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| What are God and Heaven doing up in the clouds? |
neuropolitics | Space.
The final frontier. And when it comes to religiosity, it just might be.
Out of the clouds, Fred Previc has constructed an ingenious theory of
religiosity based on the multiple mechanisms employed by the brain to
map and direct its behaviors in 3-dimensional space. As we shall see,
Previc's theory of religiosity has many similarities with Brack's hemisphericity
theory of political orientation, both of which propose a key role to the
dopaminergic system in the modulation of religiosity (and in our case,
political conservatism).
Although
our theories were derived independently, Previc's original manuscript, The role of extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity, predates
the introduction of our theory (via the web) by several months. Although
it does not specifically address political disposition, it is such a theory
by proxy, via the strong relationship between religiosity and political
conservatism. While Previc's theory makes full use of the large volume of
literature implicating the dopamine system in religious behavior, it is
a quantum leap in the theory of religiosity, and centered upon the various
mechanisms on how the brain behaves in the four 3-dimensional spatial realms
it has constructed for itself, and how time itself has become enmeshed with
the brain's rendering of space.
Fred
Previc knows something about space. Previc was the lead of the United States
Air Force's Spatial Disorientation Countermeasures Task Group, which studied
pilot spatial disorientation in flight, a major cause of aeronautic accidents.
How he has subsequently woven his research and theories on the brain's rendering
of space into a theory of religiosity is one the great insights in the history
of neuropsychology. But what exactly is Previc's theory?
