Space Faces, Causality and the Origin of Religion
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/space-faces-causality-and-the-origin-of-religion_b_2474486.htmlJeff Schweitzer
Scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst; Ph.D. in marine biology/neurophysiology
Posted: 01/16/2013 8:22 pm
The human brain manages to make sense of a chaotic world by picking out patterns from the noise bombarding our senses. We don't see the trillions of photons coming into our eyes as pointillist smears of colors; we see trees and forests. We process all of that incessant sensory input and come up with a familiar scene filled with grasses, animals, lakes and mountains. In addition, we are extraordinarily good at matching cause to effect so that we can quickly learn the behaviors necessary for survival. Burning your hand quickly teaches that fire causes pain. Understanding patterns, combined with correlating cause and effect, will save your life.
Unfortunately, this incredible talent for seeking patterns and linking cause to effect has a dark side, too. Humans see patterns where none really exist and cause where only chance reigns supreme. We cannot seem to turn off our pattern-seeking or cause-effect neurons. Sometimes the results are benign: We identify animal shapes in cloud formations or see a human face in a rock cliff or in an outcropping on the surface of Mars. A baseball player wears the same underwear during a hitting streak, believing that the underwear is the cause of his good fortune. These are silly, if smelly, manifestations of our mental abilities, but with no consequence.
Rain and the Bear
The dark side appears when we attribute cause and effect falsely in a way that has long-term impacts on our behavior and society. Let's look at our sophisticated cave-dwelling ancestors. During one particularly bad drought, our friend (let's call him Charles) draws a picture of a bear on his cave wall, something he has not done before. The next day the skies open up with a welcomed rain. Charles immediately sees cause and effect and now believes that the act of drawing a bear causes rain. He knows that is the case with absolute certainty, because, after all, he drew a bear, and the next day the rains came. What could possibly be clearer?
During the next drought Charles of course takes matters into his own hands and goes up to what is now a sacred cave to draw a bear. Hmmm, no rain the next day. Never does Charles question the causative effect of drawing bears; he knows without question that bear drawing causes water to fall from the sky. With that conviction, but with no rain, the only possible conclusion is that he has somehow drawn the wrong bear, or done so at the wrong time of day, or used the wrong color. Or maybe he did not chant the right words while creating his artwork. Not sure of the problem, he develops an elaborate ritual to cover all the possibilities. In a few days, lo and behold, water comes from above, providing yet more evidence -- in fact, incontrovertible proof -- that his actions cause rain. Charles now has developed a sophisticated ritual of drawing, dancing and chanting as a means of ending a drought.
more at link
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Though the author nicely, if overly simply, presents them. It's more a primer than a real discussion of pattern recognition. What would be interesting is if the author had expanded out from religion. We're not (evolutionarily speaking) much different from our cave-dwelling ancestors and pattern-recognition dominates and undoubtedly will dominate our way of seeing and thinking until and unless there is some great change in the human brain. As said in the article, we can't help doing it--and that's doing it all the time. It's why we send our friends two dots and a curve in a circle: 
--because we know they'll see the same pattern we do: a person smiling.
Very useful for us for everything from communications to decoding genomes. Not so good for us in getting rid of much harder things like bigotry or sexism. Or finding and curing the real causes of something like gun violence--we search for one answer ("End violence in the movies!"
rather than assuming multiple causes that might all have to be dealt with (ex: mental illness, lax gun control laws, etc.).
Religion is a product of pattern recognition, but not the only one and perhaps not even the most interesting one.
