Transcript of Dr. Robert Sapolsky on Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity

And what has always been the rationale for that is the second we’re looking at anything with genes, genetic influences, genetic hints, genetic whatevers, we’re asking where these genes come from? Where is the evolutionary sense? Where is the adaptive value for anything we’re looking at?

How would a sociobiologist interpret it? Someone else, you have a question? I should be and I don’t think I understand the subject enough to know other than something about religiosity is done in a social context, and that’s going to become important here. And the difference is one that puzzles me a great deal because it clearly transcends issues of just the social community, but that seems to be a good defining point to start from. Okay.

So where we ended up there with was this puzzle. We finished at the end of depression looking at evolutionary aspects and looking at there may be some hidden benefits, that weird argument in one of the readings in your reader creativity and aspects of manic depression going hand in hand. But we were left with somewhat of a puzzle at the end of the schizophrenia lecture. Why might there have been selection for these genes? Because once again, we start off with a theme from the very beginning, genes being selected for, why did the giraffe have long necks because this is a trait that’s adaptive.

In our Darwinian terms, this is a trait that’s associated with leaving more copies of your genes in future generations. What is the adaptive value for genes for schizophrenia? Because we looked at the fact that in this contemporary form, schizophrenia is by definition a maladaptive trait. Schizophrenics leave fewer copies of their genes than their unaffected siblings. It is a trait which is formally maladaptive.

Hidden Advantages in Genetic Disorders

What might be a hidden advantage lurking there? And where we left at the very end of that was just a hint that, in fact, as far as anyone can tell, there are no hidden advantages to schizophrenia. There may not be any adaptive advantage. What I left you with there was the notion, however, that there might be another disease lurking around related to schizophrenia, which does have an adaptive advantage. And to begin here, what we have to go back to is one of the basic ninth grade biology concepts in science there, which is the whole notion that some of the time a genetic trait, which is god awful in one setting, may have some advantages elsewhere.

And we all learned the exact same example back in ninth grade, sickle cell anemia, sickle cell anemia, which in one context when fully expressed is a hematological disaster, absolutely bad news, horrible and in other settings can protect you against malaria and not by chance that versions of sickle cell anemia have evolved in sub Saharan Africa, Mediterranean areas, thalassemia related diseases that this has been a frequent solution. Also in passing showing us one of the truisms from this class, there’s no such thing as a bad gene, there’s only a bad gene environment interaction. Okay. So this theme in medical genetics comes through a lot of times, genetic traits, which in one setting are bad news, may have advantages in another setting. And it’s turning out, this is a theme in lots of different realms of genetics.

Other examples, Tay Sachs disease. Tay Sachs, horrible congenital disorder predominantly found in Ashkenazi Jews. What you wind up getting there is full blown version, complete cortical failure to develop, child is massively retarded at birth, dies shortly afterward, partial version of Tay Sachs disease and you’re resistant to tuberculosis. Nobody knows the mechanism for it yet. People absolutely understand why the sickle cell trait both sets you up for anemia and protection from malaria.

Nobody understands it yet with Tay Sachs, but this explains one of the phenomena back from the Middle Ages, the European belief that Jews were safe from tuberculosis because they were poisoning the Christian wells. And that was a cause of a large number of pogroms back when there is a genetic explanation, which is the trait for Tay Sachs disease in this partially expressed form protects from tuberculosis.

More examples of this, cystic fibrosis, the most common congenital disorder these days that is massively life threatening. Cystic fibrosis, full blown version, disastrous disease. What you get in cystic fibrosis is inflammatory disease, your lungs fill up with fluid, you often are dead by age twenty, horrible disease, partial version of cystic fibrosis, and you were protected against cholera. And the exact same mechanism that causes an imbalance of fluids in the lungs is the same mechanism that keeps you from losing all your fluids when you have cholera of dehydrating highly adaptive, a theme that keeps popping up over and over. Full blown version, bad news, partial genetic version, good news and what you wind up getting is this basic argument, a numerical argument very similar to the I’ll lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins deal of if you’ve got enough people with a partial protective adaptive version, you can afford the occasional cousin with the full blown version. The trait over overall will still be passed on.

Schizotypal Personality: A Mild Version of Schizophrenia

Now what this sets us up for is thinking about whether something like this is going on with schizophrenia. And the question to ask, of course, is what is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia? And this one got discovered in the 1970s. Back to that classic study we’ve heard about in a couple of different lectures by now, Ketty, that psychiatrist from Harvard, who with his colleagues went off to Denmark and spent a decade there looking at every single adoption case looking at the patterns of schizophrenia, the schizophrenic, the adoptive parents, the biological parents. In the course of doing this, they discovered something amazing.

Because think about what these guys did. This was this team of psychiatrists who spent a decade in Denmark. What they did was interview every single family of every adoptee in Denmark. This was like ten thousand people. This was a massive amount of work looking for schizophrenics, looking in the various pedigrees, all that sort of thing, interviewing huge numbers of people, just a handful of these folks so they would all get the diagnostic criteria fairly similar, well designed study, blah, blah.

What had they done by the end of a decade? They had talked to more family members of schizophrenics than any psychiatrists in history. And think about this, your average psychiatrist who’s got some schizophrenic patients will meet once every six months with the parent if the schizophrenic is on the young side, maybe occasionally will also have sessions on a regular basis. These people had just interviewed tens of thousands of family members of schizophrenics and they noticed something interesting. They noticed that on the average there was something a little bit strange about family members of schizophrenics.

Not all of them and these traits are not only found amongst family members of schizophrenics, but at a higher than expected rate, there is a weird sort of quirky personality that went with family members of schizophrenics, biological family members. And this version of a much milder case of schizophrenia is now called schizotypal personality. This is a standardly recognized disorder in psychiatry. Schizotypalism is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia. What does schizotypalism look like?

First off, people have somewhat loose associations, not remotely in the realm of a schizophrenic, and there are standardized scales that can be given to show this is someone out of the normal range, but not in the schizophrenic range and intermediate range. In addition, you get a social withdrawal. And this is not the complete dysfunctional, unable to hold down a job locked up in the back of a village version of schizophrenia. This is someone instead who just gravitates towards fairly solitary occupations. This is the lighthouse keeper.

This is the fire tower watcher. This is the classic schizotypal occupation. This is the person sitting alone in the projection room in the movie theater eight hours a night in the dark. They’re classic sort of schizotypal jobs, socially detached and very solitary. And the most striking feature of schizotypal is what is termed metamagical thinking.

Metamagical Thinking and Religious Connections

And this is where things begin to get interesting. Metamagical thinking, this is not someone who is thought disordered, psychotic, unable to function. This is someone who just kind of believes in strange things. This is someone who’s really, really into science fiction and fantasy. This is someone who’s into some sort of new age stuff in a really frenzy sort of way. This is someone who believes in mental telepathy or UFOs. This is a first hint. This is someone who, if they have a religious structure of belief, has an extremely concrete level of interpretation.

Remembering this seems to be quite similar to schizophrenia, what apples oranges have in common multisyllabic words, that concreteness at the level of abstraction, these are people who tend towards extremely fundamentalist concrete interpretations of religious events.

Seven day creation of the world, this is not a metaphor, this is not a parable, this could be measured down to the minute. People alive who were once dead, this is not a metaphor for keeping the spirit going. This is an exact description of the events. We begin to see where we’re heading here. What schizotypalism is about is it’s a very mild version of schizophrenia in terms of the loose associations, in terms of the concreteness of associations, the social detachment and most of all, the metamagical thinking.

