Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

4 Shamans as hypnotists

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.

—Samuel Goldwyn

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Divination is one genus of rituals found throughout the world; healing rituals conducted by local shamans (or “witch doctors”) are another. How did it arise? In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond showed that, to a first approximation, in every culture on every continent, human exploration over the centuries has discovered all the local edible plants and animals, including many that require elaborate preparation to make them nonpoisonous. Moreover, they have domesticated whatever local species have been amenable to domestication. We have had the time, intelligence, and curiosity to have made a near-exhaustive search of the possibilities—something that can now be proved by high-tech methods of genetic analysis of domesticated species and their closest wild relatives. It stands to reason, then, that we should also have done an excellent job of uncovering most if not all the locally available medicinal herbs, even those requiring elaborate refinement and preparation. So powerful and reliable have these search procedures proved to be that pharmaceutical companies have in recent years invested in anthropological research, energetically acquiring—by theft, in some cases—the fruits of this “primitive” R & D by the indigenous populations in every rain forest and remote island. This eager appropriation of the “intellectual property rights” and “trade secrets” of economically naïve peoples is, however deplorable, an excellent instance of the cui bono? reasoning of evolutionary biology. R & D is expensive and time-consuming; whatever information has stood the test of time, replicating through the ages, must have paid for itself somehow, so it is probably worth plagiarizing! (Cui bono? It may have paid for itself by helping a long line of tricksters dupe their clients, so we mustn’t assume the payment was a benefit for all parties.)

That people take herbs to alleviate their symptoms or even cure their conditions is not puzzling or surprising, but why all the accompanying (and often horrifying) rituals? Anthropologist James McClenon (2002) has examined the patterns in rituals of healers all over the world and finds that they strongly support the hypothesis that what people have discovered, over and over again, is the placebo effect—more specifically, the power of hypnotism, often aided by ingestion or inhalation of hallucinogens or other mind-altering substances (see also Schumaker, 1990). Ritual healing, McClenon argues, is ubiquitous because it actually works—not perfectly, of course, but much better than the Western medical establishment has typically been willing to grant. Indeed, there is a convergence: the ailments that people go to—and pay—shamans to alleviate are those that are particularly hospitable to placebo-effect treatment: psychological stress and its attendant symptoms, as well as the ordeals of childbirth, to name perhaps the most interesting case.

Childbirth in Homo sapiens is a particularly stressful event, and of course the timing of its arrival—unlike the traumas of accidents and hostility—can be anticipated quite accurately, making it an ideal occasion for elaborate ceremonies requiring considerable preparation time. Since infant and maternal mortality rates in childbirth were presumably as high in pretechnological days as they are now in nontechnological cultures, there has been plenty of room for a strong selection pressure for the coevolution of any treatment (culturally transmitted) and susceptibility to treatment (genetically transmitted) that could improve the odds. Just as lactose tolerance has evolved in peoples who had the culture of dairy-herding, hypnotizability could have evolved in peoples who had the culture of healing rituals.

I hypothesize that shamanic rituals constitute hypnotic inductions, that shamanic performances provide suggestions, that client responses are equivalent to responses produced by hypnosis, and that responses to shamanic treatment are correlated with patient hypnotizability. [McClenon, 2002, p. 79]

These hypotheses are eminently testable, and, McClenon argues, they plausibly provide sources for some of the features (rituals and beliefs) to be found just about everywhere in religions. Interestingly, there is wide variation in hypnotizability, with about 15 percent of human populations exhibiting strong hypnotizability, and there is apparently a genetic component, which is not (to my knowledge) well studied yet. Shamans tend to run in families, according to a wealth of anthropological evidence, but this could, of course, be due entirely to vertical cultural transmission (of the shamanic memes from parent to child).

But why should human beings be susceptible to the placebo effect in the first place? Is this a unique human adaptation (depending on language and culture), or are related effects discernible in other species? This is a topic of current research and controversy. One of the most ingenious hypotheses under discussion is Nicholas Humphrey’s (2002) “economic resource management” hypothesis. The body has many resources to cure its own ailments: pain to discourage activity that can further damage an injury, fevers to combat infection, vomiting to rid the digestive system of toxins, and immune responses, to mention the most powerful. These are all effective but costly; overuse, or premature use, by the body could actually end up harming the body more than helping. (Full-scale immune responses are particularly costly, and only the healthiest animals can maintain a fully equipped army of antibodies.) When should a body spare no expense in hopes of a quick cure? Only when it is safe to do so, or when help is just around the corner. Otherwise, it might be more prudent for the body to be stingy with its costly self-treatments. The placebo effect, according to this hypothesis, is a releasing trigger, telling the body to pull out all the stops because there is hope. In other species, the hope variable is presumably tuned to whatever information the animal can glean from its current surroundings (is it safe in its den, or in the middle of its herd, and is there plenty of food around?); in us, the hope variable can be manipulated by authoritative figures. These are questions worth further investigation.

In chapter 3, I briefly introduced the hypothesis that our brains might have evolved a “god center” but noted that it would be better for the time being to consider it a whatsis center that had later been adapted or exploited by religious elaborations of one sort or another. Now we have a plausible candidate for filling in the blank: the hypnotizability-enabler. Moreover, in his recent book, The God Gene, the neurobiologist and geneticist Dean Hamer (2004) claims to have found a gene that could be harnessed for this role. The VMAT2 gene is one of many that provide recipes for the proteins—the monoamines—that do the major work in the brain. These are the proteins that carry the signals that control all our thought and behavior: the neuromodulators and neurotransmitters that are shunted back and forth between neurons, and the transporters within the neurons that do all the housekeeping, restoring the supplies of neuromodulators and neurotransmitters. Prozac and the many other psychoactive or mood-changing drugs developed in recent years work by enhancing or suppressing the activity of one monoamine or another. The VMAT2 gene is polymorphic in human beings, meaning that there are different mutations of it in different people. The VMAT2 gene variants are ideally placed, then, to account for differences in people’s emotional or cognitive responses to the same stimuli, and could explain why some people are relatively immune to hypnotic induction whereas others are readily put into a trance. None of this is close to proven yet, and Hamer’s development of his hypothesis is marked by more enthusiasm than subtlety, a foible that may repel researchers who would otherwise take it seriously. Still, something like his hypothesis (but probably much more complicated) is a good bet for confirmation in the near future, as the roles of proteins and their gene recipes are further analyzed.