Sam Harris states that findings in neuroscience and psychology will soon provide an objective framework for morality.
Sam Harris: Can we ever be right about right and wrong?
When average isn’t good enough - Sam Harris
By Sam Harris
LA Times
So let us ask the question that should be on the mind of every thinking person in the world at this moment: If John McCain becomes the 44th president of the United States, what are the odds that a blood clot or falling object will make Sarah Palin the 45th?
The actuarial tables on the Social Security Administration website suggest that there is a better than 10% chance that McCain will die during his first term in office. Needless to say, the Reaper’s scything only grows more insistent thereafter. Should President McCain survive his first term and get elected to a second, there is a 27% chance that Palin will become the first female U.S. president by 2015. If we take into account McCain’s medical history and the pressures of the presidency, the odds probably increase considerably that this bright-eyed Alaskan will become the most powerful woman in history.
As many people have noted, placing Palin on the ticket has made these final months of the already overlong 2008 campaign much more interesting. Is Palin remotely qualified to be president of the United States? No. But that’s precisely what is so interesting. McCain not only has thrown all sensible concerns about good governance aside merely to pander to a sliver of female and masses of conservative Christian voters, he has turned this period of American history into an episode of high-stakes reality television: Don’t look now, but our cousin Sarah just became leader of the free world! Tune in next week and watch her get sassy with Pakistan!
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages – and loses – both necessary and unnecessary wars.
McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.
And it might. Palin’s nomination has clearly excited Christian conservatives, and it may entice a few million gender-obsessed fans of Hillary Clinton to vote entirely on the basis of chromosomes. Throw in a few million more average Americans who will just love how the nice lady smiles, and 2009 could be a very interesting year.
Tune in next week and watch cousin Sarah fuss with our nuclear arsenal … .
Sam Harris is a founder of the Reason Project and the author of “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Debate: Sam Harris vs. Chris Hedges
Sam Harris author of the End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
Chris Hedges author of I Don't believe in Atheists
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos - Sam Harris
One cannot criticize religious dogmatism for long without encountering the following claim, advanced as though it were a self-evident fact of nature: there is no secular basis for morality. Raping and killing children can only really be wrong, the thinking goes, if there is a God who says it is. Otherwise, right and wrong would be mere matters of social construction, and any society would be at liberty to decide that raping and killing children is actually a wholesome form of family fun. In the absence of God, John Wayne Gacy could be a better person than Albert Schweitzer, if only more people agreed with him.
It is simply amazing how widespread this fear of secular moral chaos is, given how many misconceptions about morality and human nature are required to set it whirling in a person’s brain. There is undoubtedly much to be said against the spurious linkage between faith and morality, but the following three points should suffice.
1. If a book like the Bible were the only reliable blueprint for human decency that we had, it would be impossible (both practically and logically) to criticize it in moral terms. But it is extraordinarily easy to criticize the morality one finds in the Bible, as most of it is simply odious and incompatible with a civil society.
The notion that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is really quite amazing, given the contents of the book. Human sacrifice, genocide, slaveholding, and misogyny are consistently celebrated. Of course, God’s counsel to parents is refreshingly straightforward: whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13–14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshiping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.
Most Christians imagine that Jesus did away with all this barbarism and delivered a doctrine of pure love and toleration. He didn’t. (See Matthew 5:18–19, Luke 16:17, 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 20–21, John 7:19.) Anyone who believes that Jesus only taught the Golden Rule and love of one’s neighbor should go back and read the New Testament. And he or she should pay particular attention to the morality that will be on display if Jesus ever returns to earth trailing clouds of glory (e.g., 2 Thessalonians 1:7–9, 2:8; Hebrews 10:28–29; 2 Peter 3:7; and all of Revelation).
It is not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas thought heretics should be killed and that St. Augustine thought they should be tortured. (Ask yourself, what are the chances that these good doctors of the Church hadn’t read the New Testament closely enough to discover the error of their ways?)
As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn’t also happen to have the Qur’an.
