Dear Moderators,
Please find an article on Human religiosity and the role of dopaminergic
systems in brain. Evolutionarily dopaminergic systems drove us for
religiosity as well as for scientific reasoning (antagonistic to each
other however), but if these are not properly regulated one can end up in
bizzare situation such as hyper-religiosity, supersitious behaviour, or
hallucinations, etc. Religious behaviour is largely a product of the
extrapersonal brain systems that predominate in the ventromedial cortex
and rely heavily on dopaminergic transmission.
With Regards
Sincerely Yours
Asim Duttaroy
=================================
Professor Asim K. Duttaroy
Faculty of Medicine
University of Oslo
POB 1046 Blindern
N-0316 Oslo
Norway
Tel: +47 22 85 15 47
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Email: a.k.duttaroy@medisin.uio.no
Website:University
www.nutrition.uio.no/english/res/research/dutta_roy.html
Personal website: www.asimduttaroy.com
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Evolution of Human Religion and the Dopaminergic systems of the Brain
Professor Asim K. Duttaroy
Faculty of Medicine,
University of Oslo, Norway
Tagore and Einstein met several times. Once their discussion turned to the relationship between consciousness and human perception of beauty or truth. When Tagore denied that truth or beauty was independent of the human consciousness, Einstein asked Tagore "If there would be no human beings anymore, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful?" When Tagore replied "No", Einstein answered "I agree with regard to this conception of beauty but not with respect to truth." Einstein's point was that scientific truth must be conceived as a truth independent of reality. When Tagore claimed," if there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings". Einstein replied triumphantly, "then I am more religious than you are." Tagore wrote a poem " Ami" (I) on his views on the relationship between perception of beauty and human consciousness.
""With the colour of my own consciousness
The emerald became green, the ruby became red.
I opened my eyes at the sky,
And there was light
In the east, in the west.
I looked at the rose and said,`Beautiful!'
Beautiful it became.
…………………………….
The philosopher meditates and chants with every breath--
`No, no, no!
Not emeralds, not rubies, not light, not roses, not you, not I'.
On the other hand, the Infinite Being Himself has pursued His creation
Within the limits of human mind,
And that is called `I'. ….."
--(Translation of few parts of Tagore's poem "Ami")
In fact religion is one of five major behavioural phenomena that evolved with modern humans and are found in all human cultures—the others being language, advanced tool-making, music, and art. Emerging data suggesting that religious behaviour has a biological basis. The evolutionary increase in the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) in human brain is linked to the evolution of religion. The emerging field of cognitive neuroscience now seeks to break new ground in the dialogue between science and religion. However, we need to reconcile different aspects of our brain in our understanding of the world. Are humans genetically hard-wired for critical thinking and religious spirituality, and what are the implications for the compatibility of science and faith in human experience. A recent evolutionary theory proposed that the driving force behind the attainment of the modern human intellect was an expansion of dopaminergic brain systems. The expansion began early in primate evolution and produced a more homogenous distribution of DA throughout the brain, particularly in its upper layers where relatively more intracortical circuitry is housed. The continued expansion of DA systems in humans is the large increase of the DA-rich neostriatum of humans relative to chimpanzees, who spend the majority of their day in peripersonal activities. The brain is malleable, and consequently brain signaling system changes in response to environmental pressures. In an uncertain environment one increases DA activity and responds to the challenging circumstances. This could explain why people under stressful circumstances, such as inmates in prison or concentration camps, for example, or soldiers in the front lines of battle-often turn to religion in a conversion.
A precursor to the final stages of human brain evolution about 100,000 years ago appears to have been an increase in the consumption of shellfish and other marine fauna which are rich in n-3 (omega-3) essential fatty acids and iodine that stimulate DA activity, overall brain development, and human intellectual achievement. In contrast to the DA expansion, other key neurotransmitter systems such as glutamate and acetylcholine have remained the same or even decreased in relative terms during human evolution. The final expansion of DA is suggested to prompt the rise in abstract reasoning, human creativity in the form of art and music, and religious behaviour. The final DA expansion may have also led to the onset of clinical disorders in which DA is overactive, such as schizophrenia.among others, has argued that the same processes that led to schizophrenia must have led to advances in human reasoning and religiosity, because of the higher incidence of creativity and religiosity in first-degree relative of schizophrenics. It might seem strange that "genius and madness" should be so closely linked, especially since the intellectual quotient of schizophrenics is generally below normal. It might also seem strange that two ostensibly antagonistic processes—religious behavior and abstract (scientific) reasoning—may have co-evolved. However, both phenomena are concerned with abstract concepts and comprehensive frameworks with which to comprehend spatio-temporal events in the external environment. A common element in these two mental phenomena is suggested by an experiment involving split-brain patients.
