in women	accentuated in autism, augmented in men
voluntaristic, subjective, particularistic	deterministic, objective, universal
abstract, general, ambivalent	concrete, specific, single-minded
verbal, metaphoric, conformist	visual, literal, eccentric
top-down, holistic, centrally-coherent	bottom-up, reductionistic, field-independent
epitomized in literature, politics, and religion	epitomized in science, engineering, and technology
‘pseudo-science': astrology, alchemy, creationism	‘hard science': astronomy, chemistry, Darwinism
nurtured: culturally- and personally-determined	natural: factually- and genetically-determined
belief-based therapies: placebos, faith-healing, psychotherapy etc.	physical effect-based therapies: drugs, surgery, physiotherapy, etc.

He lists down some of the other arguments that I have made viz the fact that Valproic acid exposure in childhood/ pregnancy causes Autism, while valproic acid is used for treating psychosis. Overall it is a very interesting read and a must read.

He also tries to address the mCDD (or simultaneous occurence of Autism and Schizophrenia) in his article, though I find that part the least convincing. Here is what he has to say:

The model appears to rule out anyone suffering from an ASD and a PSD simultaneously, and such co-morbidity does appear to be rare—but is not unknown. However, I know of cases of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder who also show unmistakable signs of ASD during their non-manic phases. Indeed, I have research on one individual who suffers from severe gaze-aversion, autistic deficits in a sense of self and social anxiety most of the time, but who becomes comfortable with other people during manic episodes when his sense of self hypertrophies into megalomania with the feeling that he is the returned Jesus Christ! Furthermore, there is evidence of both ASD and PSD in Newton and Beethoven, and incontrovertibly so in the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash. Here the theory predicts that the ASD must come first (typically in childhood) and leave a permanent savant-like basis later built on by hyper-mentalistic tendencies to produce an unusually broadened and dynamically-balanced cognitive configuration: that of true genius.

I find this fascinating and agree with Badcock that the theory leads to many predictions and all these are testable; so we are witnessing a new paradigmatic shift in our understanding of these neurodevelopmental disorders and further experiments would definitely lend more credence to this theory in my view.

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Science and Religion revisited: a case for a universal spiritual grammar?

I have earlier commented on how Science and Religions may be alternate frames via which we try to make sense of our lives and the world and how autistic thinking may be more related to scientific leanings; while a schizophrenic thinking style more prone to religiosity/ spirituality. I have also commented recently how one may view mind as composed of Agency and Experience; while a brain as composed of no agency/ experience; thus again bifurcating our concepts about self along religious/ scientific lines. One may add to this too much causal reasoning about the world as opposed to belief in randomness; and extend this to the earlier observations on Autistic and Schizophrenic thinking styles:

To recap:

• Autistic/ scientific thinking style attributes too less of agency or intentionally (to even fellow human beings), while a schizophrenic/spiritual thinking style attributes too much agency (to even non-living things).
• Autistic thinking is more correlation-is-not-causation type and makes sense of the world via statistical inferences and reasoning (I am not using probabilistic reasoning by purpose as there is difference between a probabilistic reasoning based on understanding of events involved (say the fact that a die has six faces and it is equally probable that it lends on either face ) versus a reasoning based on just number crunching on past data set (say given the outcomes of a number of such die throws statistically calculating the chances of the next throw value)); while the schizophrenic thinking style is more jumping to conclusions and more of causal (cause-and-effect) type of reasoning.
• Autistic thinking is more of attributing no-experience-of-feelings-beliefs etc to fellow humans mind blindness), while a schizophrenic style is marked by a felling that one can intuit thoughts, feelings of others and a converse belief that one;s thoughts, feeling are being broadcast etc that is belief in too much of experience by self as well as others. The theory of mind or mirror neurons may go on overdrive in a psychotic episode.
• Autistic thinking being more realistic/ literal; while schizophrenic thinking being more symbolic/ metaphorical. one could summarize this as too much meaning on one hand (there is meaning to life etc), while a nihilistic attitude on the other hand (evolution has no meaning and neither is evolution progress).
  

I read a recent NYT article by Robin Marantz Henig, that seems to nicely summarize the major arguments on why religion evolved and whether it is a spandrel or an adaptation. I would now like to quote from that article on one theory of how religion evolved as a spandrel:

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

These map very well to our Autistic/ scientific vs schizophrenic/religious/ artistic dichotomy. It is interesting to note that evolution itself decreed that we have capacities for agent detection, causal reasoning (though in a scientific sense we should have statistical or probabilistic Bayesian reasoning) and theory of mind capacities. Schizophrenic are the evolutionary cost for having these capacities. Later in the article it is also mentioned that making sense of death and life may be one region religion evolved. But first the importance of each of these abilities:

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind. It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word “theory” suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.

