No. 29, April 2010
CHURCHES AS 'SEROTONIN FACTORIES'
AND WHAT RELIGION HAS IN COMMON
WITH PROZAC
During the recent holy holidays of Easter and Passover, many people worldwide gathered in churches and temples and around the family table to share in communal rituals as they observed their religious faith. While there is an important element of private spirituality in the major religions, the essence of religious identity is social. What if it is discovered that the source and essence of this identity results not from theological commitment and texts but from operations of the brain? That religion is a product of neurophysiologic engagement?
In the fractious debate on the existence of God and the nature of religion, two distinguished scientists radically alter the discussion by taking a perspective rooted in evolutionary biology with a focus on brain science. In God's Brain, renowned anthropologist Lionel Tiger and pioneering neuroscientist Michael McGuire elucidate perennial questions about religion: What is its purpose? How did it arise? What is its source? And -- most interestingly -- why does every known culture have some form of it?
Robin Fox, university professor of social theory at Rutgers University says, "With economy, evidence, and no little wit and elegance, Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire look for the answer to religion's ubiquity and persistence in the only place possible: the human brain."
What they've found is deceptively simple, yet at the same time highly complex: The human brain creates religion and its varied concepts of God, and in turn feeds on its creation to satisfy innate neurological and associated social needs.
"Tiger and McGuire have concocted an amazing and insightful look -- based on sound science -- into how the human brain seeks religion," says R. Curtis Ellison, MD, professor of medicine and public health at Boston University School of Medicine. "Their book beautifully describes how belief, ritual, and socialization within a closed group work together to help humans survive the stresses of everyday life."
Brain science reveals that humans and other primates alike are beset by unavoidable sources of stress that the authors describe as "brainpain." To cope with this natural affliction, people seek to "brainsoothe." In God's Brain, Tiger and McGuire look at how humans use religion and its social structures as one way to induce "brainsoothing" as a relief for innate anxiety.
Lionel Tiger
� Joyce Ravid
 | In a March 27, 2010 Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "Is the Supernatural Only Natural?" Tiger noted that "religious groups are intensely social, and hitherto unexpected links between social behavior and brain chemistry are now almost routinely identified. One such connection, identified at UCLA Medical School by [God's Brain co-author] Michael McGuire, is
between secretion of the neurotransmitter serotonin and the sense of status an individual possesses -- which for well or ill led to psychoactive drugs such as Prozac."
In a Maclean's magazine interview, Tiger explained that churches are veritable "serotonin factories" saying "We now know that the feeling of oceanic identification with others in an assembly -- a church assembly or whenever -- is not magical, it's neurophysiological." He has other times noted that a similar phenomenon can be experienced through other communal experiences, be it a rock concert or an exercise class.
The God's Brain thesis provides key insights into the complexities of our brain and the role of religion, perhaps the brain's most remarkable creation. Among other topics, the authors consider religion's role in providing positive socialization, its seeming obsession with regulating sex, creating an afterlife, how religion's rules of behavior influence the law, the common biological scaffolding between nonhuman primates and humans and how this affects religion, a detailed look at brain chemistry and how it changes as a result of stress, and evidence that the palliative effects of religion on brain chemistry are not matched by nonreligious remedies.
God's Brain is "a scientific take on religion that is not at the same time trying to destroy it," notes Melvin Konner, author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit.
Indeed, in his Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Tiger asserted that "there is little utility in the notion presented with varying acerbity and intensity by writers, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who announce that believers in religion are deluded or intellectually defective. This cavalier disrespect of the mass of humankind contains a biologically fatal if not foolish idea: that the vast majority of our species is somehow missing the boat... ." He added, "The stunning possibility is that religion will find its sturdiest roots in the natural, not the supernatural. Many people will reject this given the hectoring sense of their own perfection many religions have declaimed so loudly and so forever. Nevertheless, the increasingly convincing research concerning the moist meat in our skull suggests that it is so."
Lionel Tiger is the bestselling author of Men in Groups, The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox), The Pursuit of Pleasure, Optimism: The Biology of Hope, and The Decline of Males. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Harvard Business Review, and Brain and Behavioral Science. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
Michael McGuire, MD
 | Michael McGuire, MD is the author or editor of ten books, including Darwinian
Psychiatry (with A. Troisi). McGuire is the president of the Biomedical Research Foundation, director of the Bradshaw Foundation and the Gruter Institute of Law and Behavior, and a trustee of the International Society of Human Ethology. Formerly, he was a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles and editor of Ethology and Sociobiology.
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Lionel Tiger has given several fascinating interviews in the past month on the ideas presented in God's Brain. Enjoy a few of them here:
For Good Reason podcast interview
CBC-TV "The Hour"
CBC Radio "The Current" (Scroll to Part Two)
The National Post
Maclean's magazine
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