And this is now a standard diagnostic category in psychiatry to have a schizotypal personality. So what we then ask is, where does this come from? What is this like? And what we have to ask is, of course, our usual question when trying to make sense of a human trait is recognizing ninety nine percent of human history was not spent with schizotypos being able to get jobs in film projection rooms. What does schizotypalism look like in traditional non westernized human societies?

Shamans: The “Half-Crazy” in Traditional Societies

And the answer to that turns out they’ve been floating around for sixty, seventy years in the anthropology literature. And this is back to the 1930s, an anthropologist named Paul Raden, who was the first one to point this out, was the first one of a whole tradition emphasizing what was a pretty strong area of research in the 1940s in anthropology. He was the first person who pointed out that in traditional human societies, there is a category of people there who count as, and these are his exact words, “half crazy.” Who are the half crazies in traditional human society? The shamans, the witch doctors, the medicine men, the medicine women.

These are members of society who make a living being metamagical. And Raiden was the first one to emphasize this. In traditional human societies, the shamans are the ones who converse with the dead for ritualistic reasons. The shamans are the ones who speak in tongues. The shamans are the ones who, at the full moon, turn into the hyena to protect the village from predators.

The shamans are the ones who are metamagical for a living. And this has been a theme in anthropology for quite some time. One anthropologist named Actornik referred to shamans as being “healed madmen” in the 1940s. Anthropologist named Kroeber, started the anthropology department in Berkeley and was one of the grand old men in the field, this is a quote of his describing what shamanism is about:

“The shaman displays his possession by a spirit by publicly reenacting his specific personal experience, that of a man suffering from a particular mental affliction. His projections, his hallucinations, his journey through space and time thus became a dramatic ritual and served as the prototype for all future concepts of the religious road of perfection.”

And this was the recognition in the 30s and 40s that what shamanism is about is a very controlled, very socially contextual version of metamagical schizotypalism. The word did not exist in the field at the time, but that is what it is. Now what Kroger emphasized in his writing was these are not schizophrenics. And what we heard about in that story in class four days ago, looking at that schizophrenic person in that Maasai village is that people in traditional human societies are no more tolerant to the mentally ill than we are in the West and just as delighted to find cultural means to peripheralize them.

Hearing Voices at the Right Time

These are not full blown schizophrenics. These are not people who suddenly are speaking in tongues at the exact silent moment in the hunt. These are people who are speaking in tongues at the right time. These are people who were hearing voices at the right time. And you remember what the punchline was of that story about that schizophrenic woman in that Masai village was she heard voices at the wrong time.

Hearing voices at the right time is not schizophrenia, it is a version of schizotypalism. And what you see when you look at the human tradition of shamanism, these are not peripheralized people. These are some of the most powerful members of society. Many societies have a tradition of shamans being celibate, but many of them, most of them as it turns out, do not. And these are people who are anything but reproductively maladaptive.

These are people who have been passing on their genes just fine throughout history. Shamanism, this mild version, this contextually appropriate version of metamagicalism has done wonderfully throughout human history. And a great example of that, the fact that you need to get it just right was Kroger sort of emphasizing this, that in the right setting, what would be an absolutely peripheralizing set of traits instead makes you a very powerful, very sanctioned, and that’s the word that he used, a very sanctioned member of society. And it’s not for nothing that the word sanction has a whole lot to do with the word sanctuary. This is a realm in which the exact same traits would spectacularly fail to work in other cultural settings, do it right and it works just fine.

The Right Balance of Shamanism

And Kroger had a wonderful anecdote about this, the sense of you got to get it just right. He apparently was at some ritual ceremony. He spent most of his time doing his anthropology with Native American groups and this was some ceremony being done by the Winnebago. I was actually found it quite bizarre that there was a group called the Winnebago. But hanging out with the Winnebagos and this was one of his informants there sort of explaining this ritual.

And this was apparently some really frothy, really quite over the top ritual that this shaman was pulling off and was speaking in tongues and rolling on the fire and all of that. And this guy said, “That is great. We’ve got this shaman here. This guy is like the best. He’s worth every dollar we pay him.

This guy is terrific. We are so lucky to have a shaman like this in our village. This guy is… thank God we don’t have two of them though. Two way too much. One’s just fine.”

And you have this recognition that this is not schizophrenia. You wouldn’t want a person to be schizophrenic because they will be as peripheralized as in our own society. You want to get it just right. You don’t want to have too many of them. You got to have some people who are some plain meat and potatoes good hunters, that sort of thing.

And you want the ratio of that to the shamanistic metamagical folks to be quite high, but you need a few of them around. And what the anthropologists have been noting for sixty years is all human cultures traditionally have some very metamagical folks around, and these folks are anything but peripheralized with a decreased reproductive success. They’re some of the most honored members of society. So what you wind up getting here is that classic partially expressed sort of continuum deal going on, which is human societies throughout history have had such a need for shamans that they can put up with the occasional second cousin who’s fully schizophrenic as long as you’ve got the ratio right. And what the numbers suggest, the one percent to two percent rate of schizophrenia throughout human cultures and the number average population size of human villages and the number of shamans, it works about right.

Throughout history, there has been more of a predominance of schizotypal shamans than of schizophrenics you can afford to put up with the occasional cousin.

Western Irrationality

Now where does this wind up heading? What the main point of this section is about is this is not just about the people naked in the National Geographics with the bones in their noses. And this was a critical transition recognizing this. At some point, a whole lot of people, and I feel, were writing about the primitiveness of non westernized religion.

And there was a great quote who came up with this when a guy named Devereaux referred to primitive religion as being “organized schizophrenia.” This was somebody in the 1940s exactly getting this flavor of contextualized, appropriate hearing the voices at the right time, all of that. But this was overwhelmingly literature about the weird stuff those folks are up to in the night and the Time Life specials on public television. And what the critical transition is, is it’s not just about them. At some point, this anthropologist Akronet, who was quite leftist in his orientation, wrote a long essay saying how incredibly culturally chauvinistic it was of the West anthropologists to write all these articles about how shamans are half healed, half mad men and how condescending that was to talk about those cultures as being so irrationally based in contrast to us.

And what’s the obvious punch line is the problem isn’t saying that they’re irrational when we’re saying that we aren’t, but it’s saying that we’re equally irrational. We are equally irrational in some of the tenants that we have here. A quote from Akronak at the time was “our culture is unique and outlawing the irrational.” Let me give you some recent statistics from a survey. What’s the name of the survey?

The main national survey people. Who? Gallup poll, that guy. The Gallup poll a recent Gallup poll survey, I don’t know about you guys, but these numbers astonished me. Twenty five percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts, thirty six percent believe in mental telepathy, forty seven percent believe in UFOs and more than fifty percent of Americans believe in the devil and a belief that the devil influences daily activities.

These are people who can vote. These are people who can serve on juries. These are people who can operate motor vehicles. These are people making decisions about medical interventions. I, for one, in this outpost of not terribly extreme irrationality in this corner of the country, am astonished we live in a world that is highly irrational.

And the punchline of this is, this is not simply about non Western traditional human societies. The exact same thread of schizotypalism runs throughout all of the belief systems of human societies, including Western ones. We are permeated by irrationality. Now some of the versions of it that we have in the West are utter nonsense ones, ones that have just been like invented out of thin air in recent years, which is kind of like fast food for these sort of nouveau sort of medieval peasants in their hot tubs up in Marin. This is the world of crystals and channeling and things of that sort.

But some of the versions of our westernized irrationality go back millennia and organize some of our most cherished values, the same irrationality and the same valuing of those who invent the appropriate versions of the irrationality runs throughout the West.

