Recommended
15:17
|
Up next
1:49
3:45
- 2 days ago
he temporoparietal junction (TPJ) "is the brain's navigator."
Freeman explains that "people perform religious rituals, Buddhists chant, Hindus draw shapes in chalk, and Christians baptize." On the other hand, Danny Povinelli's experiments have led him to conclude "chimps don't have rituals of any kind."
Andy Newberg has studied the brain activity of praying subjects using SPECT scans in which he injects his subject with a radioactive liquid.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode10
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#God
#didweinventGod?
Freeman explains that "people perform religious rituals, Buddhists chant, Hindus draw shapes in chalk, and Christians baptize." On the other hand, Danny Povinelli's experiments have led him to conclude "chimps don't have rituals of any kind."
Andy Newberg has studied the brain activity of praying subjects using SPECT scans in which he injects his subject with a radioactive liquid.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode10
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#God
#didweinventGod?
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00From the dawn of history, humans have believed in divine forces that created our world.
00:09And today, most of us still pray to a higher power.
00:15But is God really out there?
00:18Scientists are now searching for the divine in the most unlikely places.
00:33In virtual reality labs, in the minds of chimpanzees, and in the old clothes of a serial killer.
00:44The path to God is taking an unexpected turn.
00:48Did we invent God?
00:58Space. Time. Life itself.
01:05The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:14The quest for scientific knowledge has taken us on a breathtaking journey of discovery.
01:28We've unraveled the physics that govern the heavens.
01:34And the tiny atoms that form our bodies.
01:37But science has not yet found proof that God created all this.
01:43Now, there's a new place to look for an answer.
01:47Because recent research suggests the truth may not be out there.
01:52But in here, inside all of us, did God invent humanity?
01:58Or did we invent God?
02:01Or did we invent God?
02:15When I was 12 years old, I lost someone very close.
02:20Someone who was far too young.
02:22I just could not make sense of it.
02:25I was told he was with God in heaven.
02:29But I just could not understand why, if God was out there, he would take him from me.
02:38And so, that day, I began to wonder if God, angels, and heaven were all just make-believe.
02:47Psychologist Jesse Bering is trying to understand how and when children come to believe in God.
02:58It's a career path that, from the beginning, has gotten him into trouble.
03:04I was at a friend's house, and his mother, who's a German immigrant, had a collection of eggs that were decoratively painted.
03:12Nobody was home. We were just kind of goofing around.
03:16And I just caught a glimpse of this egg out of the corner of my eye.
03:19I picked it up. I was fascinated by it.
03:22As I picked it up, I accidentally cracked the egg.
03:26And then I just pretended like nothing happened.
03:29A couple of days later, she discovered the cracked egg.
03:32And she was basically interrogating all the local children to find out who actually committed this heinous act of breaking her precious egg.
03:43When I was asked if I did it, I said, absolutely not. I don't know what you're talking about.
03:48I swear to God that I didn't do it.
03:50And then the matter was just dropped.
03:54Nobody ever talked about it again.
03:56If he's willing to sort of invoke God in his defense, then he must be telling the truth.
04:02Like most children who escape punishment for their crimes, Jesse could not escape the haunting that followed.
04:09I started having nightmares. All the misfortunes that were happening to me, you know, a splinter getting in my hand.
04:16I attributed it to God sort of giving me a sign he was punishing me because I had lied about this.
04:21The interesting thing, I suppose, is that I, you know, I didn't come from a very religious background.
04:26When Jesse grew up to become a scientist, he set out to understand why he had sensed the retribution of God in his youth.
04:33And so, he built a psychological experiment to probe just what is going on inside the developing minds of children.
04:45Do you remember Stephanie?
04:47To them, Jesse's experiment appears to be a simple game.
04:50Oh!
04:52Well, almost simple.
04:54So, what were the rules? Who remembers the three rules?
04:58Don't pass that line.
05:00Keep your hand behind your back.
05:01Keep one hand behind your back and you gotta throw it with the hand that you don't usually use, right?
05:04What was the third rule?
05:06Throw it like that.
05:07Yeah, you gotta throw it with your back.
05:09Turn to the door.
05:10You can't, you can't face it.
05:20It's an all but impossible game to win, but Jesse's not keeping score.
05:25All he cares about, as he watches from the side room, is whether the children cheat.
05:33He thinks he's alone. He thinks he's alone in the room. We want to see if he actually follows the rules up.
