According to statistics, 60 percent of people believe in God, the devil, angels or ghosts. Is it possible to make them become materialists? This task was set by a team of neuroscientists from the University of York, led by Keise Izuma. It turned out that the impact on special areas of the cerebral cortex is capable of killing our belief in the irrational!
Stimulation phenomenon
This requires stimulating the brain in one of two ways - with the help of weak discharges of electric current and with the help of weak magnetic impulses. These discharges and impulses affect certain areas of the cerebral cortex, or subcortical layers, and change the activity of nerve cells: it either increases or fades.
This is nothing new. These methods have long been used in psychiatry to treat diseases such as schizophrenia and epilepsy. In addition, they are used to treat Alzheimer's disease, pain and movement disorders of a neurological nature …
In 2012, they discovered that electrical stimulation can correct the condition of patients suffering from severe forms of depression, and magnetic stimulation reduces tobacco dependence. Last year, neuroscientists discovered that short-term, targeted stimulation with magnetic pulses increased the amount of working memory in the brain by almost a quarter!
The effect of such stimulation on higher nervous activity, cognitive functions responsible for creative processes, aesthetic perception and associative thinking was revealed.
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Braking effect
Researchers from the University of York suggested that stimulation by impulses can influence the degree of people's belief in supernatural realities, since this is also due to neurophysiological processes. By the way, similar studies have already been carried out earlier by specialists from the University of California, who studied the possibility of influencing the middle frontal cortex of the brain, one of the functions of which is to analyze current problems and synthesize a response.
It turned out that the volunteers who underwent magnetic transcranial stimulation during the experiments noted that their belief in the irrational decreased (on average by about a third), but their tolerance towards representatives of other nationalities increased by the same amount.
Obviously, the same areas of the brain are responsible for belief in otherworldly factors and for the degree of tolerance. Impulses affect neurons associated with inhibition processes, and a person's attitude towards certain things changes.
No information - there is faith
The point is that under certain conditions the brain is forced to draw conclusions based on a very limited amount of information. So, "overtime" work of the face recognition system can lead to the fact that we, for example, begin to see images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and our deceased relatives in the most unexpected places - on a leaf or a tree trunk, on toast or potatoes … We can also to attribute to the actions of other people a certain meaning, which in fact does not exist - for example, to find signs of extrasensory influence on us or on someone else …
A neurophysiologist at the University of Zurich Brugger Hospital found that those who allegedly had personal experiences with the supernatural were dominated by the right brain hemisphere, which is responsible for face recognition, certain types of creative thinking, and the perception of music and visual images.
Brugger gave his patients a test in which they were asked to compare two pictures and say which face looks more joyful. In the first case, the person smiled with the right side of the face, in the second, with the left. Those with a dominant right hemisphere should have a stronger perception of the left side, and those with a dominant left hemisphere with the right. After testing the pictures, people were asked how strong their belief in the paranormal was. Thus, a connection was established between "supernatural" thinking and the hemispheres of the brain.
Only neurons are "to blame" for everything
However, scientists were not at all going to engage in the modification of human consciousness or to prove that higher and otherworldly forces do not exist. They only tried to prove that absolutely all thought processes are based on neurophysiology. Hence our perception of objective reality, and fantasy, and subjective reasoning.