It is important to point out that we decide what is good in the Good Book. We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses; we read that a woman found not to be a virgin on her wedding night should be stoned to death, and we (if we are civilized) decide that this is the most vile lunacy imaginable. Our own ethical intuitions are, therefore, primary. So the choice before us is simple: we can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about ethics—availing ourselves of all the arguments and scientific insights that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.
2. If religion were necessary for morality, there should be some evidence that atheists are less moral than believers. People of faith regularly allege that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the twentieth century. Are atheists really less moral than believers? While it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion—delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history, or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful.
According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005), the most atheistic societies—countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom—are actually the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per-capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest by the UN in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality—belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction, societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God, each factor may enable the other, or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society’s health.
- 3. If religion really provided the only conceivable objective basis for morality, it should be impossible to posit a nontheistic objective basis for morality. But it is not impossible; it is rather easy.
Clearly, we can think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a law-giving God. In The End of Faith, I argued that questions of morality are really questions about happiness and suffering. If there are objectively better and worse ways to live so as to maximize happiness in this world, these would be objective moral truths worth knowing. Whether we will ever be in a position to discover these truths and agree about them cannot be known in advance (and this is the case for all questions of scientific fact). But if there are psychophysical laws that underwrite human well-being—and why wouldn’t there be?—then these laws are potentially discoverable. Knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality. In the meantime, everything about human experience suggests that love is better than hate for the purposes of living happily in this world. This is an objective claim about the human mind, the dynamics of social relations, and the moral order of our world. While we do not have anything like a final, scientific approach to maximizing human happiness, it seems safe to say that raping and killing children will not be one of its primary constituents.
One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns—about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering—in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. The idea that there is a necessary link between religious faith and morality is one of the principal myths keeping religion in good standing among otherwise reasonable men and women. And yet, it is a myth that is easily dispelled.
Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Boundaries of Belief - Sam Harris
According to a recent Pew survey, 21 percent of atheists in the United States believe in “God or a universal spirit,” and 8 percent are “absolutely certain” that such a Being exists. One wonders if they were also “absolutely certain” they understood the meaning of the term “atheist.” Claiming to be an atheist who believes in God is like claiming to be a happily married bachelor. Rarely does one discover nonsense in such a pristine state. Still this hasn’t stopped many people from concluding that there is a schism in the atheist community.
The inclusion of a “universal spirit” might have muddied things for some of these putative atheists, but this would not account for the 6 percent of them who rejected such a spirit in favor of a “personal God.” Granted, it is not clear what the phrase “personal God” might mean to men and women who have wandered so far from the plain meaning of words, but we can only assume that they believe in a God of the sort that 71% of Americans worship: a deity who can hear earnest and blameless prayers—as for the remission of childhood cancer—and fail to answer them, while granting those of far lesser gravity nearly every day (I rely upon the reader to insert here the most mortifying expression of religious awe ever uttered at the Grammy Awards).
Open the newspaper tomorrow morning, or any morning thereafter, and reflect upon the fact that half of your neighbors (51%) are “absolutely certain” that a “personal God” presides over all this casual destruction. The incongruity and moral carelessness of such certainty is reason enough to keep atheists (the real ones) awake at the ramparts until a proper war of ideas can be finally waged and won.
The Pew survey produced a few more anomalies: 3 percent of “atheists” are “absolutely certain” that a personal God exists and believe that the Bible is His “literal” Word; 4 percent attend religious services weekly; 5 percent pray daily; 2 percent receive answers to their prayers “at least once a week,” have witnessed “a divine healing,” and draw their morality straight from scripture. It may well be that some atheists, lacking the requisite fear of hell, find it amusing to maliciously waste a pollster’s time. I think, rather, that these figures are simply what it sounds like to ram against the error bars in this particular survey.
