cute stuff-- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992589 The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry 9:15 27 July 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Whether or not you believe in the paranormal may depend entirely on your brain chemistry. People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. Peter Brugger, a neurologist from the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, has suggested before that people who believe in the paranormal often seem to be more willing to see patterns or relationships between events where sceptics perceive nothing. To find out what could be triggering these thoughts, Brugger persuaded 20 self-confessed believers and 20 sceptics to take part in an experiment. Brugger and his colleagues asked the two groups to distinguish real faces from scrambled faces as the images were flashed up briefly on a screen. The volunteers then did a similar task, this time identifying real words from made-up ones. Seeing and believing Believers were much more likely than sceptics to see a word or face when there was not one, Brugger revealed last week at a meeting of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies in Paris. However, sceptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen. The researchers then gave the volunteers a drug called L-dopa, which is usually used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson's disease by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. Both groups made more mistakes under the influence of the drug, but the sceptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing. That suggests that paranormal thoughts are associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain, and the L-dopa makes sceptics less sceptical. "Dopamine seems to help people see patterns," says Brugger. Plateau effect However, the single dose of the drug did not seem to increase the tendency of believers to see coincidences or relationships between the words and images. That could mean that there is a plateau effect for them, with more dopamine having relatively little effect above a certain threshold, says Peter Krummenacher, one of Brugger's colleagues. Dopamine is an important chemical involved in the brain's reward and motivation system, and in addiction. Its role in the reward system may be to help us decide whether information is relevant or irrelevant, says Françoise Schenk from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Helen Philips
Apparently either way is correct... who knew? Hmm... I remember playing with bottles of dopamine at a pharmacy... perhaps I should've kept a few.
Seems to me whether or not you believe in anything is much more largely shaped by the environment you grow up in rather than brain chemicals...but I'm certainly not a scientist!
I'm not sure what it is -- myabe my dopamine levels are low -- but I find something suspect about the methodology here. You have 2 groups: believers and skeptics. In addition to not believing in the paranormal, skeptics also are more likely to think real words they are not familiar with are fake. It seems to me, they are simply more careful about what they will accept than the believers. So, then you get them high and their cautiousness goes down. Meanwhile, the cautiousness of high believers does not go down from its already lower level, making the scientists think there is a plateau: a limit to gullibility. For one, this all seems obvious to me. People make poor decisions when they are high. But, more importantly, I think there is a logical fallacy here: Believers see patterns where there are none. Skeptics see patterns where there are none only when they are high. Therefore, Believers are high Skeptics. Couldn't it be that Believers are accepting of such patterns for a completely different reason and that it is only mimicked by skeptics on dope?
Entirely JV. Well, maybe not entirely... the drug might be more discrete than just getting the guy 'high'. Unfortunately the article is just a review... so we really have no idea what the methods were. Were the methods even scientific (randomized, dbl blind, blah)? The write-up makes it sound as if the guy walked through a grocery store and had random strangers label themselves as skeptics or believers, and then submit to the test. If 'Federation of European Neuroscience Societies' is a respectable organization, I suppose the study was a bit more complex than that... but review articles leave you with those questions. I still think the study is cute... as do, I suppose, the original researchers. This sounds like a preliminary study whose findings have been bandied about just to get more funding. Stay tuned. It might mean something reallllly interesting, or it might mean that we wasted wwwoooords.
