ASM125 Imagination, Circumcision, and Confederate Monuments

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

imagination circumcision and confederate monuments all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast by me mike mccarthy the guy they call science mike even though i'm not a scientist how weird is that i'm using my best radio voice for the intro and i've got some really fun questions this week they spam neuroscience and history which i'm terrible at and implicit biases so what do you say let's get it started let's start with the events uh because there's some really exciting ones this week september the 7th thursday in memphis tennessee i'm doing theology live with broderick greer i'm so excited slash nervous that i can't stand it if you're in memphis i'd love to see you there tickets are running out for the liturgist gathering in los angeles september 15th and 16th so if you've been thinking about it go ahead and pull the trigger before there's no tickets to be had uh we'll also do the liturgist gathering in boston october 6th and 7th still plenty of tickets available for that we'll do the liturgist gathering in seattle washington october 27th and 28th to learn more go to the liturgistsgathering.com and of course i'd love to see you over in the united kingdom on october 11th i'll be in london tickets still available october 13th i'll be in birmingham tickets are still available and october 17th i'll be in edinboro i've gotten your pronunciation corrections online thank you for that so i'll be in edinburgh for an ask lance mike live love to see you at one of those events or if you'd rather see me in dublin ireland come to the rubicon conference october 21st learn more about that at we are rubicon dot com so want tickets at sciencemike.com click on events you can get tickets to any of these events theology live is a free event with no ticket required and then we've got more dates on the calendar as well in november and throughout the winter so you can learn all about that at asksciencemike.com just click on the events tab and then don't forget about ask bible pete if you'd like to ask the bible scholar pete ends a question and have it answered on this program use ask bible pete on twitter or in an email or voicemail question on ask sciencemike.com really excited about that we've gotten a lot of really great email questions we don't have that many voicemail questions yet so if you don't mind having your voice heard on a podcast go ahead and leave a voicemail question statistically you have a much better chance of your question being selected if you use voicemail than if you use email especially for the ask bible pete episode so there's the announcements let's do a question [Music] hey science mike i'm uh fascinated with the imagination and how humans are capable of imagining things i was wanting to know uh if you could share with us a little bit about the neuroscience behind the imagination also is this something that's unique only to human beings and not other species or what are we aware of as far as that goes and then um lastly is this something that we can consider to be a part of the way that we reflect the image of god and if so how does that look in the way that god imagines thank you what a terribly interesting question um gotta be one of the ones i've had the most fun researching in recent memory uh not that i spent the most time on but certainly that i had the most fun with so you know there's been years of neuroscience research trying to find where imagination happens in the brain and what we're finding over and over there's very seldom one part of the brain that's responsible for one thing almost everything the brain does is distributed in networks that incorporate different areas of the brain and the imagination is no exception it is a network that spans the anatomy of the human brain and when you imagine something any parts of the brain that are generally responsible for processing sensory information become active when you imagine say sights or sounds or smell or tactile sensation otherwise known as touch when you imagine seeing something the visual cortex in the back of your head activates as if you've actually seen something that's really cool and also kind of what you would expect so but another thing we've also seen in some studies that is a little interesting is that the normal direction of signal flow say when you see something is you have activity in the visual cortex and the occipital lobe that then moves up toward the parietal lobe kind of at the top of your head and what's interesting there is the parietal lobe among other things it plays a role in integrating sensory information in different senses and so when you're imagining as opposed to your visual cortex feeding your parietal lobe the other happens signals originate in the parietal lobe and then move toward the visual cortex you almost play out sensory information in reverse and this the fact that this is all spread out across your brain that it's a distributed network actually allows us to imagine things that we've never seen or experienced by combining different networks of neurons in something that researchers call a mental workspace so the last time you saw a baseball a set of neurons fired together at the same time that tracked different attributes of a baseball its color its size its texture its shape all those things and that became the neurological roots of your idea of a baseball and the more you see baseballs kind of the more developed this network becomes and you have different networks for different objects and the same neuron may be a part of different networks it may respond to a certain hue that your visual cortex picks up right this is also how you identify objects in memory as we understand it but what's