The Impact of Psychological Research on Christian Beliefs and Practices - a source of challenges, insights and reminders

(2) Two examples from more recently developed specialist fields

(a) Cognitive Psychology

In North America in the 1950s it seemed that the only way for psychologists to smuggle in the concept of mind was to call it something else. Jerome Bruner one of the architects of the so-called "cognitive revolution" in psychology tells how Professor George Miller, a fellow architect, commented "you're supposed to get at the mind through the eye, ear, nose and throat if you are a real psychologist". Bruner noted how, at that time, to talk about thinking, for example, was considered to be "too mentalistic, too subjective, too shifty", to be truly scientific. It was left to Bruner and his collaborators to begin to return the study of thinking to mainstream psychology. The earlier reticence to research into cognition was further documented by Bruner by noting how the standard reference work in experimental psychology used in the 1950s, namely, Stevens Handbook of Experimental Psychology devoted only 27 pages out of a total of 1,362 to a chapter on cognitive processes. This seems almost unbelievable now when cognitive psychology is so dominant.

It is only fairly recently that a few psychologists have begun to ask whether some of the things we are beginning to learn from cognitive psychology about perceiving, thinking, remembering and knowing are relevant to some long-standing questions about religious knowing? For example, what if any thing is special about religious knowing? Are there similarities between religious knowing and some other forms of everyday knowing? How do we acquire knowledge about the things of God? What about roles traditionally assigned to reason and to faith in this knowing process? Dr Fraser Watts, who has written most helpfully on these topics, argues that cognitive psychology has shown that the faith -reason dichotomy is misleading. He writes (on page 53), "the sharp cleavage between rational demonstration and voluntary faith that is assumed in much discussion of religious belief from Aquinas to the present-day does violence to the actual nature of cognitive processes". It fails to recognise how what we perceive is inextricably intertwined with our assumptions, hypotheses and preoccupations. Watt's follows Kellenberger (The Cognitively of Religion) in commending serious consideration of a third perspective to be added to the over- simple dichotomy of faith and reason. Kellenberger calls it the way of discovery which he believes has a long tradition in Judeo-Christian thought, and is seen clearly in the Psalms. The psalmist sees evidence of God all around him but it is not merely the neutral evidence of rational argument or scientific data. It is certainly not evidence that stairs everyone in the face. Kellenberger believes such knowledge is available only to those who "open their hearts" and he traces what he calls this discovery tradition through a number of Christian writers. There is much that could be disputed and debated here. Watts recognises this and himself poses the question (page 59) "if religious experience is so unusual and uncertain, how can we claimed that it is based on everyday cognitive processes?" In tracing out possible answers to this question he suggests that aesthetic cognition is a helpful analogue of religious cognition. I commend the book The Psychology of Religious Knowing, written by Fraser Watts with Mark Williams, a professor of clinical psychology. Together they explore a series of insights from cognitive psychology which they believe help to understand the emotional component in religious knowing, the part played by self-knowledge as revealed in some forms of psychotherapy, the nature of prayer and a fresh analysis of some of our concepts of God. My reason for including it this evening is to indicate that developments within psychology not only challenge some traditional religious beliefs but at times provide fresh insights into their nature and functions. Now, however, as we turn to neuropsychology we do face developments which, some at least, have seen as providing a direct challenge to what they understand to be long and deeply held religious beliefs about our own nature.

(b) Neuropsychology

The Decade of the Brain. The decision of the US Senate to pour substantial extra funding into brain research followed from what had been happening in the previous decade in terms of developments in techniques for studying brain function. Developments which Susan Greenfield has suggested should prompt us to label the current decade The Decade of the Mind.But why did the rapid advances in brain science occur when they did?

Most commentators on this area of science agree that it was the convergence of developments in three, hitherto relatively-unconnected areas of science, which provided the impetus for the significant leaps forward. First were developments in experimental psychology. New techniques were developed using computer-assisted methods. These were applied to non-human as well as human subjects and this, in turn, opened up new ways to address old questions. The second development was the so-called cognitive revolution I referred to earlier resulting in rapid developments in cognitive neuro-psychology. It is interesting, as an aside, to remember that many trace the beginnings of the cognitive revolution to the work of the Cambridge psychologist Sir Frederick Bartlett. The third major development was due, as is the case in so many advances in science, to the basic researches of physical scientists. Thanks to their work we witnessed exciting developments in brain-imaging techniques. When these three lines of research were brought together, it made possible the study of how, when undertaking a particular cognitive task, it selectively mobilises specific areas or networks in the brain. Let me now very quickly try to give you a feel for how recent advances point increasingly to the tightening links between mind, brain and behaviour.

