Frosty Morning (25 October)

Workout notes 3.5 mile walk (13:37, 13:12 (1-1), 11:58, 7:04), yoga, 7 miles home (7:07 to 8:45). My legs are slightly sore from all of the lunging.

A couple of observations:

• As I age, not only does it take longer to recover from an injury, but it takes longer to retrain to achieve the pre-injury level of sports fitness (or even 95-98% of pre-injury levels
• Nevertheless, I should be grateful that I can “do it at all”; one of my running friends has had inoperable pancreatic cancer for 10 months, yet continues to work out almost every day!

Science/Religion: There is a study in Scientific American where the brains of religious people and non-religious people were scanned to see what the brain looked like during a religious experience and to see if such experiences could be induced by artificial means.

Scientific American published an article on the the physiological cause (or effect) of religious feelings in those who claim to feel it. They studied nuns, but it could just as easily apply to hardcore pastafarians. (In our own research we’ve found that eating pasta causes a much larger surge in blood sugar than non-FSM related foods such as chicken. It even works on non-pastafarians, proving that He loves all, even those who do not yet Believe.)

I think this sort of scientific research of religious phenomena is important, and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

An excerpt of the SciAm article:

Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith. [...]

Using fMRI and other tools of modern neuroscience, researchers are attempting to pin down what happens in the brain when people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or during spontaneous utterances inspired by religious fervor.

The key, Ramachandran speculates, may be the limbic system, which comprises interior regions of the brain that govern emotion and emotional memory, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. By strengthening the connection between the temporal lobe and these emotional centers, epileptic electrical activity may spark religious feeling.

To seal the case for the temporal lobe’s involvement, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario sought to artificially re-create religious feelings by electrically stimulating that large subdivision of the brain. So Persinger created the “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface.

n a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence—a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is—or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.

Persinger thus argues that religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain. He opines that the religious bents of even the most exalted figures—for instance, Saint Paul, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha—stem from such neural quirks. The popular notion that such experiences are good, argues Persinger in his book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (Praeger Publishers, 1987), is an outgrowth of psychological conditioning in which religious rituals are paired with enjoyable experiences. Praying before a meal, for example, links prayer with the pleasures of eating. God, he claims, is nothing more mystical than that.

Although a 2005 attempt by Swedish scientists to replicate Persinger’s God helmet findings failed, researchers are not yet discounting the temporal lobe’s role in some types of religious experience. After all, not all such experiences are the same. Some arise from following a specific religious tradition, such as the calm Catholics feel when saying the rosary. Others bring a person into a perception of contact with the divine. Yet a third category might be mystical states that reveal fundamental truths opaque to normal consciousness. Thus, it is possible that different religious feelings arise from distinct locations in the brain. Individual differences might also exist. In some people, the neural seat of religious feeling may lie in the temporal lobe, whereas in others it could reside elsewhere.[...]

The whole article in Scientific American.

Note: a “Pastafarian” is someone who believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Midweek Rambles (24 October 2007)

Workout notes 2000 yard swim, yoga. I found that my legs are actually getting a bit sore from all of the lunges and Warrior I poses.

What Warrior I is supposed to look like. No, I don’t look nearly that good!

The swimming is going ok; it is getting a bit better.

Social: this post has satellite images of the California wildfires. It is incredible.

Political: Some examples of double standards in the so-called liberal media. Talking about a candidate’s spouse/marriage(s) is outrageous, unless you are talking about the Clintons.

Summary: Tucker Carlson said he was “outraged” by a statement from Rep. Charlie Rangel critical of Rudy Giuliani’s “personal life,” adding, “I don’t think you should attack Giuliani for philandering.” But Carlson has previously asserted that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s marriage to former President Bill Clinton is “[o]f course” an issue in the 2008 presidential election, discussing the Clintons’ marriage in TV appearances, with references to Bill Clinton’s “philander[ing]” and “famous appetites.”

An American woman (e. g., Nancy Pelosi) wearing a headscarf in a Muslim country is bad, bad, bad, unless it is Laura Bush.

Barack Obama: oh no, he doesn’t always put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem. Then again, neither does President Bush!

On the October 23 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, during a discussion of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) purported failure to place his hand over his heart during the national anthem at an Iowa campaign event, co-host Alan Colmes said to Fox News contributor and nationally syndicated columnist Dick Morris, “Just as long as conservatives are going after Obama, let me put up on the screen another person during the national anthem.” An on-screen image of President Bush appeared in which Bush’s hand is resting on his midsection as the national anthem is reportedly being played. [...]

As Media Matters for America documented, on his October 4 radio show, Hannity discussed an interview in which Obama said that he had stopped wearing an American flag pin on his lapel during the lead-up to the Iraq war: “[W]hy do we wear pins? Because our country was under attack. And to politicize once again the war to this extent. Well, who cares about the war? Are you proud of your country? Do you believe in America?” Media Matters noted that Hannity himself has not worn an American flag lapel pin on a number of recent occasions.

The image of President Bush shown during the program, also noted by the blog News Hounds:

Pretty stupid huh? Sure this was a cheap shot, but a well deserved one!

Other stuff:

Child Soldiers

Afghan Army

Monkeys getting into Monkey Business in Dehli, India.