Pew’s sample of 35,556 Americans included 515 respondents who identified themselves as “atheists” (1.6 percent). The margin of error for this subgroup appears to be around 5 percent – which clearly makes a hash of many of the above findings. Among 35,556 people, Pew seems to have found 40 especially confused God-fearing men and women who think they are “atheists.” Their mutterings do not offer any special insight into the nature of belief.
In search of such insight, we recently conducted a much more detailed poll of atheists and devout Christians through my website. Our sample of respondents was almost the inverse of Pew's: we had 36,781 surveys completed (some respondents completed more than one), mostly by atheists. Rather than accept each persons self-description as an “atheist” or “Christian” at face value, however, we filtered our results by each person’s response to the following two statements:
Please indicate your degree of belief in the God of the Bible.
1. Disbelieve strongly
2. Disbelieve somewhat
3. Don't Know
4. Believe somewhat
5. Believe strongly
Please indicate your degree of belief that the Bible is the word of God.
1. Disbelieve strongly
2. Disbelieve somewhat
3. Don't Know
4. Believe somewhat
5. Believe strongly
We then focused on those who responded with a 1 or a 5 to both of these statements. The primary purpose of this poll was not opinion research, in fact. Rather, we were designing stimuli for an experiment that we are now running on atheists and Christians using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goal of survey was to produce stimuli of two categories – factual and religious – which would behave appropriately once we put members of each group inside our MRI scanner. We needed factual statements that both atheists and Christians would accept with the same order of confidence and religious statements that would divide them more or less diametrically.
In addition to vetting our experimental stimuli, however, we took the opportunity to solicit the opinions of believers and nonbelievers on many psychological and social topics that are not strictly relevant to our neuroimaging work. Many of these results are now available for viewing on my website.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Sam Harris - Jesus meek and mild?
If you think that Jesus taught only the Golden Rule and love of one's neighbor, you should reread the New Testament. Pay particular attention to the morality that will be on display when Jesus returns to earth trailing clouds of glory:
God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you... when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gopel of our Lord Jesus. They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might...
--2 THESSALONIANS 1:6-9
If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.
-- JOHN 15:6
If we take Jesus in half his moods, we can easily justify the actions of St. Francis of Assisi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Taking the other half, we can justify the Inquisition. Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.
IN ASSESSING the moral wisdom of the Bible, it is useful to consider moral questions that have been solved to everyone's satisfaction. Consider the question of slavery. The entire civilized world now agrees that slavery is an abomination. What moral instruction do we get from the God of Abraham on this subject? Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves:
As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever; you may make slaves of them, but over your brethren the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another, with harshness.
-- LEVITICUS 25:44 - 46
The Bible also makes it clear that every man is free to sell his daughter into sexual slavery -- though certain niceties apply:
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has delat faithlessly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.
-- EXODUS 21:7 - 11
The only real restraint God counsels on the subject of slavery is that we not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth ( Exodus 21 ). It should go without saying that is not the kind of moral insight that put an end to slavery in the United States.
There is no place in the New Testament where Jesus objects to the practice of slavery. St. Paul even admonishes slaves to serve their masters well -- and to serve their Christian master especially well:
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ...
-- EPHESIANS 6:5
Let all who are under the oke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful on the ground that they are brethren; rather they must serve all the better since those who benefit by their service are believers and beloved. Teach and urge these duties. If any one teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound wods of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which prduce envy, dissention, slander, base suspicions...
-- 1 TIMOTHY 6:1 - 4
It should be clear from these passages that, while the abolitionists of the nineteenth century were morally right, they were on the losing side of a theological argument. As the Reverend Richard Fuller put it in 1845, "What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and permitted in the New, cannot be a sin." The good Reverend was on firm ground here. Nothing in Christian theology remedies the appalling deficiencies of the Bible on what is perhaps the greatest -- and the easiest -- moral question our society has ever had to face.