Advances in understanding sensory processing.

Forty years ago we were excited when Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that there were cells in the visual cortex of cats which responded selectively to the orientation of bars of light. Not all cells were the same. Today we know that there is a remarkable specificity for even the initial registration and processing of sensory information. Almost two decades ago David Perrett and his co-workers in St Andrews reported that there were cells in the visual cortex of monkeys which not only responded selectively to faces but also in some instances to particular orientations of those faces. We had known about such regional localisation for some time from reports of patients who, following strokes, reported they could no longer recognise faces, including their own and those of close relatives, even though they had no difficulty recognising houses, cars, dogs, cats and so on. The then available scanning techniques (CT scans) enabled us to localise such damage to a particular region of the visual cortex.

In 1972 Charlie Gross, recording from cells in alert monkeys, identified cells which responded selectively to hands. Subsequently David Perrett (1984) and his group have identified cells in monkeys that respond selectively to movement and to body parts such as hands. The specificity of some cells is such that they only respond if the hands cause the substrate to move (shown left). Thus there is a remarkable specificity in the registration and storage of sensory information.

It is also evident that the interconnections between different areas and systems in the brain are almost bewilderingly complex. On the right is a diagram published in 1975 indicating what we then knew about how different parts of the visual system were interconnected. The diagram below is from a presentation by Perrett this year summarising our present understanding. The change in our understanding of the complexity of interconnecting pathways is self-evident.

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Advances in understanding memory

Fifty years ago as students we were taught, as a result of the pioneering researches of Karl Lashley at Harvard University, that learning, and the retention of what had been learned, did not depend upon specific areas of the brain. Rather, that how the learning of a particular task was affected by brain damage depended on the extent of damage to the brain, not the specific areas damaged. This was Lashley’s famous law of mass action presented in his classic paper "In search of the Engram".

As the above illustration indicates, Lashley, using rats as his subjects, systematically lesioned widely differing areas of the brain in order to study the effect of these lesions on learning a maze task as well as in retaining the task once learned. The diagram, taken from Lashley’s paper (right), shows that what mattered was not what particular area was damaged but how much was damaged. In a way this seems strange because, a century earlier, neurologists had been able to localise specific human abilities to particular areas of the brain. The neurologist Broca, for example, noticed that a patient who had damage in an area in the left frontal part of the brain could understand language but was unable to speak. Not long afterwards Wernicke reported that he had observed patients with damage in a more posterior part of the left hemisphere which resulted in his patients being able to speak but not to understand language spoken to them. But what has happened to change our views so radically from Lashley’s time?

Fifty years ago it was the custom to speak of remembering or of memory. Thanks to a considerable extent to research carried out here at the APU by Alan Baddeley and his colleagues we have been able systematically to fractionate memory so that today we realise that memory is not a single unitary entity but is, rather, made up of a series of memories that in optimum conditions work together to serve a wide range of different functions. What they all have in common is that they provide a capability first to store and then, subsequently, to retrieve information. Subsequent studies, using functional imaging techniques have cast light on the anatomical basis of the component parts of Alan Baddeley's psychological model of working memory, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, the phonological loop and the central executive. The phonological loop involves two separate locations within the left hemisphere of the brain, the visuo-spatial sketchpad is distributed across at least four locations in the right hemisphere and the central executive depends on a range of locations within the frontal lobes of the brain. The advances in experimental psychology and cognitive psychology over the past thirty years have been crucial, because, for anyone interested in the underlying biology of memory, their task is going to be almost impossible if we do not have a clear idea of what it is that we are trying to study and explain.

Personality and Emotion

It is not only cognitive functions that are affected by brain damage. We are beginning to understand something of the neural substrate of personality and emotion. The classic case of this is the oft-told story of the railroad worker Phineas Gage. Gage had the misfortune prematurely to light a charge when clearing rocks on a railroad in New England which resulted in a tamping iron entering his cheek and exiting from the top of his head. The rod landed some fifty yards away with traces of brain and some blood on it. Surprisingly Phineas Gage, though stunned temporarily, was not killed. He recovered, and the next day, though having a very sore head, he was able to communicate with his carers. Why this particular case is so important is that a great deal was known about Phineas Gage before and after his accident. Beforehand he was conscientious, reliable, dependable, hardworking and a pillar of society. After the accident, whilst his cognitive functions such as memory and language were virtually unchanged, his personality changed dramatically. He was now totally unreliable, boastful, a gambler, and unable to devote himself consistently for any length of time to a particular task. In short, a reliable, morally upright excellent character had become unreliable, morally irresponsible and a source of little good to the society he kept or within which he lived.