05:36There he goes. He actually steps over the line, so he's broken one of the rules.
05:40Sort of flirting dangerously with breaking some more rules.
05:42Oh, there we go. A very egregious violation.
05:47Placing it right in the middle.
05:49Not atypical. I think most kids, if they think that they're not being watched, they're gonna revert to this type of behavior.
05:55With children aged six to seven, a little cheating is par for the course.
06:06But now, Jesse brings in a new group of kids.
06:09Here they are.
06:10He and his assistant prep them for the same game.
06:13Can't go over that line.
06:15Only this time, Jesse adds a supernatural twist.
06:19The children wearing the blue shirt, they're going to hear about somebody sitting in this chair.
06:22It might look like an empty chair to us, but in fact, we tell these kids there's an invisible woman sitting in this chair.
06:28Now, that sounds a little scary, but we make her very friendly.
06:31We say this is Princess Alice.
06:34And Princess Alice is a magic princess.
06:36She's got this special ability to make herself invisible.
06:39Well, maybe she just, you can't feel her, but that doesn't mean that she's not there.
06:42She just can be invisible.
06:43All I can feel is just a chair.
06:45That's all you can feel.
06:47Most of this group of children act like they don't believe in Princess Alice.
06:50But when they're left alone, their behavior tells a different story.
06:56She's already thrown all four of the balls.
06:59I don't think that she actually got any of them to stick on the dartboard.
07:04And she's not interested in cheating.
07:06I think she's being pretty true to the law here.
07:11Oh, here she goes.
07:12This is what we see sometimes with children.
07:14They actually run their hand over the chair as though they're sort of testing or trying to feel Princess Alice.
07:22And she actually said earlier that she didn't believe in Princess Alice.
07:26That just shows you the power of belief, really.
07:28Jesse has performed this experiment with hundreds of children, hardly any of the kids who are told about Princess Alice cheat.
07:38They intuitively feel she's really there watching them.
07:43What we're really seeing here is an untarnished view of human nature.
07:47I mean, these are really young kids.
07:51These are six and seven year olds.
07:52You know, they've been told all sorts of things.
07:55But they haven't been told about Princess Alice certainly.
08:00Jesse believes that regardless of their upbringing, children's minds are hardwired to believe in a hidden world of spirits.
08:08A place where Princess Alice, or God, might exist.
08:14But why do such beliefs take hold?
08:19Bruce Hood is one of Britain's leading psychologists.
08:24His work recently won him an invitation to give the Royal Institution's Christmas Lecture Series,
08:30one of the country's highest scientific honors.
08:32Bruce is researching the psychological foundation of all religious beliefs.
08:39It's a work that started one day when he was watching his sleeping daughter.
08:43He was not contemplating the miracle of life, but rather her blankie.
08:49It's a grubby little cloth, and I'm sure parents will recognize this thing.
08:53Now, what starts off as a little bit of self-soothing.
08:56Soon these objects take on very strange qualities, almost as if they're alive.
09:00Children even talk to them, they think they've got feelings.
09:04They make them almost human-like, which is extraordinary when you think about it,
09:08because it's just a piece of cloth.
09:11Bruce wanted to find out why children believe these objects are so special.
09:17So he performed an experiment with young kids and a magic machine.
09:22Bruce told the children it would make a perfect copy of their toys,
09:25thanks, in fact, to the help of her hidden researcher.
09:31He then told them they were allowed to keep only one toy
09:34and must throw away the other.
09:37Nearly every child chose the original and tossed the copy.
09:42They needed the original one back.
09:44And I think it's because they're thinking in an essentialist way.
09:47This is an idea that we imbue the world with this additional dimension.
09:52Essentialism is the belief that certain objects have a hidden essence,
09:58one that cannot be transferred to a copy, even if it looks absolutely identical.
10:04It is a conviction young children hold strongly.
10:08But do we outgrow this sense of a hidden essence?
10:13Bruce found an answer by turning his lectures into an experiment,
10:17one that he's trying out today on the staff of the Royal Institution.
10:23I was in New York last year, and I bought Einstein, one of Einstein's fountain pens.
10:29So this is an original Einstein pen.
10:31I'm very proud of this.
10:32You'd like to have a look.
10:33In fact, you're welcome to hold it and pass it along.
10:36Now, I happen to have another thing here.
10:46This is a cardigan.
10:48It belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered 17 people
10:53and brutally cut them up, ate them and did some very despicable things.
