just after jobs died, i heard some kind of neuro-dude on cnn saying that, under scan, the same region of the brain that lights up or whatever during a religious experience or intense prayer lights up when people fondle apple products. it's like a religion! maybe it is, but the argument is irrelevant as well as entirely obscure. alright, let's say that you think the human brain has a religion center, like a little neurological chapel. now the notion that it lights up when you're lusting for an ipad might be interpreted to support the claim that apple is like a religion. or it might make you doubt that you've got the religious center at all. maybe it's the consumer-capitalism center, and we should conclude that religion is a form of consumer capitalism. considering all the obscurities and difficulties of finding religious experience behind your left ear, and the tangential relation of that to what we might actually mean by 'religion' in ordinary language, one might take the more direct approach: in what respects is apple like the catholic church, or the teachings of the dalai lama? why not actually try to know something about religion and fit apple into that to whatever extent you can? religion is a social phenomenon, etc: you've got to get into the actual huge ambiguous mess of the thing to make assessments like this. it's an interesting analogy, etc., but the neurological events are doing no work. you think it's like a religion for reasons having nothing to do with neurology, which is why you pursued this line of research. alright, develop the analogy in some rich way. press on its revelatory aspects and its limitations. develop a critique or a recommendation of apple on this basis. i don't think you've done anything with the neurons except tried to pound people into agreeing with your analogy with a bunch of pseudo-scientific hooha.
let's say you found that there was a peculiar pattern of neuron-firings that buddhist monks have while chanting: they all display it identically, more or less. and then you discovered that this very pattern happens when people operate the touchscreen on an ipad. now would it follow that apple was buddhism or that buddhism was apple? dude, that's about buddhism and apple, not about the neurons in your head. it's about how things are in the world outside your head. would you conclude that buddhism was a commercial enterprise after all, or that apple was not? um, you'd better go out and look at what they buy and sell. really none of the neurology has any bearing on the actual similarities and differences between apple and buddhism. and, after all, these things are to some extent open to inspection: go look and see whether they are similar, or to what extent they are similar, or in what respects they are similar, out there, in the world, where they are actiually located.
one thing to say is that what you go looking for in neurology is whatever you think is natural and universal, or you think ought to be. that is, it's basically an attempt to naturalize and essentialize certain concepts. so if you thought the left/right political distinction was a permanent natural biological condition of humanity, (you'd be wrong but) you'd look for neurological differences between leftists and rightists (and find that rightists were using their reptilian brains, or whatever might prop up your politics) (people have done this). i hate to recommend wittgenstein, but where's the 'game center'? (well, down at the mall, maybe). it's a strategy for defending as ahistorical truths the concepts you like, or that you can't get any perspective on and optionalize. if you really tried to think about all the things 'religion' means, or the scope of activities, the ranges of beliefs and practices, that are subsumed under a concept like that, and also its historical volatility, and also all the emotional valences of religious experience, all its intersections with or oppositions to wealth, political power, sexuality, the arts, you wouldn't expect there to be a religion center in the brain, or even know what that means, exactly.well that it all supposedly lights up the behind-the-ear portion doesn't help you figure out what it means, does it?
plus it's not going to turn out to be true. the model is way, way too localizing. there is religious rage, religious desire, religious ecstasy, religious reasoning, religious sex. there is religious language, religious imagery, religious music. there are religious bodily postures, religious visions, religious dreams, religious explorations. there is the religious experience of thomas aquinas, of mohammed atta, of martin luther king, of achilles, of miss cleo. religion if it could possibly be correlated with brain states at all, in any clear way is going to have to be correlated with states of the whole brain (and, the rest of the body, and the world). let's say there really are things like a visual cortex, language processors, emotional modules, reptilian regions, higher reasoning units, etc (i say this can't be right either). then all of these are part of the religious bit.
these folks will freeze the dsm-4 into the very structure of your brain, until they revise the whole thing three years from now, in which case they'll freeze the revision into your brain. whatever faddish educational theory is in the ascendant this week will become a timeless truth about what it means to be human.
i'm surprised people aren't finding the mime center, or showing the difference between hip hop and country fans by the patterns of neuron firings, or finding the brain pattern that makes people into assholes. no doubt, it's due to an overactive asshole region, not of your butt but of your pre-frontal cortex.
