One of my favorite sentences :

“The same exact bioloy may make somebody a schizophrenia in a milder form, will have them being very interested in meta-magical issues, and in the mildest form allows you to have a fantasy while standing on line in the supermarket. It’s the same biology on the same continuum, and somewhere in there, it stops being them and their diseases and becomes us and who we are.”

Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity

This is the ‘final lecture’ that he mentioned he decided not to record/post on the official Stanford version of this course. You can see an old version in Youtube .

Schizotypal personality

From the gene lectures we learned that : there is no bad gene, but only gene in a bad gene-environment interaction.

Recall the depression class and the schizophrenia lectures. Schizophrenia has strong genetic factor, while at the end of last lecture, Prof said we didn’t come up with a good trait of it. While a milder version of schizophrenia may help.

There is an experiment that interview thousands of families of schizophrenia in Danmark. The biological family members have a milder genetic version, now called schizotypal personality.

Expressions :

  • Loose associations, Social withdraw, in some degree (not to schizophrenia level).
  • Meta-magical thinking, kind of believe in strange things, science fiction, UFOs, etc. And this is someone who if they have a religious structure of belief, has an extermely concrete level of interpretation.

We could relate these concrete image to “the seven days” that god creates the world, snacks with apples, people alive that are once dead, etc.

Religion

Shamansim. There are lectures in 1930s, 40s (anthorpologist, Paul Raiden) “half crazy”, Shamans, witch doctors, etc. This was recongized as a very controlled very socially contextual version of meta-magical schizotypalism. These are the people who do things at the right time. And studies show in most cultures, we always need some meta-magical people around, and they have high social status. Devereaux referred to primitive religion as being organized schizophrenia, 1940s. But we are all equally irrational. It leads to ritualism.

And we all fall into obsessive little rituals during times of anxiety. We also have rituals intrusive thoughts that just invade our heads at times where with on obvious purpose.

OCD, an anxiety disorder. While there are tremendous advantages of a milder version of OCD.

The leaders of religion, have the best vivid images, and are best at doing the rituals. e.g. Brahmin, in Hinduism. numerology.

They are not to make the anxiety goes away, it’s to share it in communities. But why we need these rituals, why we need a community to share.

People can make a living by doing rituals. (Science fiction : “Xenocide” by Orson Scott Card, a group of people doing nothing other than carrying out rituals, and other people work hard to feed them) Historical example: 16th century Augustinian monk in Germany named Ludar, Martin Luther.

Experiment with pigeons, with random reward, generate a “superstitious belief”. Allow you to see casual link, that doesn’t exist.

Temporal lobe