10:58Now, would you like to pass that along and hold it?
11:02The cardigan, sir?
11:03Would you put it on?
11:04No?
11:05No?
11:09Most of us are revolted by the thought of wearing the sweater of a serial killer,
11:14no matter how many times it may have been cleaned.
11:16Well, I have to let you into a secret. It's not Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater at all.
11:25But just the thought of it belonging to the serial killer, for most people, it's repulsive and repugnant.
11:31And it's sad to say, this isn't Einstein's pen. It's just a regular fountain pen.
11:34Bruce believes this sense that sacred and evil essences can contaminate the material world is the most primal form of human spirituality.
11:47A foundation upon which every religion is built.
11:52I think religions capitalize on this assumption that there is hidden structure.
11:57What religions do is they provide a framework, a narrative, which allows people to try and put these forces together in a meaningful way.
12:03Psychologists like Bruce argue that this innate spiritual intuition might be an artifact of our intelligent minds trying to make sense of a chaotic world.
12:19But this innate belief in a hidden spiritual dimension is often reinforced by experience, because one in ten of us will visit this mysterious realm in an out-of-body experience.
12:33When we leave our bodies, do we meet God?
12:40Is there a reality beyond the world we see? A place where God and spirits live?
12:47Some people believe they have glimpsed this hidden world in an out-of-body experience.
12:54Are these phenomena proof of the existence of God?
13:03Neurologist Olaf Blanka is trying to discover what really happens during an out-of-body experience.
13:10What is very typical for this out-of-body phenomenon is that it is felt as highly spiritual.
13:18You know, think about it. You feel separated. Your mind is physically or experience is separated from your body.
13:26So how could this be? This doesn't fit.
13:28Most people who have had an out-of-body experience report being spirited away to a hidden realm.
13:36But Olaf suspects these voyages to the beyond take place purely inside our heads.
13:45Because while diagnosing one of his epileptic patients for treatment, he sent a mild current to electrodes implanted in her brain.
13:54And inadvertently triggered an out-of-body experience.
14:01She had the impression that she herself would be under the ceiling of that stimulation room.
14:06And to be looking down, seeing herself, her body, as well as the people sitting around her.
14:12Olaf had sent a mild stimulating current to his patient's temporal parietal junction, or TPJ.
14:23This automatized body representation, when we stimulated in this region in this one patient,
14:28could not fuse where you see your body and where you feel your body.
14:33And this kind of discoherent representation may lead to an out-of-body experience.
14:37The TPJ is the brain's navigator, rather like the captain of a submarine who can't actually see where his vessel is heading.
14:49But it has to rely on indirect measurements of his position, like water pressure readings and sonar pings.
14:58If the data coming into the TPJ is interfered with, the navigation system can become disoriented.
15:03The TPJ could tell you, you are upside down, or somewhere you really aren't.
15:16If his hypothesis was correct,
15:19Olaf realized that out-of-body experiences might also be induced in any brain, epileptic or not, by tampering with people's senses.
15:28And to achieve this effect on a healthy subject without implanting electrodes,
15:34Olaf built a cutting-edge virtual reality laboratory.
15:39Virtual reality gives us the possibility in the research lab to dissociate touch from sight of our participants' body.
15:47Careful.
15:48So, for this experiment, you will stand with your feet in front of there.
15:54Mm-hmm.
15:55Yes.
15:56Then I will put this on your head, and you will follow instructions on the screen.
16:01The subject sees a live feed from a camera placed behind her back.
16:09She feels a gentle stroke on her back, but sees the stroking as if her body is actually two feet in front of her mind.
16:17So, the brain is exposed to a spatial conflict.
16:21And being exposed to the spatial conflict for a long time, people start identifying with the avatar rather than with their physical body.
16:28When asked to move back from where they are standing and then return to the same spot, the subjects always end up not in their original position, but two feet forward.
16:42Precisely where their virtual avatar appeared to be.
16:45The feeling is, it's very strange at the beginning, but it's actually very pleasant.
16:52It's more like my mind, like my body is more the one I'm seeing, which is actually my body, but it's more like I'm there where I see myself to be.
17:05When Olaf performed this experiment with the subject wearing an EEG sensor, he discovered that the brain's temporal parietal junction was highly active.
17:17The TPJ was struggling to create a cohesive reality out of the conflicting sensory input.
17:24And the net result was the sensation that she might be outside her body.