amazing about this because you can mix different neural networks together in this mental workspace you can actually fabricate things in your imagination you've never actually seen so i know you've never seen an antelope reading a newspaper while wearing a purple tuxedo but you can picture it very easily your mental workspace allows that kind of really advanced image manipulation and this kind of thinking where we modify and mix images and sensory fragments is essential to human problem solving and so while i don't believe that humans are the only animals that possess an imagination we might be unique in the degree to which we can combine intent or willpower with our visualization capacity and that results in something like albert einstein who says that he would actually picture visual images in his mind and transform them and manipulate them to create his theories the imagination plays an essential role in not just the arts but all kinds of human problem-solving and cognitive endeavors now in terms of what does that have to do with god's imagination i have no idea i'm a mystic that's not a question i could answer uh with any degree of satisfaction for myself i will say that a per particularly compelling understanding of genesis that i've heard is that our creative capacity is an echo of gods this is the image of god the ability to create with intent how well does that combine with my you know uh god you know that incorporates all of time and space and singularity physics not terribly well but as a mystic it is a very useful metaphor next question came in via email here it goes why does history repeat itself there are a lot of arguments about the taking down of confederate statues right now where's the line between remembering our history and memorializing can we prevent the repeat of horrific wars such as world war ii or the civil war simply by remembering our history or is there a generational element that we forget the tragedy behind it once it stops being personal and the first hand accounts of survivors die out thank you for your thoughts well the second half your question is is is particularly compelling there is research that supports the idea that horrific battles and war can eliminate a conflict of that kind as long as it's in living memory as long as there are people alive to tell these cautionary tales but historically speaking our species doesn't appear to be particularly compelled by historical account even when we know history we tend to repeat it and as someone who reads probably too much cognitive neuroscience i've learned that it's really difficult to predict any one individual's behavior moment by moment that's almost impossible but predicting a group's behavior over a period of time basically the larger the group and the larger the window of time the closer to certainty we can get with projecting how humans will respond to given conditions and unfortunately what we understand about humans is we're not only one of the most social primates we're also one of the most likely to go to war we're actually more we have a greater propensity to create war than chimpanzees the second most war-waging ape uh not particularly encouraging is it um so what do we do about that well i don't know but i'm not sure that the confederate monument thing makes for a particularly compelling case i i'd i think about it this way imagine if in germany there were monuments to the nazis not memorials to the victims of the nazis but monuments to the nazis themselves glorifying the role for example they played in expanding german infrastructure or the way that their tenacity illustrated the german spirit we can't imagine such a thing the the human cost of nazi ideology is inhuman but i would argue that's also true of the confederacy i mean can you imagine a hitler statue in israel and how different is that from a robert e lee statue next to a predominantly black elementary school the glorification of a failed rebellion is strange even by historical standards the south thankfully lost the civil war and so began a slow process of a movement toward equality for people of color in america which has still not been achieved but if you look at the history of civil war monuments you'll find something curious most of the monuments were built either in the early 20th century as jim crow laws hit the books fighting the emancipation of free black people in the south or during the civil rights movement now what do you think the motivation would be for a society to build monuments of people who fought against the legalization of slavery at exactly the moment they were fighting against civil rights for black americans i don't think confederate war monuments do a very good job of conveying an accurate picture of american history instead they portray a false narrative of a noble south primarily concerned with states rights as opposed to brutal wealthy landovers landowners sending their poor brethren to fight and die for their right to extract wealth from slave labor i think the best way to honor history and indeed to avoid repeating it is to remove every single confederate monument from public spaces around the united states of america and instead teach our children of the sacrifice people have made moving towards universal human equality to point out the flaws and failures of our forefathers and the messy struggle for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness [Music] hey mike i had a question i was hoping you could unpack it seems that out of my friends and acquaintances that tend to believe or share false news stories majority of them are conservative christians and i know you've shared the statistics that conservatives are more likely to believe and share false news um but i didn't know if they're being christian could also play into that