Winter Patriot Community Blog

I was just fixing it for you.

"The most unpleasant truth in the long run is a far safer traveling companion than the most agreeable falsehood." Emerson

And as strangeness would have it. I was just reading this article while you were posting this....all that unconscious conditioning perhaps.

Brain shuts off in response to healer's prayer
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627574.200-brain-shuts-off-in-re...
WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.

To identify the brain processes underlying the influence of charismatic individuals, Uffe Schjødt of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues turned to Pentecostal Christians, who believe that some people have divinely inspired powers of healing, wisdom and prophecy.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians.

Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq023).

Schjødt says that this explains why certain individuals can gain influence over others, and concludes that their ability to do so depends heavily on preconceived notions of their authority and trustworthiness.

It's not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.

"The most unpleasant truth in the long run is a far safer traveling companion than the most agreeable falsehood." Emerson

Great minds think alike.

A teevee story for you. You'll be horrified I know, I know.

My husband has been home, laid off for the last 4 months. He got two free movie packages for a month from the cable company. So wanting to get his 'monies worth' he has been watching movies all day (actually he reads books and has movies on in the background.) Needless to say it drives me crazy so I when I'm around I do what I can to avoid having to watch. Now, in the normal course of our days I will watch the occasional movie or documentary and I know that there is violence in the movies however this experience has been a bit of mind blower for me. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that every time I glance at that screen there is some kind of violent image on it. I keep thinking, it is no fucking wonder we go to war a the drop of a hat, our unconscious minds are so filled with violent images we think this is the natural order of things.

"The most unpleasant truth in the long run is a far safer traveling companion than the most agreeable falsehood." Emerson

This topic, where the brain shuts off, reminds me of the conversation on this blog about:

"The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Which in turn reminds me of Julian Jaynes' book on the bicameral mind.

"Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

The cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind was, apparently, a series of disasters that caused mass migrations which pitted followers of one 'god' against another and this made their brains boil over and consciousness was what splattered on the walls. (my poetic license).

I figure this authority figure in both Milgram and the prayer phenomena could be what's left over from the 'gods' of the bicameral mind.

I keep thinking, it is no fucking wonder we go to war a the drop of a hat, our unconscious minds are so filled with violent images we think this is the natural order of things.

Then the Pentagon must be very pleased with all the violent video games that are filling kid's minds with images of how psychotics deal with life's stresses and problems.

Exactly, Greg (welcome btw). No opportunity is missed, it seems, to present violence as the answer to any problem.
And the video games get the kids to act it out in their minds with no messy consequences for them to clean up. Or for someone else to clean up who just might point out to the child that this doesn't work; that the only thing that comes from violence is more violence and no one escapes its consequences.