In response, Christians like yourself often point out that the abolitionists also drew considerable inspiration from the Bible. Of course they did. People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral or otherwise. This does not mean, however, that accepting the Bible to be the word of God is the best way to discover that abducting and enslaving millions of innocent men, woman, and children is morally wrong. It clearly isn't, given what the Bible actually says on the subject. The fact that some abolitionists used parts of scripture to repudiate other parts does not indicate that the Bible is a good guide to morality. Nor does it suggest that human beings should need to consult a book in order to resolve moral questions of this sort. The moment a person recognizes that slaves are human beings like himself, enjoying the same capacity for suffering and happiness, he will understand that it is patently evil to own them and treat them like farm equipment. It is remarkably easy for a person to arrive at this epiphany -- and yet, it had to be spread at the point of a bayonet throught the Confederate South, among the most pious Christians this country has every known.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Honorary Heretic May 08- Sam Harris
Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.
Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals.
Mr. Harris has made frequent appearances on television and radio to talk about the conflict between religion and science and about the danger that religious dogmatism now poses to modern societies. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines. He is completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also the Founder and Chairman of The Reason Project.
Sam and I at AAI 07
Sam Harris at Idea CIty '05
Beyond Belief '06 - Sam Harris
Sam Harris: "Letter to a Christian Nation" Interview
Sam Harris - Misconceptions About Atheism
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Research Volunteers Needed! - Sam Harris
We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.
Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).
Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. We especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.
Please note: Each survey starts with the same first page of questions.
Belief Survey A
Monday, May 5, 2008
Sam Harris on Obama's Speech
From the Huffington Post:
Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:
He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism--and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid. As Christopher Hitchens observed in Slate months ago, one glance at the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ should have convinced anyone that Obama's connection to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. would be a problem at some point in this campaign. Why couldn't Obama just cut his ties to his church and move on?
Well, among other inexpediencies, this might have put his faith in Jesus in question. After all, Reverend Wright was the man who brought him to the "foot of the cross." Might the Senator from Illinois be unsure whether the Creator of the universe brought forth his only Son from the womb of a Galilean virgin, taught him the carpenter's trade, and then had him crucified for our benefit? Few suspicions could be more damaging in American politics today.
The stultifying effect of religion is everywhere to be seen in the 2008 Presidential campaign. The faith of the candidates has been a constant concern in the Republican contest, of course--where John McCain, lacking the expected aura of born-again bamboozlement, has been struggling to entice some proper religious maniacs to his cause. He now finds himself in the compassionate embrace of Pastor John Hagee, a man who claims to know that a global war will soon precipitate the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (problem solved). Prior to McCain's ascendancy, we saw Governor Mitt Romney driven from the field by a Creationist yokel and his sectarian hordes. And this, despite the fact that the governor had been wearing consecrated Mormon underpants all the while, whose powers of protection are as yet unrecognized by Evangelicals.
Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography. Examples of well-behaved and comparatively atheistic societies like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark--which surpass us in terrestrial virtues like education, health, public generosity, per capita aid to the developing world, and low rates of violent crime and infant mortality--are of no interest to our electorate whatsoever. It is, of course, good to know that people like Reverend Wright occasionally do help the poor, feed the hungry, and care for the sick. But wouldn't it be better to do these things for reasons that are not manifestly delusional? Can we care for one another without believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is now listening to our thoughts?
Yes we can.
Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.
Obama did not say that religion's effect on our society, and on the black community especially, has been destructive--and where it has seemed constructive it has generally taken the place of better things. Religion unites, motivates, and consoles beleaguered people not with knowledge, but with superstition and false promises. Surely there is a better way to bring people together in the 21st century. The truth is, despite the toothsomeness of his campaign slogan, we are not yet the people we have been waiting for. And if we don't start talking sense to our children, they won't be the ones we are waiting for either.
Obama was surely wise not to mention that Christianity was, without question, the great enabler of slavery in this country. The Confederate soldiers who eagerly laid down their lives at three times the rate of Union men, for the pleasure of keeping blacks in bondage and using them as farm equipment, did so with the conscious understanding that they were doing the Lord's work. After Reconstruction, religion united Southern whites in their racist hatred and the black community in its squalor--inuring men and women on both sides to injustice far more efficiently than it inspired them to overcome it.
