As Gay As Jesus

I am deeply fascinated by myth. The ubiquity of myth in human societies bespeaks its rootedness in human universals, like the brain. (For my treatment of the emergence of myth from the neural system, please see my blog post about neuroanthropology.)

Human beings have always had myths. Throughout pre-civilization and civilization, myth systems have been one in the handful of constants of the human experience.

As religious scholar Joseph Campell has explained, the term “myth” is not derogatory. Some may presume that there is a condescending implication when we refer to a story as a myth, particularly when the word is used to describe stories told by religious groups that are functioning today.

On the contrary, though, Joseph Campbell identified a vital, fourfold purpose for myth

Video: Dynamical stability of intrinsic connectivity networks

I posted the video from my 2011 Society for Neuroscience presentation to YouTube. Here is a video fly-through of the research and findings, which are reported in greater detail in the October 2011 Neuroimage paper of the same title. This will most likely be the basis of my thesis work, so stay tuned for more reports on model refinement, and applications toward disease identification and clinical relevancy. The PubMed portal to the full-text article may be found here.

The Scanner on the Mount: a neural challenge to “love thy enemy”

I’m currently reviewing fMRI publications about empathy. In surveying the existent literature on empathic neural dynamics, I came across Tania Singer’s 2006 publication in Nature that explores the human brain’s tendency toward conditional empathy. Subjects were recruited to play an economic game in which their opponent was either a cheater or a fair player. Following participation in the game, subjects observed the other player receive painful electrical shocks to their hand. In the circumstances where the opposing player was a fair opponent, there was a clear activation of the neural circuitry responsible for empathic responses to pain. Subjects easily empathized with the pain of their opponent, if their opponent had treated them fairly.

However, when a subject observed a cheating opponent receive a painful shock, the activity of the neural circuitry involved in empathy was significantly reduced. In other words, there was considerably less empathy generated by the brain when the person in pain was known to be an unfair individual.

Going the extra mile, the men who participated in the study–in contrast to the women who participated–not only demonstrated a reduction in the neural circuitry controlling empathy when a cheater received painful shocks: the men in the study actually showed activation of their reward pathways when the unfair opponent was observed to be in pain. It appears that at the neural level, men took pleasure in seeing an unfair person suffer.

Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011): hail to the prophet?

Steve Jobs: extreme visionary, charismatic leadership, early death, commitment by those leading the organization that he started to forever keep his spirit as their foundation…it certainly has some fun parallels with the inception of a religion.

Especially on the heels of a NYTimes article saying that–neuro-technically speaking–people are literally in love with their Apple products, can anyone doubt the unusual impact that Mr. Jobs had on the world? It will be interesting to see him become transfigured into a mythic persona in the modern legend.

9/11: 10th anniversary contemplations

Ten years to the date. I was serving as a full time missionary for the LDS Church when the planes hit the Twin Towers, unaware at the time that my own religious heritage bore the pockmark of faith-based fanaticism and violence (the so-called ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre’ oddly taking place on the same calendar day nearly 150 years earlier). I am left to wonder at the forces that deplete us of our sense of shared humanity, and cause the collective brotherhood of our species to stumble into a destructive, chaotic “us versus them” divide. Looking at our DNA, 99.99% of what is inside of you is inside of every other human being. Contemplating the long trajectory of our evolutionary past, we share billions and billions of years’ worth of common ground in becoming the upright, conscious species that we are today. The ideologies and dogmas of just a few hundred or thousand years seem so immovable and so rigidly intractable in the day to day shuffle of current events. But the cosmic telescope shrinks those millennia of cultural speciation to just a blip of happenstance divergence, when framed by the greater context of our wild journey into being. May we ever voyage together toward increasingly beautiful vistas of our human potentiality, and let the reserves of charity and benevolence latent in our Inner Voice guide our steps along the unfolding future.

Seeing “the code”

I was emailing my good friend Luke (@LH) the other day, and wanted to share part of our correspondence, because I think it is important and powerful to contemplate and disseminate these paradigms. (If you’re offended by ant smooshing, you may want to skip this post.)

Into the nitty-gritty: gradients in brain networks

The world of functional imaging research is on fire right now with connectivity studies. (See my post here for an introduction to the domain of functional connectivity as a tool for studying the brain.) Although we have miles to go before we sleep, the study of distributed networks in the human brain is the forefront right now in bridging the field of psychology with the discipline of neuroscience…a bridge which science will be trying to build in a comprehensive way for the foreseeable future.

The most recent work that I will be presenting at the Human Brain Mapping (HBM) conference in Quebec addresses the relationships between two of the major functional networks in the human brain. Namely, the default mode network, and

That Pesky Apocalypse

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.” -writings found on Assyrian clay tablets, circa 2800 BC (Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov)

Latter days? Corruption and degeneration? The frequency and ubiquity of this theme in the social milieu of modern conservative religion would be difficult to overstate. Hence my interest at seeing the same sentiment expressed in the ancient medium of clay writing some 5,000 years ago.

In my own relatively short stint in corporeal existence, I’ve heard a constant, rumbling undertone of world-ending, Jesus-coming, apocalyptic anticipation, with occasional attribution to specific world events–from Soviet

Osama bin Laden and the reign of fear

[Modified December 20, 2011]

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” -The New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13:11

The human brain is not optimized to function in a state of tonic fear. The higher endowments of our human inheritance–our capacities to engage things that are virtuous, lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy–they quickly erode under a torrent of limbic arousal. Indeed, the brain becomes an organ of survivalism, rather than the vehicle of transcendence and flourishing.

The human mental machine has been affected in the post-9/11 world by the increased visibility of terrorism as a global presence. Indeed, with the death of Osama bin Laden this week, there was almost a palpable, collective relief from the tightness born of terror’s anticipation, and a pulse of hopeful optimism that we may be a step closer toward heightened peace on our planet.

My thoughts turned this week to yet another icon of terror, and the contemplation of a world without him. Namely, the God of my childhood.

The God that haunts much of our planet waits in the hidden places, never stepping into open view, and watches to see whether or not his rules of choice will be adhered to or violated. His tactics sometimes bear uncanny resemblance to an Islamist trying to establish Sharia law: destruction on a country or city or an individual bold enough to

Ode to the Brain!

Jill Bolte Taylor, Oliver Sacks, Carl Sagan, and VS Ramachandran? Oh my! The folks at Symphony of Science did not disappoint with their latest autotune montage: Ode to the Brain!