17:31Olaf believes that when we have an out-of-body experience, we never leave our bodies, and the entities we sense are nothing more than phantoms of the brain.
17:41But believers sense God in their lives every day, not just in these rare and intense moments.
17:50Many of us see the hand of God constantly shaping the world around us.
17:55And this psychologist believes she knows why.
17:59Why did she die so young?
18:06Why did the hurricane destroy our town?
18:11Why did he win the lottery?
18:15To many believers, it's all part of God's plan.
18:20But psychologists are now asking another question.
18:23Why do we always ask why?
18:27Could the urge to find reason in our lives have driven us to invent God?
18:34Jennifer Whitson is a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin.
18:42She studies how human beings interpret meaning from signs and events in the world around them.
18:48Her interest in the subject began when she was a girl and became obsessed with a deck of tarot cards.
18:59When I was in high school, I got really excited about tarot cards.
19:03I had my own deck and I was, you know, drawing all the cards all the time.
19:08They did make me feel like I was connected to a greater pattern in the universe in some way.
19:13That the cards were giving me deeper insight than I could manage on my own.
19:19The uncanny ability of tarot cards, or a fortune teller, to see events in our lives is something many of us have experienced.
19:29And by the time Jennifer earned her PhD, she scientifically understood why.
19:35Our brains connect things, they just do it naturally.
19:37So when you draw the cards, your brain will still just jump right in and start saying,
19:42Oh, I am having trouble with that.
19:43Oh, that is a challenge.
19:44Oh, maybe I am overlooking this.
19:46It's like magic.
19:47Your brain will just start to make a story for you.
19:50So even though I don't believe that they're doing anything,
19:53even though I see them as just sort of a random collection of, like, various symbols and meanings,
19:57it's still really fun to watch my brain knit things together for me.
20:06Nearly every religion teaches that the events taking place in the world really are connected.
20:13They are all part of a divine scheme, whether it be called karma, the will of God, or Qadar Allah.
20:20When catastrophes strike, many believers see these tragedies as the work of a higher power,
20:28brought about for reasons that we may not fully understand.
20:32Whereas others see these same events as nothing more than random chance.
20:38Jennifer devised a psychological study to try to understand why people might develop such different mindsets.
20:45They came into the study and we said,
20:48Hey, you're going to see a series of paired symbols on the computer screen.
20:52The computer has generated these symbols using a concept.
20:56It's your job to figure out what that concept is.
20:59We didn't give them any feedback about whether they were right or wrong.
21:03So they had complete control over that task.
21:05This task is, however, a calculated trick to get the participants feeling in a secure frame of mind before the real test.
21:12Searching for patterns in images of white noise.
21:17Then we simply show you an image of static.
21:20A still photograph of just noise.
21:22And we say, very simply, do you see anything here?
21:25Yes or no?
21:26If so, what?
21:28Each participant who looked at the white noise saw it as completely random and meaningless.
21:35Now Jennifer repeats the same experiment with a new group.
21:38But for their warm-up, Jennifer has pre-programmed the computer to utterly frustrate them.
21:46The feedback that you receive is random.
21:48And so you are randomly being told that you're correct or incorrect, no matter what it is you do.
21:53This second set of subjects all believe they have utterly flunked the initial test.
22:00And when they begin looking at the white noise images, they do so feeling they are not in control of their surroundings.
22:08And Jennifer documented how it changed their perception of the random images of noise.
22:14Looking at them purely objectively, the answer should be no, every time. No, no, no.
22:21But what we see is that when people lack control, they're significantly more likely to say yes.
22:25I see something in this image. There's something there.
22:30Jennifer's work shows that lack of control encourages our brains to seek patterns in what otherwise would be randomness.
22:37All of these false patterns, all of these illusory patterns are connected.
22:43All of them are influenced by lacking control.
22:45So when people lack control, they're more likely to see trends in the stock market that don't exist.
22:50They're more likely to see conspiracies in the world around them that don't exist.
22:54Because it's our instinctive sense to try and react to the situation which we lack control by making sense of it and understanding it.
23:01Even if it's a false understanding.
23:10This effect could explain why religion is so successful among the poor and disenfranchised.
23:17Whenever people feel like their lives are out of control, God helps them make sense of things.
23:25There is a lot of randomness in our lives. There is a lot of chaos.
23:28There are many, many, many things we do not control.
23:31And so we have to pick out of that chaos things that are meaningful to us to make a sensible story out of our lives.
