- Disinhibition
of anti-cultural behavior: A means of adaptation
in early hominids? Kozintsev A, Butovskaya M
-
-
- God is the only being who, to
reign, does not need to exist. Charles
Baudelaire, Fusée.
1867.
-
- Can a physiological behavior explain a
cultural phenomenon? Here we suggest that the
neuropsychological mechanisms underlying
contagious yawning elucidate, at least in part,
the cognitive processes involved in religious
beliefs.
-
- About yawning
- Yawning is a stereotyped behavior, observed
in cold-blooded and warm-blooded vertebrates,
from reptiles with rudimentary "archaic" brains
to human primates, in water, air, and land
environments. Yawning appears to be an ancestral
vestige maintained throughout evolution with
little variation, bearing witness to its early
phylogenetic origins. Three different types of
yawning can be distinguished. "Universal
yawning", which is seen in all vertebrates, is
associated with daytime circadian rhythms, i.e.
sleep / arousal and hunger / satiety. "Emotional
yawning", which is only seen in mammals, has a
calming effect after stress. Ethologists call
this type of behavior a displacement activity.
Finally, "contagious yawning", which is observed
only in great apes, in humans, in dogs under
certain conditions and perhaps in social parrots
(budgerigar) and rats, is the ability to respond
to yawning in others [1,2].
-
- Many emotional responses (laughing, crying)
and many behaviors (vomiting, scratching and
hysterical behaviors such as the dancing manias
in medieval Europe) are considered contagious
but do not display the automation and constancy
of contagious yawning. It is nevertheless
possible that they share common neurobiological
mechanisms, all necessary for social life.
Religious practices entail emotional packages
and comprise postural mimicry and synchrony,
which appear to be the support mechanisms for
membership in a social group. What are the
neurobiological substrates required for these
practices? Are they also involved in contagious
yawning?
-
- Neurobiological mechanisms underlying
contagious yawning
- Experimental research indicates that
contagious yawning relies on the capacity known
as mental state attribution on one hand, and the
capacity to build knowledge of mental states in
oneself, on the other. These two conditions
involve a "theory of mind" (TOM) [3].
This ability to infer mental states and emotions
in others represents an evolved psychological
capacity most highly developed in humans and, up
to a point, in non-human primates. In addition,
humans can also empathize with others, that is,
share their feelings and emotions in the absence
of any direct emotional stimulation to
themselves. Innate emotional and motivational
processes are found to exert unconscious and
automatic influences on social judgments and
behavior. Facial expressions are the efferent
part of a biologically anchored system of basic
affects; they are also part of a preprogrammed
or prewired form of communicative competence.
This system enables the receiver to
unconsciously, automatically imitate the
sender's bodily state and facial expression
[4]. Contagious yawning, the onset of a
yawn triggered by seeing, hearing, reading, or
thinking about another person yawning, occurs as
a consequence of the ability to infer or
empathize with what others want, know, or intend
to do, requiring the neurological substrate
responsible for self-awareness and empathic
modeling, by which a corresponding response is
produced in oneself. Self-awareness, recognizing
that I have a mental state (I believe x to be
true) equates to first-order intentionality.
Ascribing mental states to others (I believe
that you believe x to be true) is a form of
second-order intentionality. This is the common
level of analysis noted above. Yet
intentionality can continue to still deeper
levels, as in third-order intentionality (I
believe that you believe that I believe x to be
true) and fourth-order intentionality (I believe
that you believe that I believe that you believe
x to be true). While chimpanzees "only just
aspire" to second-order intentionality, humans
engage in deeper and deeper levels of mind, not
essential for yawning's contagiousness
[5]. Functional imaging suggests that
activation of the underlying network integrating
these processes is also responsible for decoding
cognitive empathy. As a neocortical activity
(inferior-frontal cortex, superior temporal
sulcus, ventral premotor cortex, right parietal
cortex, posterior cingulate, anterior insula,
and amygdala), contagious yawning is a sign of
involuntary empathy. Thus, we see that, through
evolution, a behavior can be recycled for
different purposes according to the increasing
complexity of the central nervous system,
correlated with the richness of social
interactions [6].
-
- One of the most basic and powerful
activities of the brain involves the ability to
quickly detect other agents in the environment.
Agents are not to be confused with objects, and
the capacity to quickly and accurately
distinguish between objects and agents in the
environment is clearly crucial to survival. The
mental mechanism responsible for recognizing
agents is called the Agency Detection Device
(ADD). In addition to instantaneously
identifying the people and creatures that cross
our paths, we are also prone to make up agents
based on minimal input from any of our senses.
ADD's effectiveness and speed are due to the
application of ready inferences and expectations
about what agents are like. A complete picture
of the nature and significance of agents is the
result of ADD working together with TOM. As ADD
examines the objects we encounter, those
displaying characteristics of agents activate
TOM, which in turn initiates a rich array of
inferences. ADD and TOM function rapidly,
effortlessly, automatically, and mostly
non-consciously, competing to trigger contagious
yawning. Thus, the human brain is endowed with
an array of tools for organizing and
interpreting the world [7,8].
-
- Brief review of the neuropsychology of
religious beliefs
- The religious meaning of yawning, although
interesting, is not within our scope here.
