Sceptics subconsciously repress supernatural thoughts
In other words, it’s a vital part of staying focussed.
Decreased cognitive inhibition is associated with creativity, but also with with anxiety and neuroticism, feelings of threat and uncontrollability, altered states of consciousness, intuitive thinking and biases in logical reasoning. And this led Marjaana Lindeman, at the University of Helsinki, Finland, to wonder whether a lack of cognitive inhibition also plays a role in supernatural beliefs.
So, along with her colleagues she took a group of 23 sceptics and believers in the supernatural, and put them in an MRI scanner (AKA brain scanner). While in there, they were given some short stories to read, and then a picture to look at – you can see some examples in the graphic on the right.
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/10/sceptics-subconsciously-repress-supernatural-thoughts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecularNewsDaily+%28Secular+News+Daily%29
Interesting.
= new reply since forum marked as read
of a biological mechanism/process is, so it could be that the activity of the left IFG wasn't "hyper-" at all during some period in our development and the associations it creates now are only "obsolete" because what made them a functional adaptation before, say perhaps situational threats posed by the inability (or perhaps more precisely the as yet undeveloped potential) to recognize signs and patterns, no longer exists. This might be seen, then, as support for the hypothesis (interestingly quite similar to how it is said that we created God out of our own fears and insecurities) that left IFG pattern formation became more useful/functional by means of the development of inhibitory functions in the right IFG, because, after-all, it isn't very useful to form signifiers out of every stimulus, which brings me to a question I have been wondering about and that is: what has happened to people's longer-range perceptual skills, that is the sorts of things that would go into recognizing and caring about environmental threats like deforestation, patterns that are inhibited out of how we assess our situation in the world. Perhaps right IFG inhibition serves short-term survival, but "civilization" has brought us to a place in which that adaptation is less functional now, because we have a survival need to recognize much larger patterns of meaning and that example may apply not only to environmental issues, but also to things like the communication capacities of the internet.
Thanks for posting this interesting article, cleanhippie.
Have a good day. 
received the Nobel Prize for physics recently? They demonstrated how a whole atom (i.e. not just sub-atomic "parts" can be in two places at once and this is a very important development for computer science, i.e. mechanisms that COMPUTE/reckon/make sense, because it adds a new dimension to that which previously was restricted to SEQUENTIAL processing (albeit VERY fast sequential processing ((counting/quantities)), but sequential, non CO - incidental, nonetheless).
Pure speculation follows: To me, this suggests investigations into the more emergent properties of systems, traits that could go under the heading of being QUALITIES, no longer limited simply to QUANTITIES. Sound anything like a tool that could look at traits such as excitation and inhibition?