The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

The adaptive advantage of folkpsychology is obvious. According to Atran, our ancestors needed it to survive their harsh environment, since folkpsychology allowed them to “rapidly and economically” distinguish good guys from bad guys.

This is an interesting line of argument and later in the article one also find mention of group selection and co-operation being important for evolution of religiosity.

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped.

This bodes for a more fuller post detailing and chalking the universal religious/ spiritual grammar, similar to the exercise I did for Universal moral grammar. Wait a little for that post!! For now on to the religion is an anti-dote to death anxiety argument:(which covers out fourth difference between Autistic and schizophrenic centered on meaning (or lack of it)):

Fear of death is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts, immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: the notion of spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion. According to some adaptationists, this is part of religion’s role, to help humans deal with the grim certainty of death. Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short existence. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened.

Now for the adaptionist arguments:

Intriguing as the spandrel logic might be, there is another way to think about the evolution of religion: that religion evolved because it offered survival advantages to our distant ancestors.

So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves.

There is ample research that religious people are happier and live longer that atheists, so religion still has evolutionary advantages. It makes sense a being religious and believing in omnipotent god can contribute towards longevity in multiple ways: abstaining from alcohol/ tobacco and reducing death-anxiety being a few that come to mind.

Still, for all its controversial elements, the narrative Wilson devised about group selection and the evolution of religion is clear, perhaps a legacy of his novelist father. Begin, he says, with an imaginary flock of birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely to pass on their genes are the nonsentries. How, then, could the sentry gene survive for more than a generation or two?

To explain how a self-sacrificing gene can persist, Wilson looks to the level of the group. If there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. But the flock with sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system, so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. In other words, if the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.

There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.

There is another element here too, unique to humans because it depends on language. A person’s behavior is observed not only by those in his immediate surroundings but also by anyone who can hear about it. There might be clear costs to taking on a role analogous to the sentry bird — a person who stands up to authority, for instance, risks losing his job, going to jail or getting beaten by the police — but in humans, these local costs might be outweighed by long-distance benefits. If a particular selfless trait enhances a person’s reputation, spread through the written and spoken word, it might give him an advantage in many of life’s challenges, like finding a mate. One way that reputation is enhanced is by being ostentatiously religious.

This brings us to controversial group selection part and some recent research ahs suggested that group selction after all does work.

The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs,” Wilson wrote in “Darwin’s Cathedral.” It might seem disadvantageous, in terms of foraging for sustenance and safety, for someone to favor religious over rationalistic explanations that would point to where the food and danger are. But in some circumstances, he wrote, “a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.” For the individual, it might be more adaptive to have “highly sophisticated mental modules for acquiring factual knowledge and for building symbolic belief systems” than to have only one or the other, according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.”

Symbolic systems having group selection advantages fits with our symbolic/ realistic dichotomy. On this note I'll like to end our discussion and ask readers do they see a need for religion/ spirituality now, or do they still prefer the realistic, scientific method as the only true method, even at the cost of robbing us of meaning.

Tags: schizophrenia, autism, religion, altruism

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The factor structure of Religiosity and its neural substrates

A new article in PNAS by Grafman et al, argues that Religiosity can be broken down into three factors and the underlying machinery that these factors use are basic Theory Of Mind (ToM) circuitry, thus substantiating the claim that religion occurred as a byproduct of basic ToM related adaptations, although not ruling out that once established Religion may have provided adaptive advantage.

First a detour. I am more interested in this study as I had once claimed that Schizophrenics were more religious than Autistics and I have been maintaining that Religion is just one aspect of an underlying hyper-mentalizing to hyper-physicalism continuum on which these two spectrum disorders lie on opposite ends. The case for less ToM abilities in ASD seems to be fairly settled; its also becoming apparent that in Schizophrenia spectrum disorders you have excess of ToM abilities; This study by showing the ToM to Religion linkage, fills in the gaps and another puzzle piece falls in place.

