http://www.naturallygrown.org/farms/list/227/GA http://www.georgiaorganics.org/home.aspx From...http://www.oeffa.org/ The Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association (OEFFA) was formed in 1979 and is a membership-based, grassroots organization, dedicated to promoting and supporting sustainable, ecological, and healthful food systems. OEFFA's membership includes farmers, consumers, gardeners, chefs, teachers, researchers, retailers, and students. Together, we are working to recreate a regionally-scaled farming, processing, and distribution system that moves food from farm to local fork. listen to interview... Book on Google Books from... http://www.interfaithradio.org/ Inside the Believing Brain When Michael Shermer hears about a new medical cure, fad or folk legend, he’s probably going to ask a few questions. He’s the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, which he created in 1992 to help people think more critically about pseudoscience and superstitions – everything from Holocaust denial to belief in Bigfoot. Shermer says we’re hardwired to form beliefs, even when those beliefs don’t make much sense. Michael Shermer, author of "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths" From... http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-believing-brain/ Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. Dr. Shermer then bores deeper into the brain, right down to the neurophysiology of belief system construction at the single neuron level, and then reconstructs from the bottom up how brains form beliefs. Then we shall examine how belief systems operate with regard to belief in religion, the afterlife, God, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, politics, economics, and ideologies of all stripes, and then consider how a host of cognitive processes convince us that our beliefs are truths. Physicist F. David Peat in his article, Chaos: The Geometrization Of Thought, writes on the subject of Chaos Theory: "It suggests that when we are forced to give up control over our lives we may be giving ourselves to a deeper form of wisdom and guiding principle. It implies that within the heart of chaos lie new forms of subtle order."
from... http://www.interfaithradio.org/
Inside the Believing Brain When Michael Shermer hears about a new medical cure, fad or folk legend, he’s probably going to ask a few questions. He’s the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, which he created in 1992 to help people think more critically about pseudoscience and superstitions – everything from Holocaust denial to belief in Bigfoot. Shermer says we’re hardwired to form beliefs, even when those beliefs don’t make much sense. Michael Shermer, author of "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths" From... http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-believing-brain/ Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. Dr. Shermer then bores deeper into the brain, right down to the neurophysiology of belief system construction at the single neuron level, and then reconstructs from the bottom up how brains form beliefs. Then we shall examine how belief systems operate with regard to belief in religion, the afterlife, God, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, politics, economics, and ideologies of all stripes, and then consider how a host of cognitive processes convince us that our beliefs are truths.
Physicist F. David Peat in his article, Chaos: The Geometrization Of Thought, writes on the subject of Chaos Theory: "It suggests that when we are forced to give up control over our lives we may be giving ourselves to a deeper form of wisdom and guiding principle. It implies that within the heart of chaos lie new forms of subtle order."
Scientific American
Image: Illustration by Richard Mia
Was President Barack Obama born in Hawaii? I find the question so absurd, not to mention possibly racist in its motivation, that when I am confronted with “birthers” who believe otherwise, I find it difficult to even focus on their arguments about the difference between a birth certificate and a certificate of live birth. The reason is because once I formed an opinion on the subject, it became a belief, subject to a host of cognitive biases to ensure its verisimilitude. Am I being irrational? Possibly. In fact, this is how most belief systems work for most of us most of the time.
We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large. After forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational explanations. Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow. In my new book The Believing Brain (Holt, 2011), I call this process, wherein our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it, belief-dependent realism. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends on the beliefs we hold at any given time.
I patterned belief-dependent realism after model-dependent realism, presented by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2011). There they argue that because no one model is adequate to explain reality, “one cannot be said to be more real than the other.” When these models are coupled to theories, they form entire worldviews.
Once we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive biases that distort our percepts to fit belief concepts. Among them are:
Anchoring Bias. Relying too heavily on one reference anchor or piece of information when making decisions.
Authority Bias. Valuing the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about.
Belief Bias. Evaluating the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion.
Confirmation Bias. Seeking and finding confirming evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignoring or reinterpreting disconfirming evidence.
On top of all these biases, there is the in-group bias, in which we place more value on the beliefs of those whom we perceive to be fellow members of our group and less on the beliefs of those from different groups. This is a result of our evolved tribal brains leading us not only to place such value judgment on beliefs but also to demonize and dismiss them as nonsense or evil, or both.
Belief-dependent realism is driven even deeper by a meta-bias called the bias blind spot, or the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people but to be blind to their influence on our own beliefs. Even scientists are not immune, subject to experimenter-expectation bias, or the tendency for observers to notice, select and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment and to ignore, discard or disbelieve data that do not.
This dependency on belief and its host of psychological biases is why, in science, we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the conditions during data collection. Collaboration with colleagues is vital. Results are vetted at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research is replicated in other laboratories. Disconfirming evidence and contradictory interpretations of data are included in the analysis. If you don’t seek data and arguments against your theory, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum. This is why skepticism is a sine qua non of science, the only escape we have from the belief-dependent realism trap created by our believing brains.