Religious Experiences as Psychiatric Symptoms

Okay. Just to show you that I’m not being overly hostile or will try to pull in my own sort of tradition that I was raised in, it is not normally considered a sign of robust mental health to hear voices coming out of burning bushes. This is considered a worrisome sign. This is considered diagnostic.

It is not a good thing to be reporting that you just spent the night wrestling an angel. It is usually a very disturbing sign if you were reporting you’ve had conversation with someone who is dead and has risen from the grave. These are diagnosable problems in our secular western realm. These are the backbones of our belief systems, we in the West as well as we humans in non westernized settings. Schizotypalism runs through all of human history.

What you wind up having then is this obvious question, who invented this stuff? Who came up with the notion that the world was invented in seven days or snakes with apples are up to something no good or it’s possible to give birth and you’re still a virgin. These were not designed by committees. These were designed by extremely formative, extremely influential schizotypos throughout history.

The Genetic Basis of Schizotypalism

Yes, it’s genetic evidence. Those same studies showed that it runs through the adoption studies showed it’s a biological trait. It runs through the biological side of the adoptive pedigrees. It’s a genetic trait. What the new studies are now beginning to show is mild tendency towards increased dopamine tone, mild tendency towards most of the biology we heard about.

What we’re seeing is totally artificial bucket to say schizophrenia up to here, pass this side, non schizophrenic, we have this in between zone, like everything else we’ve been thinking about, it’s on a continuum. And it seems to be the same biology in a much milder form.

Context Matters: Cults vs. Religions

What you wind up seeing with this is that this is on a continuum and who invented this stuff? And you look throughout the history of religious leaders, those who have invented some of the theology and we will come to different variants of religious leaders shortly. As you see those who invented the theology that there is very often a thread of metamagical thinking that goes through this. And this is metamagical thinking of a type that falls readily into the spectrum of schizotypalism. Now one of the themes we’ve endlessly come back to in this class is appropriate context, appropriate context.

And this is a perfect realm to see this because what we wind up getting is you got to get it just right. If you hear voices, it’s got to be during the ceremony. If you’re speaking in tongues, it can’t be in the middle of the silent part of the hunt. You don’t want to have too many of them. Thank God, we’ve got this shaman, but not two of them around here.

You’ve got to get the context right. And what we’ve seen throughout human history and Western history as well is get it wrong and we have names for these things. Get it wrong and these are abortive religious fringe groups. These are cults and you look at some versions of this in our own recent time. You look at David Koresh in Waco.

You look at someone like James Jim Jones in Jonestown. You look at someone like Charles Manson. And these are people who were highly metamagical in their thinking, highly charismatic but hit a wall at the point where we still classify them as cults. Manson is a diagnosed schizophrenic. With the other two, there’s only post hoc sort of forensic psychiatry that that you can do.

What you wind up getting is get it wrong and we call it a cult. Get it right in the right time and the right place. And maybe for the next couple of millennia, people won’t have to go to work on your birthday if you get it exactly right in that setting. So what I think we see here is a setting here for making sense, the exact same traits in a different context to use Kroger’s words in a cultural context that is not sanctioned, the exact same traits count as psychiatrically suspect these days. What this is about is not only if you get it in the right context, is it okay, it is highly honored tapping into the question that came in before that all human societies have a strong need for a certain degree of these folks around.

You need to get the ratios right.

Religion as Daily Ritual

Picking up on this theme, a transition to our next point. In a sense, this is talking about sort of the structural steel of religious belief. What are the basic beliefs you have?

There is no God but one. He is Allah. Whatever versions of the central formats you have, there is a trinity, I am who I am, any of these variants, these are sort of the building blocks, the structural steel of religion. But what religion is often also about is lots of other things. We have a very modern, very westernized view of religion these days.

What religion is often about is the social community that it brings you. What religion is often about is the motivation for good works throughout most of history. What religion is about in one very orthodox variant is the carrying out of rituals, the daily performance of ritualistic behaviors in the context of religion. And this transitions us to the next subject in here. And this whole notion of ritualism as a backbone of religion, wonderful quote to that effect, Henry Ward Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous Protestant preacher New England, I think the 1830s or so, had this quote at the time, “religion is daily bread.”

Religion is not just cake on Sunday. The notion that what religion is about is the small acts. God is in the detail. Religion is in the small acts of the daily rituals, now beginning to look not at the large theological notions our religion believes there are multiple gods, there are virgin births that God can speak through a burning bush, but instead religion as the daily practices of ritual.

Obsessive Rituals and Religion

What comes through with this is another theme, another subtype of a very mild version of a psychiatric disorder, which once again works spectacularly when you get it just right, not now with the metamagical big theology building blocks of religion, but the daily bits and pieces of ritualism. And this brings in another psychiatric disorder, one we haven’t talked about much in class so far.

I guarantee on a regular basis all of us in this room get to some anxious period, you’ve got some major deadline, you’re applying for some summer something rather that you really want to get, you’re totally uptight about it, you’re sitting down and you’re writing the essay and before you can write the essay you’ve got to get your favorite pen, it’s got to be right there and you’ve got to rearrange your desk and you’ve got to get everything sorted out. Finally you finish it and you go mail off the application, you put it in the mailbox and you check again to make sure it went down. And this is really important.

You want to see it check again to make sure and you’re all set for that and you finally and there is no one else around. So you go and you look in front of it and look in back and that sort of thing. I mean we all do this actually, maybe we can all do this and I’m embarrassing myself hard. But my bet is most of us do this sort of thing. We fall into obsessive little rituals during times of anxiety.

We also have rituals, intrusive thoughts that just invade our heads at times where they are of no obvious purpose. They are at the cost of thinking anything more clearly. It’s totally maddening and you can’t stop the thought. For example, today I am working on a paper that’s involving all sorts of very deep ruminant thought and figuring out all sorts of data stuff. And I’ve made no progress on it at all this morning because for some reason that I don’t understand at all, all of today I’ve had the damn theme song from Teletubbies going through my head.

And I can’t stop it, especially the part where La la leaps up and says La la the really cute part there and I can’t stop doing this. And I don’t know what’s going on. I did not plan to lose today’s productivity because of Teletubbies, but we get this some stupid jingle that’s stuck in your head. You find yourself going up a flight of stairs and you can’t stop yourself from counting the steps. We do this.

We all do this. And we tend to do it more often during periods of anxiety. And the interpretation of that is that we impose this totally arbitrary useless destructive structure at a time when everything else feels like you’re walking on quicksand. We all do this as some sort of adaptation to periods of anxiety. And what we transition into now is talking about a psychiatric disorder where people do this all the time.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

And it not only gets in the way of them getting some work done on a project that requires some concentration, this is a disorder that absolutely destroys their lives. This is OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. And the full blown version of it bears so little resemblance to what any of us do when we are having to get the pen right and checking the mailbox the third time and having the jingle go through your head for a while. It is of such a scale larger. It is so much more destructive.

It is virtually unimaginable from our perspective. People with OCD have their lives completely destroyed by this disorder. People with OCD in the full blown version spent six hours a day washing their hands. The characteristic that’s always at the top of the list with obsessive focusing on hygiene. This worry that you are constantly in some way soiled six hours a day of washing.

These are people who cannot hold down jobs, their marriages come apart, their relationships are destroyed because they cannot stop washing. And you have in the reader one profile of somebody with OCD from a book entitled “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.” This is the symptom that always pops up at the top of the list. And the actual washing process is ritualistic beyond belief. These are people who have bought seven different kinds of antibacterial soap.