A series of similar adult cases has been studied with damage to the same brain region but due to disease and vascular accidents, and has been well documented by Professor Tony Damasio. In the November 1999 issue of Nature Neuroscience he reports the cases of two children who suffered brain damage– one a woman at 15 months, the other a man at three months. The woman is now 20, the man 23. They both displayed disruptive and reckless behaviour, lying, stealing, inability to make friends, insensitivity and lack of remorse. The classic picture of a psychopath.

This, however, is how The Times reported it. Another commentator on Damasio’s earlier patients wrote, “It’s as if the moral compass of these people has been demagnetised, causing it to spin out of control” (de Waal). He went on, somewhat provocatively, “What this incident teaches us is that conscience is not some disembodied concept that can be understood only on the basis of culture and religion”. Morality, he claimed, is as firmly founded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are. This tightening link between personality and emotion and their neural substrates has been further documented in studies by Hare and his colleagues of a series of imprisoned psychopaths. He has been able to secure brain images of a group of psychopaths when they have been exposed to emotion-laden words. He was able to show how a normal functioning brain lights up when exposed to such emotion-laden words, whereas the brain of a psychopath appears to remain inactive particularly in those areas linked with feelings and self-control.

A related study of the brains of murderers again indicated less activity in the frontal cortex than in the brains of non-violent subjects of the same age and sex. In one study of 22 murderers, three-quarters of them had low frontal activity of this kind, believed indirectly to regulate aggressive impulses. These findings remain controversial and need replication and extension.

(c) Emerging issues

For our purposes here today the take-home message of this very brief account of some contemporary research in neuro-psychology is that, with each new development, we see a tightening of the links between mind, brain and behaviour, not simply linking to particular areas but indicating how whole systems are involved, linking multiple sites.

The examples I have given can easily leave the impression that the whole story depends on what we may call the `bottom-up' approach. That is to say, we can see how changes to the neural substrate limit behaviour, and regulate and determine cognitive activity and the behaviour of which the organism is capable. To leave you with that impression would be mistaken. Whilst it is very much harder to do research on the `top down' approach, there is already evidence for the importance of the conscious top-down control of mental activity and behaviour, an aspect emphasised repeatedly by the Nobel Laureate, Professor Roger Sperry. There are several studies which indicate how behaviour in which one engages varies the proportion of blood dedicated to a particular area of the brain.

Using brain-imaging techniques Sadato and colleagues (1996) reported that blind subjects showed activation of primary and secondary visual cortical areas during tactile tasks, whereas normal subjects showed deactivation. This study was an extension of an earlier one by Pascual-Leone and Torres (1953) which showed that the region of the brain normally dedicated to somato-sensory processing is expanded in proficient Braille readers when compared with sighted subjects. It is evident that training and habitual use modifies the neural substrate in such a task. The results of such studies carried out with cerebral blood-flow studies in humans have been confirmed in studies using non-human primates trained to carry out tasks with one of their digits, and then by tracing out the cortical territory devoted to the task. The results show that the cortical area extends considerably beyond the normal area for such behaviour and into areas which would otherwise be used for other tasks. In short, the habitual behaviour engaged in, if you like the top-down direction of activity, determines the neural substrate devoted to that activity.

Finally, a study carried out in Italy illustrates the possible benefits of early education in warding off the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in later life. The background to the study is that primary-school education in some parts of Italy was not made compulsory until many years later than in most other European countries. This, combined with widespread poverty in some areas, meant that few people could pay to educate themselves. The result was that significant numbers of Italians, in their sixties, seventies or eighties at the time of the study, had little or no schooling at all. The researchers saw the opportunity to ask the question, “Does the amount of education in early life have any effect on the state of the brain in old age?” One surprising result was that rates of Alzheimer’s disease – the commonest form of senile dementia – were fourteen times greater among illiterate people with no education than among those who had had more than five years of education.

Taking stock

This all-too-brief glimpse at exciting developments in neuro-science has, I hope, given a little of the flavour of an overall trend - namely the steady tightening of the links between mind, brain and behaviour.Evidence accumulates daily and is often dramatised by the media.

As in all these areas of science we have to make the distinction between the accumulating evidence on the one hand, and the interpretation of that evidence on the other. I said earlier that advances in neuroscience cannot be conveniently confined to the academy and the research institute. They will be given wide publicity and the more newsworthy they seem, the more magazines and papers they will sell and the more TV coverage they will attract.