On to the study. The authors first show that Religious Belief can be split into three factors. they use a novel (to me) technique of Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to tease out the factors associated with religious belief. I have not checked how MDS works, but I assume it is similar to Factor analysis and can give us reliable factor structure underlying the data. They build on previous research and discovered the following three factors:

1. God’s perceived level of involvement,
2. God’s perceived emotion, and
3. religious knowledge source. 

The first factor refers to endowing intentionality to superantural agents like God; the second factor refers to endowing emotions to God an dthe thierd factor refers to the source of the religious beliefs- whether it is doctrinal or derived from experience. Thus the trinity of intention, emotion and belief - alos the trinity involved in ToM tasks. The authors do a good job of describing the factors, so I'll let them do it.

Dimension 1 (D1) correlated negatively with God’s perceived level of involvement (–0.994), Dimension 2 (D2) correlated negatively with God’s perceived anger (–0.953) and positively with God’s perceived love (0.953), and Dimension 3 (D3) correlated positively with doctrinal (0.993) and negatively with experiential (–0.993) religious content. D1 represents a quantitative gradient of a single concept and we will be referring to it as ‘‘God’s perceived level of involvement.’’ D2 and D3 represent gradients of contrasting concepts; we will be referring to them as ‘‘God’s perceived emotion’’ (D2) and ‘‘religious knowledge source’’ (D3).

God’s perceived level of involvement (D1) organizes statements so that ‘‘God is removed from the world’’ or ‘‘Life has no higher purpose’’ have high positive coordinate values, while ‘‘God’s will guides my acts,’’ ‘‘God protects one’s life,’’ or ‘‘God is punishing’’ have high negative values. Generally speaking, on the positive end of the gradient lie statements implying the existence of uninvolved supernatural agents, and on the negative end lie statements implying involved supernatural agents.

God’s perceived emotion (D2) ranges from love to anger and organizes statements so that ‘‘God is forgiving’’ and ‘‘God protects all people’’ have high positive-coordinate values, while ‘‘God is wrathful’’ and ‘‘The afterlife will be punishing’’ have high negative values. Generally speaking, on the positive end of the gradient lie statements implying the existence of a loving (and potentially rewarding) supernatural agent, and on the negative end lie statements suggestive of wrathful (and potentially punishing) supernatural agent.

Religious knowledge (D3) ranges from doctrinal to experiential and organizes statements so that ‘‘God is ever-present’’ and ‘‘A source of creation exists’’ have high positive-coordinate values, while ‘‘Religion is directly involved in worldly affairs’’ and ‘‘Religion provides moral guiding’’ have high negative values. Generally speaking, on the positive end of the gradient lies theological content referring to abstract religious concepts, and on the negative end lies theological content with moral, social, or practical implications.

This breakup of religiosity into three factors is itself commendable, but then they go on to show, using fMRI data that these factors activate areas of brain associated with ToM abilities. I don't really understand all their fMRI data, but the results seem interesting. Here is what they conclude:

The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of religious belief. The 2 psychological processes previously implicated in religious belief, assessment of God’s level of involvement and God’s level of anger (11), as well as the hypothesized doctrinal to experiential continuum for religious nowledge, were identifiable dimensions in our MDS analysis. In addition, the neural correlates of these psychological dimensions were revealed to be well-known brain networks, mediating evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.

This study defines a psychological and neuroanatomical framework for the (predominately explicit) processing of religious belief. Within this framework, religious belief engages well-known brain networks performing abstract semantic processing, imagery, and intent-related and emotional ToM, processes known to occur at both implicit and explicit levels (36, 39, 50). Moreover, the process of adopting religious beliefs depends on cognitive-emotional interactions within the anterior insulae, particularly among religious subjects. The findings support the view that religiosity is integrated in cognitive processes and brain networks used in social cognition, rather than being sui generis (2–4). The evolution of these networks was likely driven by their primary roles in social cognition, language, and logical reasoning (1, 3, 4, 51). Religious cognition likely emerged as a unique combination of these several evolutionarily important cognitive processes (52). Measurable individual differences in these core competencies (ToM, imagination, and so forth) may predict specific patterns of brain activation in response to religious stimuli.

As always I am excited and would like to see some field work being carried out to determine religiosity in ASD and Schizophrenia spectrum groups and see if we get the same results (less religiosity in autism and more religiosity in schizophrenics) as predicted, based on their baseline ToM abilities.

PS: I was not able to use the DOI lookup fetaure of Research Blogging, but the DOI of article is  10.1073/pnas.0811717106



* Dimitrios Kapogiannis,, * Aron K. Barbey,, * Michael Su,, * Giovanna Zamboni,, * Frank Krueger,, * and Jordan Grafman (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief PNAS

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