The same dopaminergic mechanisms that stimulate exploratory locomotion and vertical climbing in rodents and oculomotor exploratory behavior in lower primates facilitate the search for abstract patterns and meaning in humans in a space that is internally generated but distally oriented (off-line). The off-line capability of human thought has provided us with enormous powers of abstract reasoning, and creativity, but the failure to anchor these thought processes with feedback from the external world can lead to bizarre consequences. When sensory or motor feedback from the posterior cortex is diminished or eliminated—due to stress (which depletes serotonin and in which DA activity is excessive), drugs, sensory deprivation, or sleep—the activity of medial DA systems is unleashed from its external anchor, which can lead to incorrect attributions of self-initiated or internally generated activity (hallucinations) and /or empirically unsubstantiated associations of external events (superstitions). 70% of schizophrenics claimed to have had a religious experience, with those schizophrenics with additional EEG abnormalities reporting the highest percentage of religious delusions. The greater religiosity–schizotypy link in males as opposed to females could be caused by a greater DA activation in males, given that other disorders associated with DA overactivation show a male predominance. On the other hand, women tend to have more paranormal experiences overall. DA provides an emphasis on the astral and cosmological events and predictions that are associated with religion. But it is involved not just in thinking about these, but in somehow controlling them. By controlling events, we control anxiety, adding that belief in an after-life is one type of dopaminergic tendency, leading to a sense that we can control something even if it's beyond our death. Thus, DA regulates the brain's perception of control along a spectrum ranging from an internal locus that assumes a person can control events to an external locus that assumes a person has no control.
Most researchers have focused on the involvement of DA, acetylicholine, and serotonin (5-HT), as well as glutamate in hallucinations. Drugs that stimulate DA, such as amphetamine and l-DOPA, are hallucinogenic whereas drugs that reduce DA transmission (such as haloperidol) tend to diminish or eliminate hallucinations. Increased DA transmission is a major feature of the brain during hypoxia, and hypoxia at birth is one of several early-developmental risk factors for schizophrenia in which DA levels are elevated. Phencyclidine and ketamine, two drugs that can lead to out-of-body and mystical experiences bind with opioid, glutamatergic, D2 dopaminergic and other receptors with the glutamatergic and other non-DA actions ultimately expressed via DA pathways. Neuropharmacological studies generally point to dopaminergic activation as the leading neurochemical feature associated with religious activity. The ventral dopaminergic pathways involved in religious behavior most closely align with the action-extrapersonal system in the model of 3-D perceptual–motor interactions. Hyper-religiosity is a major feature of mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, temporal-lobe epilepsy and related disorders, in which the ventromedial dopaminergic systems are highly activated and exaggerated attentional or goal-directed behavior toward extrapersonal space occurs. Religious behaviour—and especially those experiences that have occurred and continue to occur—are largely a product of the extrapersonal brain systems that predominate in the ventromedial cortex and rely heavily on dopaminergic transmission. By contrast, systems dealing more with body-oriented space in parietal and other dorsal brain areas and predominantly utilizing serotonergic and noradrenergic circuits appear to be less activated during religious behavior. Although the neuropsychology of religion has become a topic of greater interest recently, religion is arguably still under-researched as a brain phenomenon relative to language, visual perception, music, and even mathematics. Nevertheless, religious beliefs, experiences and practices can be readily explored by means of attention and bisection paradigms, probabilistic tasks, trait scales such as religiosity, magical ideation, and schizotypy, animal models (superstitious behaviour), and numerous neuroscientific measurement techniques. I am sure future research will further reveal the religious behaviour in different human populations.
References:
Crawford, M. (1996) Nutrition and Evolution, London, UK
David L. Gosling: Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein met Tagore, Publisher Routledge, UK , 2007
Devinsky O, Lai G. Spirituality and religion in epilepsy. Epilepsy Behav. 2008;12(4):636-43.
Doerr O, Velásquez O. The encounter with God in myth and madness. Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2007 Jul 3;2:12
Duttaroy, AK Transport mechanisms for long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in the human placenta. Am. J. Clin Nutr. 2000, 71:315S-22S
Grace AA, Floresco SB, Goto Y, Lodge DJ. Regulation of firing of dopaminergic neurons and control of goal-directed behaviors. Trends Neurosci. 2007;30(5):220-7.
Ng F. The interface between religion and psychosis. Austra Psychiatry 2007 15(1):62-6
Ogata A, Miyakawa T. Religious experiences in epileptic patients with a focus on ictus-related episodes . Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 1998;52(3):321-5
Previc, FH, The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. Conscious Cogn. 2006 15(3):500-39.
Saver JL, Rabin J. The neural substrates of religious experience. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 1997;9(3):498-510
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