Re: Belief and the Brain

Dave,

Some responses interleaved. BTW isn't it good to be having a discussion
about something that is unquestionably about science/faith, but not, for a
change about evolution/creation/ID?

the brain. However, there are areas that still puzzle. For example, why
> are some people sensitized to pain? The same stimulus will produce
> moderate pain in one person and intense pain in another.

It's said that if men were the ones who had babies, that the human race
would die out!! I certainly have a much lower pain threshold than my wife!
Joking aside, I think one's perception of pain, and how much one can bear
also is connected with psychological factors. If you stress about things,
it makes it worse. Although it's not related to pain as such, the following
incident that happened to my mother-in-law may illustrate this. Some while
back, she was plagued by buzzing and drumming in her ears. She was
extremely anxious about it and thought that she might have a brain tumour or
something. The drumming was so loud and insistent that on occasion she
nearly fainted. After several weeks wait, she got examined at the
hospital. The good news was that there was nothing at all serious wrong, no
tumour or anything. The bad news was there was nothing they could do about
it - it was due to a bone pressing on an artery or something like that, and
what she could hear was due to the flow of blood. However, despite the fact
that there was nothing that could be done about it, she quickly recovered
enough to cope with the pain - freed of worry about the potential sinister
implications of the buzzing noise, she found quite soon that the buzzing
decreased in intensity. It never really went away - still now, several
years later, she can hear it if she thinks about it, but she hardly ever
thinks about it, and so it doesn't bother her. When she thought it might be
due to a tumour, of course she thought about it all the time, and it was
unbearable. Now, what I don't know is if the buzzing noise decreased
objectively (is there an objective measure of the noise in your ears, or an
objective measure for pain?), or was it subjectively? I'm guessing it was a
bit of both.

> The lack of faith impaired the work of Jesus (Matthew 13:58). With what
> you mention, this gives us a positive correlation between faith and
> miracle.

Yes, but one has to remember that it's not necessarily the faith of the
person being healed, but that of the person asking for the healing to take
place. Two examples: the centurion's servant, and the man who was lowered
through the roof. In that case it was the faith of the friends. So for
that case, we can't argue that it was a positive attitude in the patient
towards their own illness that triggered a placebo effect (or I would
perhaps prefer to say a cognitive approach). In that case, it was purely
the effect of the friends that brought about the miracle, and as such, I
don't think there's any scientific explanation available. Perhaps it also
tells us that we should show similar faith and pray for the sick (which
indeed we do).

As a personal note, my wife and I have been praying for a friend I mentioned
elsewhere who believes electric fields from household appliances affect her
(nocebo) for about two years now and are saddened to see the isolation of
that person getting more and more extreme (sleeping in a tent next to a lake
to get away from the emanations coming from the street lamps etc).
Sometimes I get quite cross with God for allowing this to happen .. :-(

Iain
Received on Sat Jan 14 15:31:23 2006