They go through this whole sequence. The water has to be a certain temperature for the first level of washing, then a certain type of towel that they dry themselves off with. That towel has to be put out of the room because it’s dirty then. Then the next layer of washing with the next soap, go through two hours of this, they’re finally done, turn to leave to go to their job, go to their whatever and on the way out brush their elbow against the door and they have to start all over again. And you will stop them at that point and say, you will miss this interview, you will not get this job.

And they will say, yes, I know, but I’m not going to be able to function. And I’m just it’s dirty. I know my elbow, I know I’m going to touch it then and then I’ll get in my face and I just have to start over. I’m not going to be able to get anything done today anyway. So I need to go wash.

If I don’t wash, I’m not going be able to do it and back they go and hours and hours of this. People with OCD spend half their waking hours doing this. People with OCD just have constant sequences of numbers going in their head, constant jingles, intrusive thoughts. They cannot stop thinking, what if I don’t stop the car at the next stop sign? What if I run down this person?

They have the intrusive thoughts of, I’m absolutely sure I struck somebody at that street crossing back there. I’ve got to go back and check. Okay. They don’t see anybody there. They drive on five miles down the road.

Probably the person flew off into the bushes. I have to go back and check. I have to go back and check. They can never leave their home because they’ve left the door unlocked. They go back, they check, the door is locked.

They have to go back. They left the gas on. They left the light on. This is absolutely paralyzing. Intrusive thoughts, what if I leaned over and the person next to me? What if somebody kills my loved ones? You can’t stop the thoughts. They just keep coming at these people. They cannot enter or leave a place. There is a paralysis about entering and leaving built around this sort of almost magical exclusionary power that you get a transition into a place.

They cannot enter a room until they do a prime number of tappings on the wall before entering. They can then not enter the room until that’s prime number and then a different prime number with their left foot shaking completely arbitrary symptoms of having to enter and leave. Numerology, these people cannot begin a meal until the utensils are absolutely symmetrical and lined up and they’re never perfectly symmetrical. And the entering and leaving ritual is never done right and they certainly can’t enter the classroom unless the number of steps from here to the door is two times an interval that’s with this very mathematical quality to it and it’s never quite right and you’ve got to do it all over again.

And what’s been pointed out, one of the really interesting sort of insights as to what OCD is about is that this is an anxiety disorder. This is a pathological attempt to impose structure, to impose predictability, to impose control in a world where everything is pathologically provoking of a sense of disease and uncertainty and anxiety. And the absolute horrifying version of OCD that I’ve heard described is this metaphor where this is straight out of ethology. This is a fixed action pattern. We all know the fixed action pattern of a dog is settling down at night on its blanket. And what does the dog do?

It circles a few times before it settles down, but then it circles a couple of more times and just as it’s ready to and then it circles a few more. And you can see at some point, the dog doesn’t even want to do this anymore. And it takes a while longer and another thirty seconds before the dog can finally escape from this fixed action pattern and sit down. In OCD, the person never ever escapes. The person spends forever circling on the blanket being unable to finally lie down and rest because they are just consumed with these rituals, with these obsessive intrusive thoughts.

Everyday Obsessive Behaviors

And what you get is this is completely paralyzing. Okay, here’s an example of an obsessive belief that we all have. Okay, anybody identify this? Okay, here’s what it is. This is an aerial view.

In fact, it’s a satellite photograph up here. This is a tray of Rice Krispies Treats. And you’ve just walked into the room and it looks like this. And for a huge percentage of us, within a minute or so, it’s going to look like this because we all feel this compulsive need to take a knife and cut off that edge. Okay, let me just canvas you on all of that.

Okay, many of you do this for starters? I certainly do. Okay, how many of you of those who do this cut off this bit here because it doesn’t really count on your diet? Couple of hands. How many of you cut it off because what’s perfectly obvious is going from this to this decreases the total perimeter so that it will stay fresher that way?

Problems there. How many of you wind up doing it because it’s just getting at you that it’s the knife’s just there and you just have to cut it off and smooth out the edge? Yes, that’s why we all do it. And then what you then decide is that there’s this little bump here which requires you to trim this out and then there’s a little bump and off you go with that. And we all wind up doing that.

But if this is what you did around the clock for your entire life, it would destroy it. And what is most striking with people with OCD is you can never go through sequence I just did. There’s no insight. The person does not sit there and say, help, there’s something wrong with me. I feel this need to wash my hands six hours a day.

They say, help, there’s something wrong with me. I can never get clean. I’m just so dirty. Everything I do makes me dirty. There’s no insight into it.

Religious Rituals and OCD

Okay. So where does this fit in? Again, our modern version of religion, our modern, very secularly influenced version of religion so often involves an emphasis on what religion is about is counseling the troubled. What religion is about is holding the hands of the newlyweds and making sure they understand what they’re getting into. What religion is about is comforting the distant, the bereaved.

What religion is about is the good works. But this is not what religion has often been about throughout history. Often, the religious leaders are not necessarily the ones who are most psychotherapeutically minded or the most galvanizing of people into the good works. Often, leaders have been the ones at the head of a crusade. Often religious leaders have been the ones with the most vivid images of what hell and damnation would be like.

But often what religious leaders have been are the people who are best at doing the rituals. And that has been another thread of religious practice throughout history of religious leaders as often being among the most fervent, the most accomplished at carrying out of rituals. Now let me give you a sense of this because as I began to read more on this, this absolutely astonished me because I knew very little about this stuff, just the scale of this. And starting off with what will probably be a fairly alien religion for most of you in here and then moving into examples closer to home.

Looking at orthodox, very traditional Hinduism, looking at the behaviors of a Brahmin, an individual who devotes their entire life to ritualistic practice in pursuit of their religion. A Brahmin, a highly observant Brahmin spends six hours a day in cleansing rituals. And there are detailed rules as to which hand you wash in what sequence, how many times you wash each hand separately, how many each one together, the sequence with which you wash out one side of your mouth versus the other with water.

There are set rules for Brahmins as to how you were supposed to lie down at night dictating what your first sight is in the morning. There are set rules as to what direction you must face when defecating in terms of what you were looking at at the time. There are set rules for rituals you have to do when entering a temple, when leaving a temple.

There are set rules for how many breaths you take through each nostril. You close one nostril during your prayers for a certain number of breaths, then you close the other. And all of these are very carefully stipulated. The number of mouthfuls of food, the number of times you chew per mouthful, the number of prayers you have to say per day, sequences of magic numbers, All of this is absolutely spelled out and Orthodox Brahmins consumed their entire days doing this. Okay, next example, Orthodox Judaism, spectacularly yes, question.

Great. Okay. Hang on for a while. We will come to that. That’s a superb question as to why they seem to have lots to do with cleansing and food preparation.

Wow. Thank you. Okay, do you want to why don’t we take a five minute break right now and you can all store in the front here for handouts. Lots of opinions here, lots of thoughts. Once again that same thing I mentioned two days ago, three days ago, whenever, this is very provocative stuff.

# Ritualistic Behaviors in Religion

Take advantage of the course website, put up some of your opinions, get dialogues going on this because people lots of times have extremely strong opinions on this and very interesting ones take advantage of this.

Couple of questions that just came up. How come people with OCD don’t come down with learned helplessness? Why aren’t they depressed? Because part of the fuel behind OCD is you’re always convinced, one more. Now I know instead of doing it seventeen times, eighteen. If I do it eighteen, then it’s going to be perfect. You’ve always just figured out not only do I have to do the six hours of washing, but make sure I never step on a crack and then I won’t break my mother’s back. You’re always figuring out the next step.