The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.
Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama's candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.
But Obama's candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?
Sam Harris is the author "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." He can be reached at www.samharris.org
Monday, March 24, 2008
Sam Harris Vs Rabbi David Wolpe
This was a great debate - Sam cleaned house with the rabbi who seemed to love the argument from ignorance. Watch it here:
Friday, January 4, 2008
Functional neuroimaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty
Authors: Sam Harris 1, Sameer A. Sheth, MD, PhD 2, Mark S. Cohen, PhD 3 *
The capacity of the human brain to believe or disbelieve ostensible statements of fact (eg, 
Actions that require the influence of goals and logical inferences appear to be the product of
Although there is substantial evidence of functional segregation within the PFC, the connectivity of this region suggests that functional networks have their nodes distributed widely, and thus may be difficult to resolve with current techniques of neuroimaging.[6] Like other higher cognitive processes, belief and disbelief likely emerge from the activity of neural circuits that participate in a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral tasks. We would not expect, therefore, to find regions of the PFC dedicated exclusively to belief and disbelief. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect that these cognitive conditions are sufficiently distinct that they might be differentiated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
 |  |  | | |
Fourteen adults (18-45 years old; 7 men, 7 women) gave written consent to participate in this study. All were right-handed native speakers of English. Subjects had no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders and were not taking any prescribed medication at the time of scanning. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
While in the scanner, subjects were presented with a series of short statements through a video-goggle display worn over their eyes. After reading each statement, they were asked to evaluate its truth content with the press of a button, indicating
| | Mathematical: |
| | (2 + 6) + 8 = 16 |
| | 62 can be evenly divided by 9. |
| | 1.257 = 32608.5153 |
| | Geographical: |
| | California is larger than Rhode Island. |
| | Wisconsin is on the West Coast of the United States. |
| | Senegal borders Guinea. |
| | Semantic: |
| | Gigantic means huge. |
| | Devious means friendly. |
| | Akrasia means weakness of will. |
| | Factual: |
| | Most people have 10 fingers and 10 toes. |
| | Eagles are common pets. |
| | The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.2% last Tuesday. |
| | Autobiographical: |
| | You have two sisters. |
| | You were born in New York. |
| | You had eggs for breakfast on December 8, 1999. |
| | Ethical: |
| | It is bad to take pleasure at another's suffering. |
| | Children should have no rights until they can vote. |
| | It is better to lie to a child than to an adult. |
| | Religious: |
| | A Personal God exists, just as the Bible describes. |
| | There is probably no actual Creator God. |
| | Jesus spoke 2,467 words in the New Testament. |
An effort was made to balance each scan with respect to category content and response valence (
All scanning was performed on a Siemens Allegra 3T scanner (Siemens, Milwaukee, WI). Each subject received three functional scans of approximately 7 minutes in length. Functional images were acquired in the anterior commissure-posterior commissure orientation using T2*-weighted echo planar scans (TR = 2500 milliseconds; TE = 50 milliseconds; flip angle = 90 degrees; field of view = 200 × 200mm, slice thickness = 4mm; number of slices = 21; interslice gap = 1mm; bandwidth = 3,256Hz/pixel). Anatomic images were acquired using a magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo sequence (TR = 2300 milliseconds; TE = 2.1 milliseconds; inversion time = 1,100 milliseconds; flip angle = 8 degrees; field of view = 256 × 256mm; slice thickness = 1mm; number of slices = 160; interslice gap = 0.5mm; bandwidth = 320Hz/pixel).
All functional data were analyzed using FSL (FMRIB Image Analysis Group, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom; http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl).[7][8] We performed standard preprocessing (ie, slice timing correction, motion correction, brain extraction, spatial smoothing [using a 5mm kernel], high-pass filtering, and prewhitening) before contrast modeling.