23:43Psychologists believe that our intelligent minds constantly strive to make sense of the world.
23:50For every action, there must be a cause.
23:53But there are other intelligent creatures on the planet.
23:57Do they believe in God?
24:02In every civilization on Earth, people perform religious rituals.
24:08Buddhists chant.
24:10Hindus draw shapes in chalk.
24:12Christians baptize.
24:15Scientists now believe our spiritual behavior stems from our advanced intelligence.
24:20If this is the case, do other intelligent creatures experience God?
24:27Danny Povinelli, of the University of Louisiana, is a world-renowned expert in comparative psychology.
24:38He's a meticulous scientist who intimately studies the mind of chimpanzees.
24:48I first became interested in chimps when I was 14.
24:53And I had read all of the work about how they could use sign language and do all of these fabulous things with tools.
24:59And so I thought they were pretty much hairy human children that couldn't quite speak.
25:05And the scientific story was that meant they were self-aware and, you know, for a young introspective teenager, that meant there might be another organism out there on Earth that was asking the same existential questions I was about what it meant to be alive.
25:18That's good stuff. No, this one's mine. This one's mine. You got one.
25:26And for Danny, the most important existential question a thinking creature could ask was, is there a God out there?
25:36So when he grew up to become a scientist, he developed a series of tests to explore the difference between the way chimps and humans think about the world.
25:47We're going to give Billy a little test here.
25:50A really short object and a long object.
25:53We're going to see if Billy knows which one to use.
25:56Go ahead, Billy. Go ahead. Go ahead.
25:59But you can see he knows to use the long one here to get the treat that he wants.
26:04Good job. Good job.
26:06Billy the Chimp immediately knows that only the longer stick will reach the gummy bears.
26:12The short and long sticks are obviously different to him.
26:16But for chimps, not all tools are as easy to tell apart as they are for us.
26:22Okay, Noah, we're going to try something a little different.
26:25In this experiment, the goal is to crush a nut with one of two blocks.
26:30The blocks look identical, but in reality have different weights.
26:34You know which one's a good one to crack the nut?
26:38How do you know?
26:39Because the pillow is going down more than that one.
26:42Oh. Well, why does that mean that that's the good one?
26:45Because this one's more heavier.
26:48Well, let's see if you're right.
26:49Good job. I love these things.
26:56Good job. Good work. Good luck.
26:59Now, Billy takes a crack at the same problem.
27:04And we're going to see if Billy can immediately figure out which one to use.
27:08Go ahead, Billy.
27:10Good job, Billy.
27:12Okay, that's the hard way, Billy. That's the hard way.
27:15Here. Try it easy. Go ahead. Crack it. Crack it, Billy.
27:18There you go. There you go. Good job, Billy. Good job.
27:22The ability to understand that objects can have hidden properties like weight appears to be beyond chimps.
27:32But how about understanding that other living beings have something hidden under their skulls?
27:38Can chimps sense the minds of others?
27:41Theory of mind is our ability to empathize with other people and imagine what it might be like to be in that other person's perspective from a certain point of view.
27:52We know that a chimp like Billy can approach someone, make a gesture, look up into their eyes, and ask for cookies if he wants them, or a gummy bear.
28:00But does Billy realize that someone can actually see him? There's an inner visual experience.
28:05Danny came up with another experiment to test whether chimpanzees possess a theory of mind.
28:13Watch this. Boom.
28:15He shows Billy two pairs of sunglasses. The blue ones are normal. He can see out of them just fine.
28:21Boom.
28:23But the yellow ones are blacked out on the inside. When Billy puts them on, he's completely in the dark.
28:30Now we're going to let Billy observe someone else wearing these sunglasses.
28:34And we're going to see if he knows that only the person wearing the blue ones can actually see him.
28:49Even though chimps can easily distinguish the colors of the sunglasses, and they know the yellow ones are blacked out,
28:55Danny found that chimps approach food givers at random.
28:58Chimps do not appear to know or care that other creatures are conscious beings.
29:10But human beings already have a theory of mind at a very young age.
29:14Go ask one for a gummy bear, but you can't say a word, and you've got to stay on this side of the road, okay?
29:21You ready? Uh-huh.
29:22Go.
29:24Oh, good job. Good job. Why did you ask her for one?
29:29Because she can see.
29:31How do you know that he can't see you?
29:33Because there's paint on it.
29:35How do you know she can see you?
29:37Because there's no paint.