Then pointing out we’re about to go in a direction where what are the advantages of a mild version of OCD and we’re discussing this in a religious context, I should point out in a secular context, there’s a tremendous advantage to a mild version of OCD. What it does is get you into a place like Stanford. What it does is work to a tremendous advantage given how regimented and disciplined a lot of folks are in here, get it in the right context, that theme that we have again and again.

Ritualism in Orthodox Religions

Okay, shifting over, just seeing Orthodox Brahmin belief in Hinduism absolutely dominated virtually full time with ritualistic behaviors. Orthodox Jewry, a spectacular number of laws built around food preparation, the kosher laws, very detailed rules as to how long of a time interval between eating one type of food and another type of food, if you inadvertently mix up the silverware with different types of food, ritualistic cleansing rituals that you have to go through involving putting the utensils in dirt for months on end and special prayers that have to be said, rules about how you enter and leave a holy place involving certain prayers, involving a certain ritualistic touching that you have to make on the door jam there, all sorts of magic numbers.

The number eighteen has magical powers in Orthodox Judaism and is built around numbers of times you have to say a prayer multiples of eighteen. You have these prayer shawls that have strings on the end, which have eighteen knots in them and they have to be pulled a certain number of times.

Here’s one of the amazing examples of ritualism. These numbers have magical powers in Orthodox Judaism. And you will note three sixty five is the number of days in the year, two forty eight is the number of bones that people believed were in the bodies during the Middle Ages when this evolved, and together six thirteen.

According to the holy books, there are six thirteen rules for daily behaviors, three sixty five prohibitions every day, two forty eight things that have to be done every day, the preponderance of the prohibitions leading one clearly fairly depressive rabbi back when to be saying, obviously, it would have been better if none of us were born given the fact that there were more things that we could mess up by doing.

But what you see here is it’s just highly ritualistic. The number of prohibitions equaling number of days of the year, the number of ritual constraints equaling the number of bones in the body, six thirteen is the magic number.

Okay, where did these numbers come from? Very often in religious rituals, what you find is a number has symbolic value because it’s got a certain appeal for making learning easier. It is not by chance that a base ten society came up with ten commandments because ten commandments are much easier to remember than nine or eleven.

What are these about? You would say, okay, well there’s some sort of ritualistic content here. The number of things God doesn’t want us to do each day is equal to the number of days of the year. The number of things God wants us to do is equal to the number of bones in the body. Okay, great device for remembering the rules.

But here’s the amazing thing, nobody knows the rules. You look through thousands of pages of commentary stretching back centuries and the rules aren’t written down and various rabbis have made a living arguing over what are the three sixty five things you aren’t supposed to do each day. In other words, the numbers are more important than the content. The content is less critical than the fact that whatever they are, there’s three sixty five things that God doesn’t want you to do. And whatever they are, there’s two forty eight that God wants you to do. The number that you are attributing to God is more important in that case than the content. Okay, classic, classic obsessive numerology.

Switching over traditional Orthodox Islam. What you find there is very detailed rules as to what foods you can eat, what the first food is you’re supposed to eat each day. There are rules as to how you enter and leave a holy place. There are rules for very ornate cleansing after relieving yourself, very, very detailed rules when you were washing out your mouth, how many mouthfuls of water, which hands you wash in which sequence, the exact same thing, exact same rules as with an OCD person after showering, explicitly written down when a man is washing himself at the of the cleansing, should he happen to touch his penis, he has to do the whole sequence all over again.

Magic numbers thought to have powers there, seven, ten, seventy and one hundred apparently have magical powers in Islam, and you have very explicit concrete instructions about them. Mohammed himself wrote down that a man who says a prayer with clean teeth gets seventy times the brownie points as a man saying his prayers without them. Multiples of magic numbers with all of that.

And probably for most of you by now, what will be the most familiar is looking at Orthodox Christianity and you have rosaries and the counting of rosaries. You have three as a magic number. You have very detailed numbers of times you were supposed to say prayers. You have rules for entering and leaving churches. Even in Christian groups that are viewed as some of the least ritualistic, some of the most cerebral in some ways, you look at the Lutherans. Lutherans have set rules for prayers that are only said during even years, prayers that are only said during odd years.

All of these versions of orthodoxy are absolutely shot through with rituals built around cleansing of the body, food preparation, entering and leaving of significant places and numerology. It’s the exact same list as you find with OCD.

Religion and OCD: Historical Perspectives

And Freud, one hundred years ago, came up with this amazing quote to that regard. Freud described obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional compulsion. He absolutely linked the two.

Now just when you’re thinking that I’m standing here and I’m going to start pathologizing religious belief from sort of a medical psychiatric standpoint, conclusion has been reached by religious leaders over the centuries as well.

In the fifteenth century, there was Saint Ignatius of Loyola. And what this guy did was he wrote this long track describing scrupulosity. Scrupulosity is not a common word in English anymore, but its opposite certainly is being unscrupulous, being scrupulous, having scrupulosity at the time was defined as someone who was going through religious ritual for its own sake, someone who was not thinking about the content but was just doing the ritual.

And he wrote this long track to Catholic priests saying, watch out for people like these, people who are coming and being super devout, but you will notice they’re just doing the rituals without thinking of the content. Your job is to recognize them and guide them back into actually focusing on the content. They shouldn’t be doing the rituals for their own sake. There’s a danger of people like that showing up.

In the Talmud and Orthodox Judaism, the exact same thing, there is a law in there that when you read the holy book of Judaism, the Torah, you were not allowed to do it by heart. You have to actually read the words because there is an injunction to think about the content, don’t do it in a rote way.

And Mohammed himself in Islam wrote down that people who give prayers without thinking about the content, the prayers don’t count. Even religious leaders for centuries, for millennia, have recognized the pull of religious ritual for its own sake to have to admonish religious adherent to pay attention to the content because the ritual takes on a life of its own where the numbers, the content, the ritual is more important than the actual thought behind it.

Exactly. And that was that point, that transition, talking about schizotypalism, there’s much more resemblance to the large theological building blocks of religion, of spirituality, what are military’s principles, what do we believe, do we believe you always follow orders, you never follow orders you don’t agree with, what’s more important value sort of stuff. This is instead in the realm of religious practice, absolutely, completely different realm.

The Function of Ritual

So where am I heading with this? Obviously, emphasizing the similarity of the traits and that whole business that once again have a six hour compulsion to wash your hands each day and have it occur in the secular context of OCD, it destroys your life. You cannot function in society. You are peripheralized. You are mentally ill. And that exact same theme, get it right in the right context and this is protected, this is honored, this is rewarded, get it in the right setting.

Now nothing about being able to do rituals and turn them from your own private OCD into the religious setting. This is not a process for making the anxiety go away. It’s very important. When people are pulling off these rituals in a religious setting, it’s not to make the anxiety go away, it’s to share it. It’s to share it over time and space with a larger community. It’s to take this nameless dread and to give it a name. And to have that name come with feeding instructions and all sorts of rules for how to please the source of the named dread at this point, it’s not to make the anxiety go away, it’s to make the anxiety shared.

Now from this transitioning from this notion that okay, in the right setting, the same exact trait that can ruin your life can in fact be enveloped, rewarded, welcomed, protected in the context of religious belief, now taking it one step further.

Yes, question. Sure. No, it definitely doesn’t. But from that standpoint, this is speaking to one aspect of what it’s doing. And we still haven’t come to the question that was up there before, isn’t there an ecological reason why there should be these rituals about cleansing and food preparation? We’ll come to that shortly.