Stimuli were presented in inhomogeneous blocks to increase the probability of signal detection. For example, statements expected to be judged
Responses were then analyzed in an event-related manner. Individual judgments of
| | | | |
Reaction time data were acquired on all subjects (mean reaction time for belief trials = 3.26 seconds; disbelief trails = 3.70 seconds; uncertainty trials = 3.66 seconds). The mean differences in reaction time, although small, were significant (t test for belief vs disbelief and belief vs uncertainty [p(belief <>-11; p(belief <>-9]). The reaction times of disbelief and uncertainty trials did not differ significantly (p[uncertainty <>
Contrasting belief and disbelief (belief - disbelief), across all stimulus categories, yielded a discrete region of magnetic resonance imaging signal increase in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) (Fig 1A), specifically in rostral regions of the gyrus rectus and the orbitomedial gyrus, predominantly in the left hemisphere. A similar pattern of signal changes was detected within certain of our category-specific contrasts (see Figs 1B, C).
 | Figure 1. Belief - disbelief. (A) Those ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) regions showing positive blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal for judgments of truth (belief) - judgments of falsity (disbelief) across seven stimulus categories: autobiographical, ethical, factual, geographical, mathematical, religious, and semantic (maximum Z-score = 3.56). (B) The same subtraction for ethical judgments alone (maximum Z-score = 3.00). (C) The subtraction for mathematical judgments alone (maximum Z-score = 3.52). Most category-specific contrasts failed to achieve statistical significance in our study. Color bar ranges from 2.0 < Z  3.0 unless otherwise indicated.[Normal View 42K | Magnified View 111K] |
The contrast between disbelief and belief (disbelief - belief) showed increased BOLD signal in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the anterior insula (bilateral) the dorsal anterior cingulate, (extending to the superior frontal gyrus) and in the superior parietal lobule (Fig 2).
 | Figure 2. Disbelief - belief. Axial image shows increased blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the inferior frontal gyrus (primarily the left), the right middle frontal gyrus, and the anterior insula (bilateral) when judgments of falsity (disbelief) are compared with judgments of truth (belief) across all stimulus categories. Sagittal image shows increased signal in the superior parietal lobule, the cingulate cortex, and superior frontal gyrus within the same contrast (maximum Z-score = 3.8). [Normal View 22K | Magnified View 43K] |
When compared with both belief and disbelief, judgments of uncertainty were associated with a positive signal change in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Fig 3) and decreased signal in the caudate (Fig 4).
 | Figure 3. Uncertainty. The above figure shows increased signal in the anterior cingulate and superior frontal gyrus during those trials in which subjects were unable to judge the truth or falsity of a given statement. (A) Uncertainty - belief (maximum Z-score = 3.98). (B) Uncertainty - disbelief (maximum Z-score = 4.16). This subtraction also yielded increased signal in the posterior cingulate. [Normal View 35K | Magnified View 83K] |
 | Figure 4. Belief and disbelief - uncertainty. (A) Increased blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the head of the caudate, primarily in the left hemisphere, in all belief trials - all uncertainty trials (maximum Z-score = 3.46). (B) Increased signal in the head and tail of the caudate, primarily in the right hemisphere, in all disbelief trials - all uncertainty trials (maximum Z-score = 4.08). There is increased signal in the anterior insula, bilaterally. Color bar ranges from 2.5 < Z 3.0. [Normal View 33K | Magnified View 76K] |
| | | | |
Several psychological studies[9-11] appear to support Spinoza's conjecture[12] that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection. Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise. Our behavioral data support this hypothesis, in so far as subjects judged statements to be
fMRI studies in general have several limitations. Perhaps first and most important are those of statistical power and sensitivity. We chose to analyze our data at extremely conservative thresholds to exclude the possibility of type I (false-positive) detection errors, reducing our susceptibility to the problem of multiple comparisons. This necessarily increases our type II error (false-negative rate). Thus, we may have failed to detect activity in additional brain regions involved in the formation of belief states. Furthermore, in whole-brain studies such as these, the analyses implicitly assume uniform detection sensitivity throughout the brain, though it is well known that several brain regions, including the orbitofrontal and rectal gyri, show reduced magnetic resonance signal in the low-bandwidth fast imaging scans used for fMRI because of the relatively inhomogeneous magnetic field created there. Thus, false-negative rate may be further increased in these brain areas.
