Brain Tricks

What can we possibly  learn from such a divided time in which we find ourselves living in?   Liberal/Conservative, Black/White, Democrat/Republican   Evangelical/Atheist

How sensational and inexplicable, that so many of our species reacts to a label, and once hearing it, closes their eyes and shuts their ears to opinions other than their own.

This month, every single person who has access to a TV or the internet, saw a white police officer kneel on the neck of a hand-cuffed black citizen for almost 9 minutes while he said that he could not breathe.  Then he heard him cry for his "mama" before his last breath was taken.  No CPR was administered and no ambulance called. 

Before this, I had only seen someone killed in the movies.  Never while someone was filming it in real time.  It demands an objective answer as to why a police officer was able to commit this atrocity while feeling that it was what he needed to do.  

 

The answer lies in a strange and unexpected place.   It lies in our grey matter.   It lies in the organ of the body we call the brain.  The fundamental problem lies in how the brain perceives and understands reality. It is an unfortunate fact of nature, that our feelings are located in a different area of our brain than our intellect, and these areas seemingly do not connect.

How can we distinguish illusion from what is real?   Info Link

     Our brain has quite a ways to go before it is in perfect rational order.  Depression and other mental illnesses are common.   Irrational fears can plague us.   We confuse sexual attraction, lust and love.  Sensory perception can be felt in the absence of outside stimulus.

    The relatively new science of ethology (the study of animal behavior), cultural anthropology and neuroscience are shedding new light on the roots of spirituality.  

Research indicates that spirituality stems from basic emotional needs that are met by and encourage strong social connections. These strong social connections enabled us to band together in family and tribal units that facilitated survival in a challenging and dangerous world.  These ancient inborn emotional needs leave us vulnerable to the lure of supernatural belief systems.  The near universal embrace of theology and sacred texts is an outgrowth of how human beings are wired for social survival.

By Enrique Lescure

George Vaillant, a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Med School writes, "For the last million years, survival by our ancestors in the African savanna would have been impossible without the natural selection for prosocial emotions.  On those sparsely wooded plains evolved our hairless ancestors. They lived in a land richly endowed with carnivores. Our ancestors could not run like the gazelle, burrow like the rabbit, climb trees like the gibbon, fly away like the flamingo, or fight back like the elephant. If they did not band together, they perished. They did not have fur for their young to cling to; instead, the mother had to cling to her young. In order to survive humans had to subordinate both hunger and sex for the development of an inborn altruistic social organization. From such social bonding came lasting attachment and the survival of their young.

 

Goosebumps Explained by Jennifer Viegas

That many human beings on our planet are able to feel a strong emotion when they kneel and pray, can also be explained scientifically, kind of like goosebumps.    Such positive emotions that define spirituality such as awe, love, gratitude, joy, hope, trust, forgiveness, and love,  can be looked at objectively. 

 
Can we admit that believing a wafer can turn into flesh or that Lot's wife in the Bible actually turned to salt, is not rational thinking?  Genital mutilation only exists because of religious superstition.  The belief that no matter how you behave in this life, you will be "saved" if you just believe, is a classic example of this magical thinking that we are susceptible to.

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20 best Hitchen quotes

To accept that our brains, as primates,  are so defined and framed that  atrocities occur not because we seek evil, but because the human species is biologically, only partly rational.  Some decisions that are emotional instead of rational, have such tragic consequences.  

 As nuclear proliferation combines with countries where religious extremism and  government are so inextricably connected, the future of our planet depends on us choosing rationality, over faith and emotions.