But the other point you brought up, maybe this is to foster a sense of community, but this comes back to the question around there before, why should people in a communal sense feel better? Why should we all feel better when we do rituals and our rituals of counting the stairs and making sure the application really went down the mailbox? Why do we feel even better when we do it in the context of a community?

You are absolutely right that these are meant to foster the group shared features of religiosity and spirituality, the question then becomes, why does it work? Why do we respond to it? Why do we need shamans? And why do we respond to this ability to share these customs? Why is it the trade of eighteen year olds all over the world to try to invent a whole bunch of generationally shared rituals that lets the world know I have nothing whatsoever to do with those appalling people who embarrass me, my parents? What’s that whole separation that goes in?

Why is it that individuation is very often going hand in hand with, I need a community to do this individuation with, that in a sense is the question.

Ritual Performers and Religious Leaders

And that kind of brings us to this next issue, looking at sort of a next scale of this application of this ritualism. By far, one of the weirdest stories that Franz Kafka ever wrote was “The Hunger Artist.” And this is a story about a person who performs starving. His performance is he comes into a town and he’s locked up in a cage in the middle of town and he entertains, he performs there by starving himself. And people come and watch him starve.

And initially, you read this and this sounds like one of the more bizarre parables that Kafka has come up with until you read that during the Middle Ages, there were hunger artists. There were people who performed in European cities starving themselves in a ritualistic way for people to come and watch.

Suddenly, we now look at a next level, the notion of performing rituals and people who are very good at it. Once again, what are religious leaders about? Mostly these days, we think of them in terms of people who are empathic, people who are able to use the religious tradition they come from to make people treat each other better, to comfort people during troubled times. But back to that issue that some of the time what a religious leader is about is someone who is excellent at doing rituals.

And when you look at the history of religion, not only do you have the capacity for somebody to suddenly lose themselves to finally have these same life destroying rituals be sanctioned and protected, you have people who could make a living performing rituals. You can have people who are aptly rewarded for doing so.

Some examples. Starting off with traditional Hinduism, there is a mantra there called the Gayatri Mantra, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing. But in traditional Brahminism, you are supposed to say this mantra two million four hundred thousand times in a lifetime to guarantee a good afterlife. And what happens is you have these aging captains of industry who are worried that may not have quite gotten the right number in there and are feeling the years catching up with them. And what do you do? You hire yourself a bunch of Brahmins to come and say the prayer two million four hundred thousand times for you.

# Ritualistic Practices in Religion

And you say it in appropriate multiples. There are set rules. You hire two forty of them. So each of them says ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one thousand, ten thousand. Each of them says a whole lot of them and they all say the same number and there are rules for what sort of tent city you put up for them in your backyard and what sort of feast you throw for them.

You hire people to come and do the rituals for you that get you your afterlife. Switching over to Judaism, these rules of orthodox food preparation, there is an entire job you can get built around ritualistic preparation of food. Now there is a certain primary level of this, which is people who make a living, making sure food is prepared in a kosher way that they slaughter animals, things of that sort. But there’s a whole second level, people who make a living watching the folks who prepare the food. You have rabbis who make a living sitting around in slaughterhouses and making sure the animals are slaughtered in a ritualistically appropriate way.

These guys don’t do anything with their own hands. Their entire job is to watch and make sure the rituals are done right so that you can produce like fat free tofu hot dogs that would bring a smile to the lips of the patriarchs that’s done so ritualistically correctly. These guys make a living doing this. And then the version probably we are most familiar with the American experience, you have the high school graduation, you have the opening of the new town, whatever. And what happens?

The local clergyman comes out and does a convocation, says a prayer, is invited to come and do a ritual to mark this community transition. And our response here is, well, yeah, of course, that’s the guy’s job. And that’s exactly the point. You could make a living doing these rituals and you can do that job these days complete with health insurance and a retirement package and a 401k and all of that, you make a living doing rituals. And when you look at the history of religion, suddenly what you see is an inevitable outcome of that.

If there’s somebody who’s spending all his time washing his hands ritualistically for the good of the community, there’s some peasant out there who’s got to work by the sweat of his brow to make bread for two people instead of one.

Religion and Obsessive Compulsive Behavior

And there’s an amazing novel, a science fiction novel that absolutely caught this, which struck me as like one of the truly horrible novels in terms of writing style, almost as bad as Adam Huff. But in there was this brilliant idea, a book called Xenocide by a writer named Orson Scott Card and had this brilliant idea that absolutely caught this. And this was on, as always, a multiplanetary empire and the people running the evil empire figured out the people on some planet were biologically very, very prone towards being extremely smart. We can dissect that in lots of ways, perhaps the particular prenatal environment on that planet.

But they nonetheless worried that this planet had great danger for producing revolutionaries that were going to lead the overthrow of the empire. So what they did was invent a virus, a virus which caused obsessive compulsive disorder. And they infected a subset of people on this planet with the virus and the virus integrated into the DNA so it could be passed on multi generationally. And suddenly you had a subset of people who were paralyzed with OCD, with counting rituals and all of that. And what did they manage to foist off on the rest of the population?

These were religious experiences they were having. And within a few generations, this had become a priestly class who sat around all day carrying out their obsessive rituals and the rest of the population couldn’t begin to think of revolting against the empire because they were spending all day long having to come up with enough food to feed the priestly class. And what you suddenly had was a paralysis built around an entire class that does nothing other than carry out these rituals, and that planet was no worry to the rest of the empire at that point. What you wind up seeing is that truly involved ritualistic religious belief is often at the cost of doing anything else. There’s a spectacular example of this historically.

Martin Luther and OCD

And this is a sixteenth century Augustinian monk in Germany named Luther, and this guy happened to have left a lot of written records. And this guy is a classic example of this. He was the son, the only son of a very aggressive, very violent father. There was some suggestion that the father had in fact killed somebody once in a brawl. The son was absolutely terrified of him and was extremely obedient to him.

Very anxious, very psychosomatic young man. One day he is out for a walk, gets caught in a lightning storm out in an open field, has a panic attack there because the lightning storm makes a devotional agreement at that point. If he can survive this lightning storm, he will become a monk. He promises God that. He survives, he becomes a monk and he is absolutely paralyzed with his ritualistic training.

He leaves records about when he had his first mass, he fainted beforehand. He was so nervous about doing it wrong. The mass went on three times the length it was supposed to because he kept having to stop and start over again because he was sure he had done something wrong. He spent approximately five hours a day in confession with his priestly mentor there, his sort of advisor there, confessing to every this is a guy who lived in a monastery. He didn’t have a chance to do anything sinful, but he’d be in there five hours a day.

“When I said this prayer, I wasn’t mindful enough about it. I did it by rote. When I did this, I wasn’t thinking enough about this. I’m pretty sure I didn’t wash my hands enough before doing this prayer. I did this wrong. God is angry at me for doing this. I’m sure God is angry at me for doing this.”

And records his mentor, this elderly priest, eventually in exasperation said one of the most astonishingly modern psychoanalytically insightful things imaginable. He said, “Enough already. God isn’t angry with you. For some reason, you are very angry with God. God doesn’t care about how many times you’re washing your hands.”

And the most definitive thing about this young man, this young priest was something he left in his records. He washed hours and hours a day, an exact quote from him, “The more I wash, the dirtier I get.” And this is OCD.