Field inhomogeneity also tends to increase the magnitude of motion artifacts. When motion is correlated to the stimuli, this can produce false-positive activations. The interleaved event-related design for our study greatly reduced the possibility of such false-positive activation, however. We note also that we did not observe or control for eye movements, and we cannot exclude the possibility that some of the brain activity we see is related to eye movements, though there is little reason to expect a strong correlation of such movements, or their cortical control, with the stimulus timing.
We operationalized the states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty by having subjects rate statements as
This is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to study belief at the level of the brain. Consequently, there was little basis to generate a hypothesis about the specific neural correlates of belief before scanning, apart from anticipating regions of interest in the PFC. Post hoc analyses are a flaw of many neuroimaging studies, and we acknowledge the importance of distinguishing between activations predicted by hypothesis and those that arise without a prior prediction.
The VMPFC receives strong reciprocal connections from the limbic system, the basal ganglia, and the association cortex of the parietal lobe. This region of the frontal lobes appears to be instrumental in linking factual knowledge with relevant emotional associations,[4] in modulating behavior in response to changing reward contingencies,[13] and in goal-based action selection.[14] The VMPFC is also activated by reasoning tasks that incorporate high emotional salience.[15][16] Individuals with VMPFC lesions test normally on a variety of executive function tasks, but often do not integrate appropriate emotional responses into their reasoning about the world. They also fail to habituate normally to unpleasant somatosensory stimuli.[17] The circuitry in this region that links decision making to emotions appears to be rather specific because VMPFC lesions do not disrupt fear conditioning, or the normal modulation of memory by emotionally salient stimuli.[4] Although reasoning appropriately about the likely consequences of their actions, these individuals appear unable to feel the difference between good and bad choices.
In our study, the only significant positive signal differences for the contrast of belief - disbelief were found in the VMPFC. Our analysis suggests that this signal change was due to a greater decrease in signal during disbelief trials than during belief trials when compared with the implicit baseline. This region often shows reduced signal during extended cognitive tasks.[18] The VMPFC also has been implicated in ongoing reality monitoring, and lesions here can lead to spontaneous confabulation.[19] Whatever its cause at the level of the brain, confabulation appears to be a condition in which belief processing has run amok because of a failure to subject emergent memories and associations to ongoing truth-testing.
The involvement of the VMPFC in belief processing suggests an anatomic link between the purely cognitive aspects of belief and emotion/reward. Even judging the truth and falsity of emotionally neutral propositions activated brain regions that are strongly connected to the limbic system. It is not clear from these data whether emotional engagement enters directly into the assessment of propositional validity or whether it is a secondary consequence of the cognitive process, but the fact that ethical belief showed a similar pattern of activation to mathematical belief suggests that the physiological difference between belief and disbelief can be independent of a proposition's content and affective associations (see Figs 1B, C).
We found a similar pattern of activation in the frontal lobes for the contrast disbelief - belief as has been found for negative - positive responses in the Sternberg working memory task (in which subjects are asked to judge whether a newly presented stimulus matches, or fails to match, a remembered one).[20] Judgments of propositional falsity (vs truth) in our study and negative responses (vs positive) in the Sternberg task appear to be similar in cognitive terms, and it seems natural that they should share some of the same neural correlates. (It is also notable that negative responses in the Sternberg task take longer than positive ones, regardless of stimulus set size.) In our task, however, the rejection condition (disbelief) also showed increased signal in medial regions of superior parietal lobule, bilaterally (see Fig 2). This is an area that has strong connectivity with the medial PFC, though its recruitment in the present task is not readily explained based on prior studies. This contrast also showed signal in the dorsal portion of the ACC, a region that is activated when subjects judge the self-relevance of words.[21] It does not appear surprising that judgments of self-relevance - non-self-relevance and judgments of truth - falsity would invoke similar regions of processing because both tasks require that propositions (at least tacitly) be judged for their validity.