The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions
The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions
http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/relexp/reviews/review_daquili_newberg02.htm
Eugene d’Aquili; Andrew B. Newberg
“The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away”
Review by Susan Scully Troy, 2008
d’Aquili, Eugene G.; Newberg, Andrew B. “The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away.” Zygon 33 (June 1998): 187-201.
“The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away” by Eugene G. d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg, is a concise and clear explanation of the authors’ findings that religious experience is part of normal brain function and results from specific neural activity which they identify. The authors answer the question posited in the article’s title, “Why Won’t God Go Away?” The answer is found in the activity of the human brain and therefore “God” continues to appear in human history no matter what social/ historical conditions prevail. Their conclusion as stated in this article is that “essential elements of religion are hard wired in the brain (198).”
D’Aquili and Newberg are prominent researchers in the area of religious experience and neuropsychology/neurophysiology. At the time this article was published in 1998 D’Aquili was a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Andrew Newburg was a Fellow in the Division of Nuclear Medicine and an Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at the same hospital. Both were Directors of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Meditation. As demonstrated in this article, the authors’ scientific study leads them to claim that sources of religious experience can be discovered through a thorough understanding of brain function, and the specifics of neurophysiology and neuropsychology are given.
They are some among those working in this field, like d’Aquili and Newberg, that see religious experience as thoroughly understood through neurobiology. They do not examine the larger social and psychological context of religious experience; discuss religion as always embedded in a cultural matrix. The reader of this article is left wondering about these alternative contexts. The authors are quite single minded in their approach. Their focus is the brain to the exclusion of all else. “We are proposing that gods, powers, spirits, or in general what we have come to call personalized power sources, or any other causative construct, is automatically generated by the causal operator [part of neural function] (191).” But the reader who is concerned about a broader understanding of religious experience, and the “truth” of these experiences or of their own religious experiences, is not abandoned by the authors.
After a lengthy explanation of the neurophysiology of the brain and its functioning, the issue of the “reality” of religious experience in light of this scientific knowledge is dealt with very satisfactorily. Stating that “baseline reality (e.g., chairs, tables, love, hate), can also be reduced to neural blips and fluxes of brain chemistry,” the authors’ postulate that those whose religious experience is “the most extreme hyper lucid unitary state, that of AUB [Absolute Unitary Being]” consider these experiences as “more real (199).” The authors suggest, therefore, that we can have the same surety in the “reality” of religious and spiritual experience as we have in the “baseline reality” of concrete objects and emotional experience in our world and in our daily lives.
D’Aquili and Newberg divide this article into three parts; 1) Religion as a Problem, 2) Religion as Control of the Environment, 3) Religion as Self-Transcendence. They begin with a look backwards to the Enlightenment of the 18th century when it was felt “religion as a form of profound ignorance would simply vanish with higher education (187.)” This obviously didn’t happen, and in the 20th century the trend is in the opposite direction towards greater degrees of religiosity and spirituality. They begin by providing a very welcome, short, historical retrospective on the status of religion and religious phenomenology since the Enlightenment.
Having asked the question “Why God Won’t Go Away?” d’Aquili and Newberg begin with a discussion of neurophysiology and brain function to answer the question. They propose that there are “two classes of neurophsychological mechanisms that underlie the development of religious experience and behavior (190.)” What follows in this article is a concise, but accessible, explanation of the neurobiology that supports their proposal. These two mechanisms are the “causal operator” and “holistic operator.” The first neural mechanism is the “causal operator” that, to put it very simply, responds to the experience of disunity and works to create order from chaos, wholeness from disunity. The development of “supersensible forces and powers to control the environment (190)” is the reason we continue to find “God” or other forces that control our human environment.
The second neural mechanism, the “holistic operator,” produces distinct “mystical” phenomena or “altered states of consciousness” where a transcendent “other” is perceived as ultimate. This leads the authors into a discussion of the neurophysiology of the sympathetic and parasympathetic brain systems and their energy-expanding and energy-conserving neural properties. The authors’ conclude that the stimulation of the holistic operator always results in experiences that are described as “religious or spiritual in varying degrees (195.)” The most important mystical state achieved via the functioning of the holistic operator is described as Absolute Unitary Being, or AUB. Such experiences are often described as perfect union with “God” or an ultimate transcendent “other.” According to D’Aquili and Newberg all these experiences involve self-transcendence and they see this as the “second manifestation of religion.” The two manifestation of religion are 1) control of the environment and 2) mystical manifestations.
The discussion of brain function, of brain physiology and of the neurotransmitters is scientifically rich. Its full import is probably only available to those with a background in neurobiology. However, it is quite clear that the authors believe that the weight of modern neurological science supports their thesis that the human brain is the source of religious experience. Their findings are obviously part of a burgeoning amount of scholarship in the area of scientific study of religious experience and others in the field will have to evaluate their science and the conclusions that they make.
Accessible to all readers is the authors’ conclusion that the “truth” of religious and spiritual experience is as cognitively real and foundational to human life as is the everyday reality of our objective world. According to d’Aquili and Newberg, the constancy of religion and religious or spiritual experience in human history past, present and future is due to the simple and outrageously complex fact that the phenomena of religion (control of environment, self-transcendence) is neurologically based, and part of human cognition at its most highly developed level.