And why do we know so much about this man? Because we know him five hundred years later, not by his Latin name of Luther, we know him by his more westernized name of Martin Luther. This was Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, and these were the transitional events in his life. And talk about somebody who takes his personal affliction and turns it into perhaps the most influential events of the last one thousand years in Western European history, this is someone who turned it into the biggest display of failing to obey his father that anybody has seen in the history of Catholicism. And this was a person paralyzed by obsessive compulsive disorder.

The Origins of Religious Rituals

So what we get here at this point is the obvious question, who invented knocking on wood for good luck? Who’s the Hindu who had some sort of obsession with the number twenty four or the Jew with an obsession with the number eighteen? Who got this belief that God was completely obsessed with the numbers of bones in the body and that’s how many things you should do. What we have here is not only the recognition that if you are OCD, religion can provide a sanctuary. If you are OCD in the right setting, you can, in fact, make a living by being religiously ritualistic.

But the recognition that probably people with strong obsessive compulsive tendencies had something to do with the invention of many of these rituals. I suspect historically that’s where it has come from. So that brings up the issue that was brought up before, why should these rituals be so similar? You look at the prohibitions, for example, in Judaism, more than two hundred of these have to do with food preparation and cleansing. You see the sequence in any of these and the top four in OCD are identical to the top four in all of these religions, cleansing of the body, food preparation, entering and leaving significant religious places and numerology, numbers.

Why should that be? Basically, two types of explanations. One is we may be seeing some sort of convergence. It’s not by chance that people are highly ritualistically concerned with making sure their bodies are clean and that their food is correctly prepared. And I suspect that has part to do with it.

But I suspect what we’re also seeing and with records of people like Martin Luther, what we’re also seeing is because some of the people who invented some of these religious rituals had a background of OCD, maybe not fully paralytic versions, but nonetheless, somebody spending five hours a day washing his hands and five hours a day confessing about how he didn’t wash his hands enough, this does not seem to be a mild version. “The more I wash, the dirtier I get.” Okay. What I think you wind up seeing is that historically all sorts of folks generating rituals, OCD is estimated to have an incidence anywhere from one percent to ten percent in the population, depending on how you define it, the continuum.

And what you have is, I suspect, in periods of religious crisis, cultural crisis, during a period of persecution, during a period where whatever is currently in shape is not working, the right person at the right moment comes forward and in effect says, “This is how I have privately honoring our Lord all these years and I am offering it to all of you to see this is what I’ve been doing.”

And in the right place and time, it catches on and it turns into the thing that is the ritual for the rest of the community within decades. Okay. So what I’ve been suggesting here and what I also emphasize is none of this is original with me except for the notion that the OCD has something to do with the invention of these rituals. These ideas go back in decades, go back centuries that there is a parallelism between the symptoms of what we call schizotypalism and the metamagical backbone of religious theology. There is a parallelism between what we call obsessive compulsive disorder and the ritualism of mainstream orthodox religion.

And this key point that the exact same behaviors, which in one context destroys your life has you peripheralized, do it right, do it in the right context and it is not peripheralizing. It makes you very honored and powerful.

Religion and Mental Health

There are more themes. Wonderful question. Would you expect to see different incidences of OCD type traits in different cultures depending on how secular the society is, how ritualistic the religion is?

You look at, for example, Catholicism or high Episcopalianism, highly ritualistic compared to Lutherans or Unitarians or Quakers at the other end. Would you expect to see different instances? Absolutely. I don’t know if anybody is studying that. That would be exactly a prediction you would expect.

Okay. A related one, which taps into the lecture on Friday, would you expect to see differences in the incidence of depression depending on religiosity? And boy, do you see that with a vengeance. One of the healthiest things you could do with your life is to be religious. And to be highly religious, it is a very strong protector against major depression.

Religious belief extends your life expectancy, and that’s after you control for, it changes risk factors, you’re less likely to drink to excess all of that. What is the big issue in that field is do the health benefits of religiosity merely come from the social community that you get typically by being religious? The question early in the lecture today, religiosity versus spirituality, that might be a realm to dissociate them. Spirituality, if it’s a very personal one, you wouldn’t get the community. Do you still get the health benefits?

Nobody knows at this point, but those are studies that people are doing. But absolutely, one of the greatest things you can do out there to buffer yourself from depression is to be religiously believing. And walk through all the steps at the end of the lecture the other day, elements of control, predictability, explanation outlet, and you will see exactly how religion taps into that.

Superstitious Behavior and Religion

Okay, couple more threads here in terms of making sense of some of the covariance between biological phenomenon behavior that we can explain and patterns of religious belief. Back to something we talked about earlier in the course.

Take a hungry pigeon and put it in a cage. And instead of the behaviorist circumstance where it has to press a lever umpteen times to get food, you randomly reward it. And what we discussed there was a pigeon has a strong psychic need to come up with an attribution. What did I do to cause this food to appear? And what we went through was the fact that if a pigeon is hungry enough and the reward is both big enough and random enough, the pigeon has a prepared learning state to make it think, ah, whatever I just did is what caused that to occur.

And then you suddenly have superstitious conditioning, the capacity to get pigeons doing the most outlandishly ritualistic things over and over and over in the belief that that’s the cause of the food appearing. And what we heard was take a room full of hungry pigeons and randomly reward all of them with food at different points and come back a few days later and every pigeon is going to be having its own private belief system built around in order to get food, I have to do X, the enforcement of superstitious belief. And that is the term that is used in psychology. And as we often have here is a question of is this word a metaphor, is this word an inappropriate metaphor or what is superstitious belief? And to go back to the question that came up here before, why do we have a societal need for shamans?

Explaining the Unexplainable: Superstition and Causality

Why do we have a societal need for much of this? Because we are trying to explain the unexplainable. We are trying to look for causal links of things that may or may not be associated. This is basically a way of describing superstition, how tight of a link do you need between cause and effect to believe that there has been cause and effect. And this is coming down to statistical relations.

And if you allow yourself to believe that this prayer could be answered, but it wasn’t this time because I wasn’t concentrating enough, I need to do it a bit more fervently, all of that, you have a system that allows us very readily to see causal links that may not be there.

The Hippocampus and Superstitious Conditioning

Now what is the next interesting neurobiological piece of this is that take animals, take rats and damage their hippocampus. And what you get with hippocampal damage then is you have more trouble making causal sequential links and events. What you wind up seeing, and this next sentence is meant to be as provocative as it will sound, is when you have rats with hippocampal damage, they are more vulnerable to superstitious conditioning.

Essentially, what that is saying is that as you have a damaged hippocampus, you have less of the capacity to tell the difference between accurate cause and effect linkages and ones that are merely statistically hinting of that or ones that may not be in the slightest bit connected with each other.

Hippocampal damage and rats have a lower threshold for superstitious conditioning. And we can very readily run with that one in terms of what the implications of that might be, going on our usual sequence from in order to appreciate a biological effect, big gross lesion sort of stuff to once again the much more subtle realm. We all differ in our number of hippocampal neurons and the amount of this enzyme and the amount of myelin and all the biology we know, all the individual differences.

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Religious Belief

A last disorder that winds up being interesting. There is a type of epilepsy, which when you have it, something happens to your religious belief system.

And this is one of its characteristic features. Epileptic seizures, as I think we’ve discussed in here, have characteristics as to what part of the brain they originate in. And this is epilepsy that originates in the temporal lobe, the temporal lobe containing the hippocampus, the amygdala, it’s a big limbic area, the temporal lobe, temporal lobe epilepsy.

