Zombie brains—freed from the metabolic costs of self-awareness—exhibit reduced glucose metabolism in those areas, as well as in the prefrontal cortex, superior parietal gyrus and the left angular gyrus; this accounts the fractionally-reduced temperature of the zombie brain. Interestingly, the same metabolic depression can be found in the brains of clinically insane murderers.[28]
I’d like to start this section by emphasising how utterly cool Portia’s eight-legged namesake is in real life. That stuff about improvisational hunting strategies, mammalian-level problem-solving and visual acuity all contained within a time-sharing bundle of neurons smaller than a pinhead—God’s own truth, all of it.[29],[30],[31],[32]
That said, the time-sharing cognitive slime mold at Icarus is even cooler. Given the limitations of Human telematter technology at the end of the twenty-first century—and given that any invasive agent hitching a ride on someone else’s beam would be well-advised to keep its structural complexity to a minimum—the capacity for some kind of self-assembly is going to be highly desirable once you reach your destination. Miras et al describe a process that might fit the rudiments of such a bill, at least.[33],[34] Once it starts assembling itself, I imagine that Portia might function something like Cooper’s “iCHELLs”:[35] inorganic metal cells, capable of reactions you could call “metabolic” without squinting too hard. Maybe with a sprinkling of magical fairy-dust plasma[36] (although I’m guessing those two processes might be incompatible).
An enormous amount of recent research has been published about the natural history of the religious impulse and the adaptive value of theistic superstition.[37],[38],[39],[40],[41],[42],[43],[44] It’s no great surprise that religion confers adaptive benefits, given the near-universality of that impulse among our species.[45],[46],[47],[48] If you’re interested and you’ve got ninety minutes to spare, I’d strongly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s brilliant lecture on the evolutionary and neurological roots of religious belief.[49]
It’s not all food taboos and slashed foreskins, though. Far more relevant to the current discussion is the fact that religious minds exhibit certain characteristic neurological traits.[50] Believers, for example, are better than nonbelievers at finding patterns in visual data.[51] Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing).[52] There’s even circumstantial evidence that Christians are less ruled by their emotions than are nonbelievers[53] (although whether the rules they follow instead are any more rational is another question). Certain religious rituals are so effective at focusing the mind and relieving stress that some have suggested coopting them into a sort of “religion for atheists.”[54]
An obvious significant down side is that most religious beliefs—gods, souls, Space Disneyland—are held at best in the complete absence of empirical evidence (and are more frequently held in the face of opposing evidence). While it remains impossible to disprove the negative, for most practical purposes it’s reasonable to describe such beliefs as simply wrong.
It was only during the writing this book that it occurred to me to wonder if one couldn’t say the same about science.
Lutterodt’s comparison of religious faith with the physiology of vision came to me while I was reading Inzlicht et al,[55] a paper that describes religion as an internal model of reality that confers benefits even though it’s wrong. While that idea is nothing new, the way it was phrased was so reminiscent of the way our brains work—the old survival-engines-not-truth-detectors shtick—that I had to wonder if the whole right/wrong distinction might be off the table the moment any worldview passes through a Human nervous system. And the next paper[56] I read suggested that certain cosmic mysteries might not be a function of dark energy so much as inconstancies in the laws of physics—and if that were case, there’d really be no way to tell…
Of course, there’s absolutely no denying the functional utility of the scientific method, especially when you compare it to the beads and rattles of those guys with the funny hats. Still, I have to admit: not entirely comfy with where that seemed to be heading for a bit.
The Bicameral Order did not begin as a hive. They began as a fortunate juxtaposition of adaptive malfunctions and sloppy fitness.
The name does not derive from Julian Jaynes.[57] Rather, both Jaynes and the Order recall a time when paired hemispheres were the only option: the right a pragmatic and unimaginative note-taker, the left a pattern-matcher.[58] Think of “gene duplication,” that process by which genetic replication occasionally goes off the rails to serve up multiple copies of a gene where only one had existed before; these become “spares” available for evolutionary experimentation. Hemispheric lateralization was a little like that. A pragmatist core; a philosopher core.
The left hemisphere is on a quest for meaning, even when there isn’t any. False memories, pareidolia—the stress-induced perception of pattern in noise[59]—these are Lefty’s doing. When there are no data, or no meaning, Lefty may find it anyway. Lefty gets religion.
But sometimes patterns are subtle. Sometimes, noise is almost all there is: a kind of noise anyway, at least to classically evolved senses. Smeared probabilities, waves that obscure the location or momentum of whatever you’re squinting at. Virtual particles that elude detection anywhere past the edges of black holes. Maybe, when you move a few orders of magnitude away from the world our senses evolved to parse, a touch of pareidolia can take up the slack. Like the feather that evolved for thermoregulation and then got press-ganged, fully formed, into flight duty, perhaps the brain’s bogus-purpose-seeking wetware might be repurposed to finding patterns it once had to invent. Maybe the future is a fusion of the religious and the empirical.
28
Adrian Raine, Monte Buchsbaum, and Lori Lacasse, “Brain Abnormalities in Murderers Indicated by Positron Emission Tomography,”
29
Duane P. Harland and Robert R. Jackson, “Eight-legged Cats and How They See—a Review of Recent Research on Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae). 16 (2000): 231–240.,”
30
D. P. Harland and R. R. Jackson, “A Knife in the Back: Use of Prey-Specific Attack Tactics by Araneophagic Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae),”
31
M. Tarsitano, “Araneophagic Jumping Spiders Discriminate Between Detour Routes That Do and Do Not Lead to Prey,”
33
H. N. Miras et al., “Unveiling the Transient Template in the Self-Assembly of a Molecular Oxide Nanowheel,”
34
Katharine Sanderson, “Life in 5000 Hours: Recreating Evolution in the Lab,”
35
Geoffrey J. T. Cooper, “Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs,”
36
V. N. Tsytovich, “From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures Towards Inorganic Living Matter,”
37
Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality,”
38
Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior,”
39
Jesse M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,”
40
Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game,”
41
Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-world Setting,”
42
Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior,”
43
Jeffrey P. Schloss and Michael J. Murray, “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: a Critical Review,”
45
Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhovel (Eds),
46
Justin L. Barrett, “The God Issue: We Are All Born Believers,”
47
Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?,”
48
Elizabeth Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,”
49
50
Sam Harris et al., “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief,”
51
Lorenza S. Colzato, Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg, and Bernhard Hommel, “Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention,”
52
Sara W. Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,”
53
Laura Saslow, “My Brother’s Keeper?: Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals,”
54
Graham Lawton, “The God Issue: Religion for Atheists,”
55
Michael Inzlicht, Alexa M. Tullett, and Marie Good, “The Need to Believe: a Neuroscience Account of Religion as a Motivated Process,”
56
George Ellis, “Cosmology: Patchy Solutions,”
57
Julian Jaynes,
58
Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,”
59
Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,”