Aside from the usual concerns about over interpretation, some wondered whether there was any justification for assuming that Paleolithic people had an essentially modern aesthetic category which might be called “art.” If they didn’t, it would follow that artistic interpretations of the cave paintings were just that and shed little light on Paleolithic minds.

Frustrated by the sense that we weren’t getting any closer to understanding Paleolithic symbols, some began searching for alternatives. One of the more compelling came from cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. Having studied rock art around the world, Lewis-Williams noticed that certain kinds of symbols regularly appeared across time and space. This was an enigma, given that the peoples producing these recurring symbols had not been in contact with one another. These symbols were not, in other words, the result of cultural diffusion.  Lewis-Williams calls these symbols “entoptic forms”:

What could account for this similarity of forms in rock art around the world? Lewis-Williams argues, with considerable force, that such images are the result of a universal cognitive architecture. Our brains are constructed in a particular way to process visual images and carry out other sensory related functions. When we experience altered states of consciousness (“ASC”) and reach a stage just before full blown hallucination, the mental images we generate are similar across time and space. These images are entoptic forms.

We know from ethnography and ethnohistory that in non-state societies, ASC is often the province of shamans. With this in mind, Lewis-Williams argues that entoptic forms are related to shamanic practices. Although we can’t know what kind of cultural meaning the symbols had or were assigned, we could at least link them to ASC and shamans.

If we don’t go any further, the argument is fairly parsimonious and anchored in shared biology. Lewis-Williams, however, goes further. He contends that shamans were largely responsible for the European cave paintings and that access to the caves (and images) was restricted. He sees in this an emerging social complexity and stratification, whereby shamans are privileged and powerful. Although this is plausible it is also speculative. There is little evidence for emerging complexity or stratification in the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record. It is bootstrapping to argue that because shamans (may have) made the paintings, shamans (may have) had more power.

While the functional linkage between shamans-ASC-entoptics and ritual surely holds in some or even many cases, it is looking less likely in others. In 2004, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder suggested that 13,000 year old “flutings” inside Rouffignac Cave, France were made by children. In 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder experimentally confirmed these findings and found that children between 2 and 5 years of age made these markings:

This year a Cambridge University doctoral student in archaeology, Jessica Cooney, discovered that children were responsible for even more “art” at Rouffignac than was previously thought. In a recent interview with History (which includes a slide show), Cooney discussed her findings:

What I’ve found in Rouffignac is that they are screaming to be heard — the presence of children is everywhere in the cave, even in the passages furthest from the entrance. There are no areas in Rouffignac with flutings where we find adults without children, and vice versa.

Many theories about cave art point to shamanism or ritual use. While I don’t rule that out, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for all caves. With children involved, it could have been one of those reasons but also very likely could have been play or a time for practicing art, or simply an exploration of the landscape.

If we didn’t know that young children made these markings, it would be tempting to attribute them to shamans experiencing ASC. There are some obvious resemblances between entoptic forms (see chart above) and the childrens’ markings at Rouffignac. While one could argue that the children were shaman apprentices being tutored in ASC and entoptics, this amounts to special pleading. I can’t think of any ethnographic or ethnohistoric instances of children this young being trained as shamans or inducing ASC.

These findings also call into question the often made argument that the deepest, darkest recesses of caves were reserved for experienced shamans (with privileged access to the spirit world) undergoing the most intense ASC. If children were in these dark zones, it is hard to argue for restricted access or shamanistic exclusivity.

The most likely or parsimonious interpretation of these symbols is the one given by Cooney: play. If children were doodling “entoptics” in the cave with their parents, it suggests that “artistic” interpretations of these symbols deserve reconsideration. All in all, this research serves as a good reminder that not everything produced by Paleolithic peoples requires a utilitarian or functional explanation.

References:

Lewis-Williams, David, & Dowson, T.A. (1988). The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art Current Anthropology, 29 (2), 201-245

Sharpe, Kevin, & Van Gelder, Leslie (2006). Evidence for Cave Marking by Paleolithic Children Antiquity, 80 (310), 937-947

When we bring these western habits of thought to the concept of consciousness, our learned reflex is to dichotomize and contrast with its supposed opposite: unconsciousness. We are either conscious or unconscious. This is, however, a mistake. I was reminded of this while reading David Lewis-Williams’ Inside the Neolithic Mind — Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods:

Human beings are not either conscious or unconscious, as may be popularly supposed. Normal, everyday consciousness should rather be thought of as a spectrum. At one end is alert consciousness — the kind that we use to relate rationally to our environment and to solve the problems that it presents. A little further along the spectrum are more introverted states in which we solve problems by thought. Relax more and you are day-dreaming: mental images come and go at will, unfettered by the material world around you. Gradually, you slip into sleep and the hypnagogic state, possibly with vivid hallucinations. From there, you drift into normal dreaming, a world of changing forms and impossible circumstances.