29:38Good job.
29:39Hi, Bob.
29:40Nice job, Kelly.
29:42By somewhere between three to five years of age, young children consolidate a human way of thinking about the world.
29:51That there are features of the world that they can directly grab ahold of with their hands, feel, smell, hear, taste, see.
30:00And then there's a more abstract world also that bridges together these things.
30:05Things like force, mental states.
30:08And unlike that, no matter what age a chimp is, even full adult chimps never seem to make that leap.
30:14We share our planet with chimpanzees and about nine million other species.
30:20But Danny believes that only Homo sapiens is capable of believing in God.
30:26Because being able to perceive a divine consciousness requires a theory of mind, which we alone possess.
30:35But chimps don't have rituals of any kind.
30:38There are no cultural traditions that are passed on that are at the level of worship or praying.
30:44They share with us a lot of abilities that we have.
30:47But the human mind has something different.
30:48The core of religious experience involves not only sensing this divine mind, but also communicating with it.
30:58Does God really answer our prayers?
31:01Or is it all just in our heads?
31:03The book of James says,
31:04If any of you lacks wisdom, ask of God, and it shall be given.
31:17Hindus pray to Lord Shiva to protect them from harm.
31:21Nearly all religions believe we can petition the divine for help or guidance.
31:26But how do we hear God's answers?
31:34Jesse Baring's psychological research has shown that children instinctively believe in supernatural entities from a very young age.
31:43Now he's trying to figure out when they begin to believe those entities can communicate with them or send them signs.
31:50We create a laboratory situation where unexpected things happen in the environment.
31:56And we find out the age at which they begin to see events happening that are unexpected as basically being signs.
32:04Jesse and his assistant secretly place a ball in one of two boxes and ask the children to guess which one.
32:12However, he also lets them know they have a supernatural helper, his loyal sidekick, Princess Alice.
32:23Princess Alice can make herself invisible. That's her superpower.
32:27She's going to tell you when you pick the wrong box.
32:31I don't know how she's going to tell you, but somehow she'll tell you when you pick the wrong box.
32:36Let's say that a kid puts their hand on top of the box and all of a sudden they see this light.
32:41flickering in the corner of the room.
32:44The expectation would be that they would simply move their hand to the opposite box so that they understand that she is giving them a message or communicating with them.
32:52OK, now we're going to see a four year old and see how she responds to Princess Alice talking to her.
32:58She looks at the light but not terribly interested and doesn't seem to be motivated to move her hand to the opposite box.
33:12Jesse argues that belief in the divine requires a theory of mind, the ability to comprehend that other beings are thinking.
33:22But two way communication with a hidden entity requires something more.
33:27Children must be able to understand that Princess Alice also has a theory of mind.
33:33That she too is aware that they have a mind. A mind hard at work choosing a box.
33:39And as simple as this might seem to us, this is actually a fairly sophisticated cognitive achievement.
33:51He has to understand that Princess Alice is communicating with him.
33:54Younger children can't do this.
33:55It's only about age seven or so, seven, eight, nine, that we begin to see a clear indication that children are really beginning to understand Princess Alice as thinking about what they're thinking.
34:08Understanding in this case that they don't know where the ball is actually hidden.
34:11Younger children may attribute the strange flickering light to Princess Alice, but they cannot comprehend that she's doing it to send them a message.
34:20And while younger kids might pray to God, Jesse's work shows that only older children with more developed intelligence actually perceive answers to prayers in the world around them.
34:35Princess Alice is basically being sort of a God by proxy.
34:38She's making these things happen, like the light flashing on and off, just like God would in principle, you know, create a thunderstorm to give one a message or create a parking lot opening up at just the right time.
34:51Jesse believes we develop the mental ability to read these messages whether we believe in God or not.
34:59Jesse experienced this phenomenon firsthand when his mother Alice, the inspiration behind Princess Alice, was dying.
35:08She wasn't convinced absolutely that there was something after death, but she told me that if there was, she would come back somehow and give me a message and communicate with me.
35:15After she passed, Jesse was overwhelmed with grief.
35:20And as a scientist, he was shocked at what his mind did next.
35:24When she died, the following evening, the wind chimes outside of her window, when she had passed away, started to move and make sound.
35:34Which was odd, because there wasn't a lot of wind.
35:38And my mind immediately sort of leapt to the conclusion that this was my mother telling me that she was okay.
35:44She was giving me a message not to worry about her. Everything was fine.