now admittedly i have a lot of friends that are conservatives and out of those a majority of them probably are christians so this may be my personal observation but if it's more common i was wondering what the driving factor may be um is our being christian does that make us more susceptible to believing on fault-hitting rumors or does believing falsehood and rumors make us more likely to be christian um whatever like you could shed on that would be great i appreciate it and i thank you and keep doing what you're doing i've found that any linkage between religiosity even christian religiosity and accepting unsupported claims is overplayed for example when you look at the uh rate at which people deny the theory of evolution's validity or climate change sure you see a high correlation with religious people but only when that's combined with a conservative political ideology when you remove that as a factor the differences between that the general population level out or even invert and so what we're seeing is there's been an intense uh intermingling of christian theology and conservative political ideology in the united states since the rise of the moral majority and that's a much better predictor for things like fake news or denying climate change than whether someone believes in god prayer angels or indeed identifies as a christian at all there are progressive christians in fact they are uh growing in number um every day although not as fast as people are dropping the label christian altogether which makes some sense in reaction to uh what we're about to talk about now when we unpack this this more fundamental cognitive label of conservative versus christian we do find some fascinating trends in the data though they are not universal some studies show that conservative people are more attuned or aware of potential threats in their environment than people who identify as liberal they're they're more concerned about danger in the world and because of this they're more likely to accept false positives about potential dangers as a result so if a media outlet wants to drive you know some desired action anything from clicks to register to vote to whatever it may be if they attach this to a fear-based narrative about threats or impending disasters then that is something conservatives are more likely to accept and so one thing it's not just fake news in general it's fake news that involves risk or threat that conservatives are more likely than liberals to respond to other studies have shown that conservatives are less likely to engage in cognitive reflection meaning when they are exposed to information that subverts their understanding of the world they are less likely to continue to think about it and to devote their analytical capacity to dealing with it this does not mean they are less capable of cognitive reflection or that they are less intelligent than liberal people simply that they are more reluctant or more reticent to engage in cognitive reflection obviously cognitive reflection plays a role in checking uh uh sharing information that goes along with the narrative that supports our worldview for example on the conservative side you know that obama was um doing illegal surveillance on donald trump so that's not a threat really but it does kind of validate a world view now to be clear several studies actually show no difference at all in conservatives and liberals and how often they believe and share fake news and furthermore we're finding that fake news on the left is growing rapidly now in the age of donald trump some of the hysteria around russia to me resembles the hysteria around obama's birth certificate right it's true barack obama's origins involve different nationalities that's a that's a true statement that doesn't mean he wasn't born in the united states you see what i'm saying so there's you take a legitimate idea and expand it into nonsense it is entirely possible that russia played a significant role in donald trump's election uh it's it's possible that there was even some coordination between members of the trump campaign and russia but to blow this into like bernie sanders as a russian spy uh there's some really just crazy overblown claims on the left that are extremely popular hundreds of thousands of people share these ideas and so one thing that might explain that studies both show that conservatives are more likely to fake news and other studies showing no difference is simply that now there's more fake news that's finding the cognitive triggers that will encourage liberals to not engage in cognitive reflection or to process risk and threat differently many liberals feel frightened and under siege in the trump era and so maybe liberals are beginning to become just as threat focused as conservatives are another thing i believe is that we are becoming addicted to moral outrage in our media it feels good on and this can be shown in brain scans to have moral outrage to be disgusted by something that is so obviously wrong and prevalent that also shows the way in which you may be morally superior to other people that's emotionally gratifying it stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain at the very same time it stimulates the brain's so you're feeling fear or anger plus pleasure at the same time and friends i think that's a toxic mix i think that's driving our media narrative now don't get me wrong i actually think it's important and essential that the media holds the trump administration accountable heck i wish they would have held the obama administration more accountable than they did i think there are genuinely substantive issues that we can disagree about in this country and some issues that aren't issues at all but people's right to human flourishing their constitutionally protected rights