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LadyCimarron -> RE: Why do people think it's ok to strawman an atheist? (6/30/2010 6:49:47 PM)
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ORIGINAL: LadyCimarron
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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
I seem to recall a study showing that belief and rejection were not the same brain process; I'll look it up when I get home.
I promised you a study on how a belief and the rejection of a belief are not the same thing in the brain, here it is:
http://www.samharris.org/images/uploads/Harris_Sheth_Cohen.pdf
Thank you very much. I will look it over when I have a chance.
Thanks again for the link. I read over the study it was a very interesting read by the way. I would begin by saying that the tests had many limitations.
First of all it was a very small test group of only 14 adults.
The researchers also readily admitted that most of the categories in their study were not significant enough to be relevant.
“Most category-specific contrasts failed to achieve statistical significance in our study.” Pg1
However; the experiment found that belief and disbelief do indeed come from the same areas of the brain; as stated on page 1…….
“The final acceptance of a statement as “true” or its rejection as “false” appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula.”
They reaffirm these findings on page 6
Pg. 6
The results of our study suggest that belief, disbelief and uncertainty are mediated primarily by regions in the medial PFC, the anterior insula, the superior parietal lobule, and the caudate. The acceptance and rejection of propositional truth-claims appear to be governed, in part, by the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors.
The only difference they found in the two processes was in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and they reasoned that this particular difference was common in extended tests such as these as referenced on page 5.
Pg 5
In our study, the only significant positive signal differences for the contrast of belief % disbelief were found in the VMPFC. Our analysis suggests that this signal change was due to a greater decrease in signal during disbelief trials than during belief trials when compared with the implicit baseline. This region often shows reduced signal during extended cognitive tasks.
I will admit that I am no expert in this area and I may very well have misread or drawn the wrong conclusion from what I read. If you would like to re-read the article and discuss it further I would be happy to listen to any discrepancies you find I may have made while analyzing this article.
But with such a small test group and most of the categories being statistically insignificant; I wouldn't give a study of this nature a whole lot of credence whatever the results were.
Thank you again for the article
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