God Soul Mind Brain

mechanisms for social perception might influence culture itself, the spread of culture from person to person, the development of religion and politics and moral certainties. Some of these topics I have touched on already. The belief in God, or what I prefer to call the perception of God, was discussed in Chapter 3. Cultural habits may spread from person to person through the mechanism of mirror neurons, discussed in Chapter 8. The neuroanatomy of personal morals, involving the amygdala and the hypothalamus, was discussed in the Chapter 9. In all of these cases I was concerned with what is rather than with what should be . The media pundits have thoroughly covered should and shouldn’t. The purpose of this book is not to propose what people should believe, whether people should be religious or not, conservative or liberal, or how human society should cure its ills, but to describe as clearly as I can, from the point of view of neuroscience, what people are , what the soul itself is made out of, how the social construction of the human brain leads to a complex culture. I will try to stick to that same perspective in this final chapter. I certainly have my own moral and political opinions on all these subjects, but perhaps they are more appropriate to a different type of book.

    Let me begin by briefly summarizing some of the main points of the book so far.

    We are social animals. The natural environment is cluttered not only with objects but with animals. To handle this fact of our environment, we have brain mechanisms that are specialists at constructing working models of other brains.

    These models are simplifications. It would be prohibitively difficult to model the full complexity of someone else’s brain, and perhaps even impossible from an information-theoretic point of view. The models are necessarily simplified and sometimes in error. But they are useful. These models give us our perception of other minds and also of our own minds, of their awareness and intentionality.

    Gods, ghosts, souls, consciousness—everything in the spirit world is a perceptual model of a mind and is a creation of the social perceptual machinery.

    A central brain structure in this system is area STP, discovered in monkeys and studied further in humans. STP computes at least some of the essential information for modeling other minds. Other brain structures including area TPJ in humans are probably also directly involved but are less well understood.

    One of the primary, simplest, most powerful methods used by the social brain to refine or enhance its modeling of other brains is imitation. For example, to better model someone else’s emotional state, you recreate a pale version of those emotions in your own circuitry. In essence, you project a hypothesis about the other person’s mind state onto your own brain, and then assess the details and dynamics.

    This method of mental imitation has secondary consequences. It increases the likelihood that you will overtly imitate the other person. You are priming your brain to feel and act as the other person does. This tendency for people to imitate each other is an added adaptive value. The machine for understanding other brains also serves as a machine for social learning and cultural cohesion. It is this emergent property of the social machinery that leads directly to human culture.

Memes

    It was once believed that humans and animals learn by overt training. A carrot and a stick, reward and punishment, are necessary to teach lessons. That general hypothesis went by the name of behaviorism. Behaviorism essentially denied that humans or animals could learn by observation. But everything described in this book so far suggests otherwise. By our nature, by the social construction of the human brain, we excel at learning by observation and imitation. Beliefs and behaviors spread through the culture, replicating from person to person, as a direct result of the neuronal machinery used for computing models of other brains.

    Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene . A meme is a bit of culture, a thought or a behavior that spreads from one person to another, thereby replicating. Because memes can replicate, they can undergo Darwinian evolution. They compete with each other for the limited attention of humans. The memes that are most compelling to the human mind, that integrate best with existing culture, that are best able to spread from person to person, will