to live their lives free of the interference of the beliefs of other people but i think many of us spend more time in a state of neurological arousal and moral outrage than we do in real substantive discussion of the issues we face or methods we can take to address them i am far more fascinated in people discussing possible solutions even be they ill-conceived then i am simply continuing to be demonizing the other fake news i think it may turn out to be near nuclear weapons and the internet and the impact on human history as future historians look at our age i think it's essential that we develop critical thinking skills and learn to reflect on and check our own invisible cognitive biases or else we won't just repeat history we'll amplify it and it won't just be a conservative thing or a liberal thing we'll be truly united in our mutual moral outrage our last question came in via email and it reads my husband and i are feeling pretty conflicted about getting our unborn son circumcised from what we have learned about the issue anatomically we feel it is not medically necessary and even potentially harmful to a person's overall sexual health however many people that we respect have asserted that circumcision is biblical what are your thoughts about upholding biblical traditions that seem to be more a matter of culture okay you can imagine where i'll go with this one pretty easily first of all um no there's no medical necessities to circumcision when um meta studies or studies of studies have been done about circumcision some of the narratives about the harm to sexual health appear to be overblown but those researchers also admit that we don't have much high quality data and that much more research is needed so just because you get your child circumcised it's not like a you know death sentence to sexual gratification or sexual health uh that said i think circumcision is probably immoral like children don't consent to it you know it's not like a medically necessary procedure it is our own culturalization and yeah the biblical thing the the more is around circumcision i feel like paul covered this pretty exhaustively um in the new testament that uh gentiles weren't meant to be under the entirety of uh the old covenant so even if you're like a pretty biblical literalist i feel like paul's is a really easy way out of uh mandatory circumcision for babies now i i did also read um it's obviously a very biased source because it's doctors opposing circumcision.org but i did look up the bio some of the board members they are legitimate doctors who uh express their concern about circumcision and its health impacts uh i think it's better safe than sorry just avoid circumcision and frankly like why does everyone need to know what you're doing with your child's genitals it's none of their business whether you circumcise your child or not they should have no idea if you're circumcising your children or not i understand you're probably asking people um just because it's a human thing we're social animals we like to kind of pull people we care about and find their opinions it's a huge factor in our decision making capacity but at the end of the day it's nobody's business other than your child really so yeah i think i think your impulse your impulse here is good um and an increasing number although still small number of parents are opting to not circumcise their male children and i want to be you know complete in my answer so i want to go ahead and offer some of the pushback i might get from the medical community regarding uh my stance on circumcision uh some doctors first of all the circumcision rate has fallen from about 83 percent the 60s to about 77 in 2010 that is primarily driven um by changes in racial demographics uh white people are still circumcised the overwhelming majority of their children but some doctors say that circumcision is not just cultural but medically necessary that it should be as common as vaccination because about half of children develop some health related um effect from a circumcision like a uti and then some studies have shown circumcision reduces transmission risk for hiv and general herpes so there are potential health benefits to circumcision according to many studies and i'll include a link to all that and the notes on assignments mike.com so where's that leave you leaves you in a pickle it really does uh because i you know i can offer you some research that shows that circumcision is not not bad something that shows it's beneficial some that shows that it's harmful all from qualified medical professionals so armed with all that data make the decision that squares best with your understanding of the data and your moral ethical rubric for the world but remember at the end of the day it's not my business it's not your friend's business it's your child's penis and only your child's penis [Music] ask science mike is made possible by people who financially support this program if you enjoy this question and answer completely open-ended discussion helping people understand and avoid shame and doubt about questions related to science and faith and just life and general social justice and sexuality i could use a buck a month or five bucks a month just go to ask sciencemike.com click on the patreon logo and you can join the folks on patreon who make this program possible of course the show also needs questions in order to exist so you can go to ask sciencemike.com uh you can send me an email or a voicemail question on sciencemic.com i'll get your question in consideration for the show i'd like to thank andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordeen for producing and sound designing as science mike and my boy jeff bodiford for the ask science mic theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week