Rather, our focus is on how the human species,
so enamored with its own logical and critical
facilities, has been able to hold strong
religious beliefs. The overwhelming majority of
believers today are the cultural descendants of
a small group of prosocial religions that
emerged and spread worldwide. These religions
elicit deep devotion and extravagant rituals,
often directed at Big Gods - powerful, morally
concerned deities who are believed to monitor
human behavior. These gods are believed to
deliver rewards and punishments according to how
well people meet the particular, often local,
behavioral standards, including engaging in
costly actions that benefit others. Partly out
of fear of supernatural punishment, people will
comply with norms that they believe to be
monitored by agents. Religious concepts activate
various functionally distinct mental systems,
present also in non-religious contexts, and
"tweak" the usual inferences of these systems.
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per
se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the
complex evolutionary landscape that sets the
cognitive, emotional and material conditions for
ordinary human interactions, recruiting the
brain's capacity for metarepresentation, which
is the forming of representations of
representations. Core religious beliefs
minimally violate ordinary notions about how the
world is, with all of its inescapable problems,
thus enabling people to imagine minimally
impossible supernatural worlds that solve
existential problems, including death and
deception [9,10].
-
- Gods and supernatural beings, the concepts
around which religion form, are represented and
processed by the human mind as social agents, as
members of the human social network, because the
kinds of beings that gods are said to be, are
only intelligible in relation to the natural
ontological category of "person". Neuroimaging
studies find that thinking about or praying to
God activates brain networks known to be
implicated in mentalizing. Mentalizing is
associated with a tendency to personify God, and
the same mentalizing biases that are typically
found when reasoning about other peoples' minds
are also found when inferences are made about
God's mind. This effect of cognitive constraint
dramatically shapes the way people intuitively
think about gods. Supernatural beings not only
feature many of the ordinary properties of
person-like agents but, important to the present
context, are also naturally represented as
agents with whom we can interact
[11,12].
- Cognitive biases make humans receptive to
religious ideas, but do not themselves generate
them. This means that an explanation for the
universality of religion has to be found
elsewhere. We possess a suite of sophisticated
cognitive adaptations for social life, which
make accessible certain concepts that are
associated with religion, but they require
further cultural support. Transcultural
neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that
one's cultural background can influence the
neural activity that underlies both high- and
low-level cognitive functions
[13,14].
-
- Yawning and religious beliefs: the
intriguing crossroads between neuropsychology
and neurotheology
- We process God concepts using the suite of
mental mechanisms involved in social
intelligence. Through the activity of ADD and
TOM, we automatically evaluate the import,
intentions, and utility of all intentional
agents, and especially other humans. The fact
that God beliefs engage this automatic,
low-level cognitive support is one key to
explain why gods are humanlike. In this way,
religious beliefs activate the same neural and
cognitive systems that guide social interaction
with other humans. Gods are seen by some as
plausibly real because thoughts about them
activate TOM systems, ADD, contagion-avoidance
and social exchange. As stated above, ADD and
TOM systems are the underlying neural mechanisms
that the brain relies on to trigger contagious
yawning. Because God concepts capitalize on
these and other powerful cognitive systems in
the human mind, they have proven extremely
resilient.
-
- Without
the contagiousness of yawning, the belief in God
would be impossible.
-
- We are not claiming the discovery of a
"God-spot" in the brain, as Vilayanur S.
Ramachandran famously did in 1998, after
examining patients with temporal epilepsy who
reported profound religious feelings during and
after seizures [15]. Our syllogism is
admittedly simple and lacking in scientific
evidence, but our hope is that it will stimulate
further scientific studies on yawning, a poor
relative of the more visible research
areas.
-
- References
-
- 1°) Walusinski O. The Mystery of
Yawning in Physiology and Disease. Basel,
Karger. 2010.
-
- 2°) Provine R. Curious Behavior:
Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.
Cambridge, USA, The Belknap Press. 2012.
-
- 3°) Siegal M, Varley R. Neural systems
involved in "theory of mind". Nat Rev Neurosci.
2002;3(6):463-71.
-
- 4°) Preston SD, Bechara A, Damasio H,
Grabowski TJ, Stansfield RB, Mehta S, Damasio
AR. The neural substrates of cognitive empathy.
Soc Neurosci. 2007;2(3-4):254-75.
-
- 5°) Platek SM, Critton SR, Myers TE,
Gallup GG. Contagious yawning: the role of
self-awareness and mental state attribution.
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 2003;17(2):223-7.
-
- 6°) Nahab FB. Exploring yawning with
neuroimaging. Front Neurol Neurosci.
2010;28:128-33.
-
- 7°) Adolphs R. The social brain: neural
basis of social knowledge. Annu Rev Psychol.
2009;60:693-716.
-
- 8°) Raz A, Buhle J. Typologies of
attentional networks. Nat Rev Neurosci.
2006;7(5):367-79.
-
- 9°) Berring J. The Belief Instinct: The
Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of
Life. New York, WW Norton & Co. 2012.
-
- 10°) Casebeer WD. Moral cognition and
its neural constituents. Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 2003;4:840-847.
-
- 11°) Boyer P. Religious thought and
behaviour as by-products of brain function.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences;
2003;7:119-124.
-
- 12°) Barrett JL. Exploring the natural
foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive
Science. 2000;1(4):29-34.
-
- 13°) Krueger F, Grafman J. The Neural
Basis of Human Belief Systems. Hove, Psychology
Press. 2013.
-
- 14°) Tremlin T. Minds and Gods, The
Cognitive Foundations of Religion. New York,
Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
- 15°) Ramachandran VS, Hirstein W, Armel
KC, Tecoma E, Iragui V. The neural basis of
religious experience. Society for Neuroscience.
Abstracts. 1998;23:519-21.
-
-
|
