Beliefs And The Brain

[Shyone]

Imposters and Capgras syndrome

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124745692

 

Capgras delusion can be brought about by a variety of conditions — changes in brain chemistry associated with different mental illnesses, or physical trauma to the brain — but the delusion always involves the distinct feeling that the people around you have been replaced by impostors.

 

Ramachandran thinks that Capgras can be better explained by a structural problem in the brain. According to Ramachandran, when we see someone we know, a part of our brain called the fusiform gyrus identifies the face: "That looks like mom!" That message is then sent to the amygdala, the part of our brains that activates the emotions we associate with that person. In patients experiencing Capgras, Ramachandran says, the connection between visual recognition and emotional recognition is severed. Thus the patient is left with a convincing face — "That looks like mom!" — but none of the accompanying feelings about his mother.

 

Ramachandran holds that we are so dependent on our emotional reactions to the world around us, that the emotional feeling "that's not my mother" wins out over the visual perception that it is.

 

This is a rare syndrome that does not strictly involve recognition as much as the emotions that we associate with recognition. The relevence to religion is the lesson that "emotions triumph over reason." That is, the facts that we can gather may all indicate that what we see and recognise is real and true, but emotional attachment that should be there isn't, so we do not recognise the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of recognition.

 

In other words, there are indeed two sources of "knowledge" that humans rely on. There is the information of our senses (or derivatives) and the emotional satisfaction of integration of that knowledge with our memories. We ask ourselves two questions then: 1) Does this fit with other information and ideas? and 2) Does this "feel right"?

 

People that can see facts, understand them, but cannot accept them for emotional reasons are relying primarily on their "gut" feelings and emotions.

 

In the above examples, the people afflicted with Capgras syndrome have arrived at a compromise mental construct. The person that they recognise intellectually but have "lost" their emotional feelings for must be imposters; Identical in every respect, but somehow not the real person.

 

The reverse is the normal way of thinking - that we have a feeling and then, despite the facts, we go with the feeling. Cognitive dissonance is the disagreement between what we accept with feeling and what facts fail to integrate with our feelings. Capgras delusion and other experiments are demonstrating that our emotions trump our intellect when these contradict one another.

 

The brain has powerful mechanisms to compensate for such discrepancies. The most blatant is Denial. In the face of tragedy, we have problems accepting the death of a loved one, so we just refuse to accept it. Eventually, reality takes precedence, but denial is still the first reponse to many types of personal tragedies. Pious fraud is an example of creating a reality to match ones beliefs. Rationalization is common for those whose actions do not correspond to our self perception. Stockholm syndrome is believed to be a means to resolve cognitive dissonance. And then there is "True Believer Syndrome."

 

Randi commented: "no amount of evidence, no matter how good it is or how much there is of it, is ever going to convince the true believer to the contrary."

 

Our emotions are not fixed or written in stone. They can change, sometimes in predictable ways. Other emotions may take precedence (as when one holds embarrasing beliefs. Embarrassment may transform a strongly held belief).

 

I tend to think of skepticism as both an approach to evaluate new information and an emotional attitude. I also think that attachments that predate the development of skeptical approaches to information are harder to let go because once we have accepted something, we are loathe to reconsider that position in light of new evidence that may contradict our beliefs. It is therefore easier to skeptically evaluate new information than old information.

 

"Give me the child until he is seven and I care not who has him thereafter."

[Franko47]

You can actually see this guy discuss this on one of the TED lectures; I remember seeing this a while back. Wow, that's really interesting.

 

It does illustrate the power of emotional connectionism to our beliefs and cognition, and I think sometimes that people underestimate the power of "feelings" in many aspects of how they view reality.

[Shyone]

You can actually see this guy discuss this on one of the TED lectures; I remember seeing this a while back. Wow, that's really interesting.

 

It does illustrate the power of emotional connectionism to our beliefs and cognition, and I think sometimes that people underestimate the power of "feelings" in many aspects of how they view reality.

That should include all of us. We are, at some level, incapable of dissociating our beliefs and our emotions.

 

That does not, however, mean that our beliefs are all pointless or false. If the principles of the belief system 1) accord with the facts, 2) make predictions that are testable and verifiable objectively and 3) exclude (or limit) unsupported conclusions, then the belief system is likely to be beneficial. Self-scrutiny and constant evaluation of beliefs is difficult, but is the key to reliable beliefs.

 

Disagreements about the reliability of information stem primarily from preconceptions, but even these disputes can be settled scientifically.

 

We should all be aware of our prejudices. Self-awareness is more than just knowing that I am.

 

I need a nap.

[skepticalme]

I saw a discovery channel program on rare neurological disorders a while back and one of the people they featured was a woman who had this disorder. She thought that her husband of several decades was dead and that the man who was living with her was an imposter. The husband kept trying to take her to a neurologist for treatment but she kept refusing because she didn't trust him. The neurologist even came to visit her but she threw him out because she didn't believe he was a real doctor even though minutes prior she had excepted that he was.

 

Another person they featured on the same program was a man who had face blindness. He could see just fine but did not have the capacity to recognize the faces of people he knew, even the face of his own daughter. He coped by learning to recognize people by their voices and mannerisms. I believe he difficulty recognizing some objects as well. They took him to a fruit stand at a market and asked him to pick out the bannanas and he couldn't do it. It reminded me alot of the difficulties that computers have in distinguishing objects; the ability to see the shape, color and other physical characteristics of an object but not have the ability to put all those things together to determine what it is.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

To some, the mind is outside the body. The effects neurological disorders have on your mind just proves it, your mind is your brain, or at least a part of it.

 

Very interesting though.