When compared with both belief and uncertainty, disbelief was associated in our study with bilateral activation of the anterior insula (see Figs 2, 4B), a primary region for the sensation of taste.[22][23] The anterior insula has been regularly linked to pain perception[24] and even to the perception of pain in others.[25] This region, together with left frontal operculum (also active in the contrast disbelief - belief), appears to mediate negatively valenced feelings such as disgust.[26] Studies of olfaction have shown that the left frontal operculum is engaged when subjects are required to make active judgments about the unpleasantness of odors.[27] Thus, regions that have been regularly implicated in the hedonic appraisal of stimuli, often negative, appeared in our study to respond preferentially when subjects rejected written statements as
In phenomenological terms, uncertainty is a state in which a given representation of the world cannot be adopted as a guide to subsequent behavior, cognition, or emotional processing. If a person does not know what he or she believes to be true (eg,
The contrasts uncertainty - belief and uncertainty - disbelief yielded positive signal in the ACC. This region of the medial PFC has been widely implicated in error detection[28] and response conflict,[29][30] and regularly responds to increases in cognitive load and interference.[31] It has also been shown to play a role in the perception of pain.[32] With respect to its cytoarchitecture, the ACC has been subdivided into dorsal and ventral sections. The ventral ACC is phylogenically older, projects primarily to limbic structures, and is more often associated with emotional processing. The dorsal ACC has few connections to the limbic system and is more often implicated in cognitive functions.[33] In our study, although there was considerable overlap in the contrasts uncertainty - belief and uncertainty - disbelief, they yielded a BOLD signal difference primarily in dorsal (cognitive) and ventral (emotional) regions of the ACC, respectively. This leads us to conclude that these regions of the ACC differentially contribute to judgments of truth and falsity.
Response conflict and uncertainty might share many features in common. Surely a conflict between judging a statement to be
Differences in reaction time are generally interpreted as differences in cognitive load. The fact that the reaction time data for disbelief and uncertainty trials were statistically indistinguishable, although these trials yielded different patterns of neural activation in our paired contrasts, makes it unlikely that cognitive load differences account for the signal changes we detected in this experiment.
Our results also suggest a role for the basal ganglia in mediating the cognitive and behavioral differences between decision and indecision because both belief and disbelief showed increased signal in the caudate when compared with uncertainty (see Fig 4). It has long been believed that one of the functions of the basal ganglia is to provide a route by which cortical association areas can influence motor action. Projections to the striatum from association cortex predominantly run through the caudate, whereas inputs from sensorimotor cortex are largely mediated by the putamen.[34] Projections from the orbital and medial PFC appear to primarily target the medial edge of the caudate.[35] The caudate has displayed context-specific, anticipatory, and reward-related activity in a variety of animal studies[36] and has been implicated in cognitive planning in humans.[37] It has also been shown to respond to feedback in both reasoning and guessing tasks when compared with the same tasks without feedback.[38] In cognitive terms, one of the principal features of feedback is that it systematically removes uncertainty. The fact that both belief and disbelief showed highly localized signal changes in the caudate, when compared with uncertainty, appears to implicate basal ganglia circuits in the acceptance or rejection of propositions about the world.
The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs. Indeed, personhood is largely the result of the capacity of a brain to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of countless others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions of truth and falsity, logical necessity and contradiction, human beings are able to knit together private visions of the world that largely cohere. The results of our study suggest that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty are mediated primarily by regions in the medial PFC, the anterior insula, the superior parietal lobule, and the caudate. The acceptance and rejection of propositional truth-claims appear to be governed, in part, by the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors.
These results suggest that the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty may one day be distinguished reliably, in real time, by techniques of neuroimaging. This would have obvious implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect during the process of drug design, and for the study of any higher-cognitive phenomenon in which the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty might be a relevant variable.
| References |
| | | | |
Posts
