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As with emotionally drawn-out religious initiations, neurobiological studies of stress disorders indicate that subjects become intensely absorbed by … - Scott Atran
" "As with emotionally drawn-out religious initiations, neurobiological studies of stress disorders indicate that subjects become intensely absorbed by sensory displays. The mystical experiences of schizophrenics and temporal lobe epileptics, which may be at the extreme end of the "normal" distribution of religious experience, also exhibit intense sensory activity. These may help to inspire new religions. There is no evidence, however, that more "routine" religious experiences that commit the bulk of humanity to the supernatural have any characteristic pattern of brain activity.
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About Scott Atran
Scott Atran (born February 6, 1952) is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence and religion, and has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders.
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Another ridge includes social interaction schema. Some of these schema may have aspects that go far back in evolutionary time, such as those involved in detecting predators and seeking protectors, or that govern direct "tit-for-tat" reciprocity (you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours; if you bite me, then I'll bite you). Other social interaction schema may have elements common to some species of social mammals (e.g., bats, wolves, monkeys, and apes). Examples include certain systematically recurrent forms of delayed reciprocity (you help me now and I'll help you later), indirect reciprocity (I'll help those who help those who help me; the enemies of my enemies are my friends), and greeting displays of submission-domination. Still other social interaction schema appear to be unique to humans, such as making decisions to cooperate on the basis of social signs of reputation rather than on the basis of individual observation and experience, or in offering and obtaining future commitments of an indeterminate nature (when the chips are down, I'll help you, whatever the situation). Only humans, it appears, willingly commit their lives to groups of nonkin.
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In the course of life, all such systems (i.e., the different evolutionary ridges) are somewhat functionally interdependent, as are components within each system (i.e., the different programs, schema, modules) . Nevertheless, each system and system component has a somewhat distinct evolutionary history and time line. There is no single origin of religion, nor any necessary and sufficient set of functions that religion serves. Rather, there is a family of evolutionary-compatible functions that all societies more or less realize but that no one society need realize in full.
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