And about thirty years ago, a neurologist named Geschwind, who was at Harvard, who was probably the most influential neurologist of the twentieth century, Geschwind published a paper first describing what is now called temporal lobe personality, which is a cluster of personality traits that become far more common in people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Once again, not everybody with this personality profile has epilepsy lurking there.

Not everybody with temporal lobe epilepsy gets this profile, but statistically at a higher than expected rate. What do you see with temporal lobe personality? First off, the person becomes extremely serious and humorless. Okay, you might say, I would become extremely serious and humorless if I suddenly came down with epilepsy. What’s appropriate control looking at other types of epilepsies of equivalent severity?

It’s specific to temporal lobe. So you get the seriousness. Next thing you get is what is termed neophobia. You don’t like new things. You like to just do very familiar sorts of stuff, the same small circle of friends, the same very relatively limited range of experiences.

Okay, if I had epilepsy, I would suddenly get a lot more sort of involuted in my lifestyle. Once again, the controls are other types of epilepsies. Next thing you see is this bizarre trait called hypergraphia, which is people with temporal lobe personality begin to write obsessively. They feel a pressured need to write.

Fourth trait and the most interesting one of all is people with temporal lobe personality become obsessively interested in religious subjects.

And these are not people with uncontrolled seizures happening all the time. These are people whose seizures are relatively well controlled with medication. And once again, well, if I had this horrible neurological disease, I’d suddenly start getting more introspective, once again control for with the other types of epilepsy.

The Case of the Religious Thirteen-Year-Old

And the classic temporal lobe patient that you see is somebody who is meeting a new neurologist and says, “Oh, hi, great to meet you. I very strongly believe that a patient should be more than just their symptoms. So I’ve prepared this sixty page document here, which is my philosophy about life and meaning.” And if the next week’s appointment comes back with a forty page addendum, this is what you wind up seeing.

And there’s this fabulous story told showing that it’s not that you get religious, you get interested in religious and philosophical subjects. There’s a great story showing this. And this was apparently shortly after Geschwind first published this paper.

And he had some neurology resident who one day all the residents were in there and the neurology resident was summarizing some patient. This was some thirteen year old boy in there with temporal lobe epilepsy. And he went through the meds and all of that and how the kid was doing. And at the end said, “Oh, by the way, I just read your paper on that personality stuff. This kid doesn’t fit at all. Doesn’t fit in the slightest.” Clearly doing some chest thumping kind of territorial stuff with the big man there.

And Geschwind says, “Oh, yes, really? How come?” And he said, “Because I asked him if he’s religious. He said, ‘No, he’s not.'” Geschwind says, “Idiot. Out of my way.” He goes storming down hall and the resident’s running after him bursts into this kid’s room and says, “Oh, hi, I’m Doctor Geschwind.” He puts him through a neurological exam and all of that and goes through and asks him, Does he like baseball? How’s the weather? All of that. And then offhandedly says, “Oh, by the way, are you religious?” And the boy says, “No, I’m not.”

And then Geschwind asked the critical question. He says, “Oh, how come?” And this thirteen year old kid gives this hour long lecture about the internal inconsistencies of Christ’s Sermon on the Mountain, the epic of Gilgamesh and sort of Enkatu’s treatment of this and Bertrand Russell’s critique of Christ. And like Geschwind just leaves the residents in their torture to listen to this kid for an hour and it’s not becoming religious, it’s becoming fascinated with the subject.

St. Paul and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

And there’s even been a paper published in the neurology journal doing this sort of paleo forensic neurology by a neurologist speculating someone who in history had temporal lobe epilepsy and this was St. Paul. St. Paul who had seizure auras as documented, no evidence that the guy was particularly humorous. The guy was hypergraphic as hell and clearly had a very strong interest in religious and philosophical subjects.

And this is fun, but what do you make of the fact that somebody has an uncontrolled seizure in this part of the brain for thirty seconds once every six months and they become more interested in religious subjects?

The Nun with Visions

And at the end of the handout, I cite a novel that was published a couple of years ago called “Lying Awake,” fabulous novel by Mark Salzman, talking about a nun who is in the middle of a rather dispiriting life experience. As a nun, it has not been what she was hoping for. It has mostly been empty ritual. And in the last few years, she’s been having religious visions. And this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her.

What she also has to admit is she has kind of become a star of her convent after being this very peripheral nobody and they’re publishing books about her visions and people are coming to see her. And what becomes apparent halfway through the book is that she has a tumor in her temporal lobe, which is causing temporal lobe seizures.

And suddenly, what does it mean that this is what these visions have been about? What does it mean that this is something that somebody in a white coat would call a disease? Is this a disease? And do I want my disease cured? Do I want this taken away from me?

And it’s extraordinary novel, absolutely getting these features of temporal lobe personality and getting at this issue, which now is the core of what this whole lecture has been. What do we do with something like this? What do we do with the possibility that have an uncontrolled burst of action potentials in one part of your brain for thirty seconds every six months and in a somewhat deterministic way that makes you more interested in religious subjects?

What I Am Not Saying

Now summarizing here, what I think is really important for me to emphasize is what I’m not saying because that I kind of learned the hard way over the years and touching on the subject in this class, what things I am not saying. I am not saying, oh, some snotty, you got to be crazy to be religious. That’s nonsense. Nor am I saying even that most people who are, are psychiatrically suspect. I’m not saying slightest.

What I’m saying is it is absolutely fascinating that the same exact traits, which in a secular context are life destroying, separate you from a community and in the right setting are at the very core of what is protected, is sanctioned, what is rewarded, what is valued in religious settings so often and that there can be an underlying biology to this and what do we do with this.

What’s most interesting here is even if this describes one single person, I mean to put cards on the table, I was raised in an extremely religious orthodox upbringing, and I had a complete break with it when I was about fourteen. And that process of completely breaking to the point now where I have no religion, I have no spirituality, I’m utterly atheist. And in passing, it is probably the thing I most regret in my life, but it’s something I appear not to be able to change.

The process of getting to that point, I view in retrospect as one of the most defining things in my life, the process of turning into that person from who I was, what are we to make of the possibility that each one of us goes through some equivalent version in our life deciding how religious or irreligious we are going to be.

For a lot of us that are among the most defining features of who we are, where we have wound up with this and how we got there. What do we make of the fact that even if there’s one case in all of human history of someone who got to wherever they were instead because of a neurotransmitter hiccup, because of a genetic influence, because of something that we would see as deterministic as your visions are due to a tumor in your temporal lobe. What are we to do with this?

What I am also saying here is it is just as interesting to ask this question about why some of us lose faith as to ask this about why some of us gain faith. It is just as biological. It is simply much less studied because there are fewer examples of it to study out there, but it is just as biological of a process.

And it is just as interesting if it has only been one person in all of history once again coming to this issue, what are we to make of who we are if even in one case somebody has arrived at that point because of just a storm of neurotransmitter abnormalities rather than the journey that all of us associate with helping to define who we are.

Now this now is a segue to Wednesday’s lecture, which is going to look at all of these issues in a much more subtle realm of this biology of what makes our personalities personalities, and this is finally moving outside of the realm of them and their diseases for what makes us, us. And at the core of this is what does it mean that biology may have as much to do with it as I will hopefully convince you of on Wednesday. So let’s pick up then.

Related Posts

• The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics – Joshua Citarella on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)
• Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Distorted Version of the Monroe Doctrine (Transcript)
• Robin Day Speaks With Svetlana Alliluyeva – 1969 BBC Interview (Transcript)
• Grade Inflation: Why an “A” Today Means Less Than It Did 20 Years Ago
• Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive? – Jeffrey Edmunds (Transcript)