35:48It's completely unconscious. It's not something deliberate that I was trying to do. It just happened.
35:55Belief is basically sort of the default setting for the human cognitive system.
36:02It's seducing us with these very powerful intuitions that things happen for a reason.
36:16Jesse's work shows we all naturally develop the ability to receive messages from God.
36:23Believers feel these messages are real.
36:29Atheists argue they are just in our imagination.
36:33And this neuroscientist is peering into our minds, trying to discover who is right.
36:44What is real?
36:46We define reality by what we can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.
36:55Inside the brain, these senses exist as electrical signals.
37:00For us, the entire sum of all reality is contained in this bundle of electrical wiring.
37:09So when our brains sense God, does that make God real?
37:18Andy Newberg is the founding father of neurotheology, a new branch of neuroscience that studies the effects of spirituality on the human brain.
37:32It's a scientific quest he has pursued as long as he can remember.
37:36Ever since I was a kid, I was very interested in trying to understand reality.
37:43I was disturbed by the fact that everyone was looking at the same reality, and yet there were people of different religions and different political beliefs.
37:50Andy found a way to peer inside the brains of believers while they were in the midst of a religious ritual.
37:58It's the highest of high-tech brain imaging devices, the SPEC scanner.
38:04I'm going to come in and I'm going to just inject you through the IV with the goal that I'm going to try very hard not to disturb you or distract you or make any noise.
38:13And you're just going to continue to do your prayer session until it's done.
38:18This woman is a Presbyterian minister.
38:21She's prayed to God daily for over 34 years.
38:24Right now, she's deep in prayer.
38:29At the height of her connection with God, Andy injects her with a harmless radioactive dye.
38:37Over the course of the next few minutes, as she continues to pray, the dye migrates to the parts of her brain where the blood flow is the strongest.
38:46The brain works in a very nice way that the more active a particular part is, the more blood flow it gets, and the less active it is, the less blood flow it gets.
38:56These are the images of her brain before and during her prayer.
39:00The redder the shade, the more active the neural area is.
39:06This is the resting scan.
39:08This is the prayer scan.
39:10Showing increased activity in the frontal lobes and in the language area of the brain.
39:17Andy has scanned hundreds of brains in the midst of their prayer rituals.
39:21From Muslim Imams to Tibetan monks to meditating atheists.
39:28So, for example, when a person feels deeply focused on their prayer, we see increased activity in the focusing area of the brain.
39:36This area of the brain, the frontal lobe, is intensely active when we hold conversations.
39:43It allows us to speak and to listen.
39:45Andy believes that in Judeo-Christian prayer, the frontal lobe activates just as it would in normal conversation.
39:56To the brain, talking to God is indistinguishable from talking to a person.
40:03When we study Buddhist meditation where they're visualizing something, we might expect to see a change or an increase of activity in the visual areas of the brain.
40:16In Buddhist practice, the divine is an abstract presence.
40:23Not a person who is directly spoken to, but rather an essence that can be visualized during deep meditation.
40:33And when Andy looks at the brains of people who do not believe in God, he finds that simple, quiet meditation produces none of the brain activity of believers.
40:43This was a scan of an atheist.
40:46We actually had them meditating or contemplating God, showing that the frontal lobes don't activate as opposed to the person praying who does.
40:54To an atheist, God is unimaginable.
40:58But to the believer, experiences of God are more than thoughts.
41:03They are lived sensations and just as real as the physical world that we all sense.
41:09So it helps us to understand that at least when they're describing this to us, that they are really having this kind of an experience.
41:16What I'd like to say is that the experience is at least neurologically real.
41:20And his brain studies show that all religions create neurological experiences that are just as real as if God physically existed in the world outside our brains.
41:33And if God only exists inside our brains, that does not mean God is not real.
41:39Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us.
41:44It's certainly this notion that there is something bigger than all of us here and whether it's the whole universe or whether there is something beyond all of that, I'm still working on that.
41:57And if I ever figure it out, I'll certainly let everyone know.
42:03Did we invent God?
42:06Or did God invent us?
42:09Our expeditions into the depths of the human mind are revealing that both ideas may be correct.
42:16Because God is inseparable from the way we see the world.
42:19The search for divine truth may now turn us away from the heavens and towards the self, where God is woven into every fiber of our being.
42:32And our belief could be the very thing that makes us human.
42:37Because that's human.
Recommended
15:17
|
Up next
1:49
3:45