Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainOften times skeptics talk about people who have paranormal beliefs as seeing patterns that aren't necessarily there. We even have a word for it, pareidolia (which I invariably have to look up the spelling for). This seems to make sense because our neocortex is an incredibly powerful pattern matching engine. So if some people see patterns more easily in vague or obscure stimuli then that implies there is something different going on in their brains.
This 2002 article from New Scientist magazine reports on research conducted by Dr. Peter Brugger at University Hospital in Zurich. Using a group of 20 self-described "believers" (I wonder exactly what they believed in) and 20 self-described skeptics he asked each group to distinguish between scrambled images of faces and images of actual faces flashed upon a screen. A second trial asked the two groups to tell real words from nonsense words. As you might expect, the believers were much more likely to see a face or a word where there wasn't one.
Both groups were then given L-DOPA to increase the levels of dopamine in their brains (L-DOPA is a synthetic precursor to dopamine and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier). This led to both groups making more errors, but it also led to the skeptics being more likely to see the scrambled faces and words as real. Interestingly, the increased levels of dopamine in the believer's brains did not seem to increase the likelihood of their interpreting the spurious data as real which might mean there is a threshold above which more dopamine does not make a difference.
Dr. Brugger interprets the results as indicative of paranormal thoughts being associated with higher levels of dopamine. I find this interesting because dopamine is involved in the brain's reward and motivation systems and is also important in addiction. I have to wonder, and please take this as nothing more than idle speculation, if certain beliefs could become addictive? I don't think singular beliefs could be addictive but maybe classes of beliefs that share many things in common with other beliefs? Well, I warned you it was idle speculation. David Brin has also speculated along these lines.
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You know, I can see where this would be evolutionarily advantageous. After all, in the wild a false positive just scares you while a false negative can get you dead.
So, I wonder too if perhaps skeptics aren't the abnormal ones. After all, there do seem to be fewer of us than of them. Could there be something about the way skeptics use their brains, i.e. think about things, that causes dopamine levels to be suppressed?
There's another journal article I intend to post about after I've thought about it further that could be taken to imply a difference between scientists/skeptics and others but I'm hesitant to draw that conclusion.
I'm pretty sure we all get our jollies in the same way though. Again, as I understand it, feeling good is all about flooding the brain with endorphins (and a corresponding rise in dopamine levels) but here again I don't have the knowledge off-hand to say for sure. Still, I'm pretty sure it's the same mechanism across all people.
Where there might be a difference is in those who have learned deductive reasoning skills and have reinforced that learning by practicing those skills regularly. Since those skills are all about predicting whether or not a pattern match is positive or negative, could this result in a continual negative reinforcement that results in lowered dopamine levels? Again, wild speculation.
I wonder what kind of things might increase my dopamine levels. Things such as really getting to grips with a 'complex' issue in my studies; irony-based humour, satire especially; arguing about Star Trek or Doctor Who; performing a fulfilling job.
I was a theist at one point (as recently as two years ago) and I certainly "felt" like there was a god, and was given nice warm fuzzy feelings for my efforts. I can understand that part of some people wishing to "go back for more."
As I understand it, doing anything pleasurable will increase your dopamine levels. I could be wrong.
I don't know that the 'god' belief is the same as parnormal beliefs though. Well, maybe the belief is the same as I think all beliefs are the same in terms of how the brain processes them (this is a big question for me -- what is a belief in relation to the brain) but I think the god belief might have some extra baggage. There seem to be at least two different types of paranormal beliefs (and many people hate having the god belief judged as paranormal) at least as people who have a strong belief in their religion do not seem to have a strong belief in traditional paranormal beliefs (ghosts, psychics, UFOs, etc.) and vice versa. See our previous Blast From The Past article Why Creationists Don't Go To Psychic Fairs. But sociologist Erich Goode has done some research that seems to counter that but I need to spend more time with his report and see what I think about it.
Schizophrenia has a whole complex of behaviors associated with it. Maybe the disease process underlying schizophrenia results in increased dopamine levels in the brain? I bet there's studies out there on that one. It'd be interesting to find out.
Still... and correct me if I'm wrong, but the excessive pattern recognition associated with schizophrenia seems far and above what is going on here and Brugger's study did show a plateau effect for dopamine levels.
Incidentally, J.R. mentioned schizophrenia in e-mail to me too.
Arrrrgh! I can't figure out how to make links here!
Researchers have hypothesized that excessive dopamine in the brain can cause scizophrenia. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro98/202s98-paper2/Frederickson2.html
A recent study reports finding a gene involved in dopamine regulation that may be involved in development of the disorder in high-risk children. http://www.lpch.org/newsEvents/NewsReleases/schizophrenia.html
Research findings are still mixed, however, and more studies need to be done.
Dopamine has also been found to be a likely factor in addiction. http://www.utexas.edu/research/asrec/dopamine.html
Some Parkinson's patients experienced a troubling side-effect with certain medications, which are typically dopimanergic agents (drugs that increase levels of dopamine). They became compulsive gamblers when they'd never been gamblers before. Doctors believed the dopamine agonists they were taking were the likely culprits. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/briefs/addictions/hb050712a.htm
So it appears that dopamine may have an affect on how we view, interpret and remain bound to ideas, objects or substances. Could dopamine be involved in beliefs--particularly strongly held beliefs that cannot be swayed by copious ammounts of empirical evidence to the contrary? It is indeed possible IMO.
You can just paste the URL in and it will be instantly linkified or you can select the text you want to turn into a link and then click the link button (looks like one link of a chain) in the same box you type your reply in. Also, there's no need to hit return twice. Hitting return once automatically makes it a paragraph. If you hold shift and hit return it'll do a line break without making a new paragraph.
Thanks for all the interesting articles too.