Because fluctuating consciousness is a human universal, all societies must come to terms with it or make sense of it. Values are assigned to different parts of the spectrum. Lewis-Williams argues that religion is founded on these fluctuations and develops “out of the socially situated spectrum of consciousness.” It is a powerful argument and one that is at least partially confirmed by Native American dream traditions.

In “Dreams, Theory, and Culture: The Plains Vision Quest Paradigm,” Lee Irwin observes that dreaming is central to Native American traditions:

To understand the visionary world of Native American religions, it is necessary to overcome a rational bias that would reduce dreaming to an expression of the “irrational” or “epiphenomenal” mind. Because we all dream, it would seem superfluous to point out the continuity that exists between our dreaming and waking lives.

Yet it is a mark of modern consciousness that dreaming is strongly identified with the “pre-rational” mind and with a substratum of “primitive” instinct and emotion beneath the threshold of rational conceptualization. The dreaming basis of culture must engage our attention as something far more complex and subtle than a purely sensory and empirical waking model of consciousness permits.

In the Native American context, there is no separation between the world-as-dreamed and the world-as-lived. These are states integral to the unifying continuum of mythic description, narration, and enactment. In contemporary, non-indigenous culture, the distinction between waking and dreaming is largely a consequence of culturally reinforced rational theories of mind and has resulted in a bifurcated world view for most Euroamericans.

It seems fairly safe to say that dreaming played an important role if not central role in ancient religions. It surely is no accident that Australian Aborigines characterize the foundational elements of their supernaturalism as “Dreamtime.” It also seems fairly safe to say that as religions became more organized and systematic (following the Neolithic transition), dreaming is displaced by doctrine and belief as the source of the supernatural.

Reference:

Irwin, L. (1994). Dreams, Theory, and Culture: The Plains Vision Quest Paradigm American Indian Quarterly, 18 (2) DOI: 10.2307/1185248

What we ultimately want to know, in other words, is when it was that various kinds of beliefs (and associated practices) arose. If we know this, we can begin assessing what role those beliefs-practices may or may not have played in the “evolution of religion.” What we need to do is test these ideas with history. We cannot simply assume that post-Neolithic religions are anything like Paleolithic supernaturalism and function in the same way; this is the fallacy of backwards projection.

There are two large bodies of data relevant to this enterprise. The first is the archaeological record and the second is ethnographic. These two are tightly linked. Most interpretations of the archaeological record are guided explicitly or implicitly by our knowledge of hunter-gatherer supernaturalism. We use ethnographic analogies to understand how deliberate burials with grave goods, entoptic symbols in cave paintings or rock art, and carved “Venus” figurines are related to supernatural beliefs and ritual activities.

When it comes to hunter-gatherer ethnography, everyone’s favorite source is the San or Bushmen of southern Africa. One of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups in the world, they were the subject of extensive research conducted from 1963-1980 by members of Harvard’s Kalahari Project. Major contributions were also made by South African scholars at the University of Witwatersrand, prominently including cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams.

Why so much focus on Bushmen? As one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies that lived in largely traditional ways at least through the 1960s, it was a rare opportunity for professional ethnographers to observe and record. Only one other group, the Hadza of Tanzania (some of whom are still foragers), offered similar opportunities.

While our knowledge of San supernaturalism is valuable, it is but a single sample coming from one area. If we are going to rely on ethnography to make inferences about hunter-gatherers in general, we need larger samples. One source that remains largely untapped is Native American ethnohistory. I was recently reminded of its value while reading two classics of the genre, one old and one recent.

First published in 1935, Robert Lowie’s The Crow Indians is a veritable treasure trove of information regarding Crow beliefs, myths, and rituals. It is a comprehensive ethnohistory that has never gone out of print. The second is John H. Moore’s The Cheyenne, which after it was published in 1999, quickly established itself as the definitive history of this tribe. It too is comprehensive. Both contain discrete chapters on supernaturalism-ritual, and important chapters on kinship and group formation-dissolution.

As things currently stand, many lab based studies into supernatural belief use methods that are perhaps limited post-Neolithic religions of sedentary peoples. This is fine if what we want to study is limited to these recent religions. If we want to get at something deeper in time, our research will need to be designed with Paleolithic supernaturalism distinctly in mind. While neither Crow nor Cheyenne supernaturalism is the equivalent of Paleolithic, it is much closer to the mark than modern religions.

In a recent study, Brian Akers and colleagues report on a 6,000 rock shelter mural in Spain. As is true of so many Paleolithic cave paintings, this one depicts a bull (which is most likely a wild auroch). What makes this mural unique, however, is that it also depicts mushrooms of the psychotropic or tripping variety (Psilocybe hispanica):

Selva Pascuala Rock Art

At the bottom right, there are 13 images of what the authors consider to be psychotropic mushrooms native to this region of Spain. After noting that ritual or shamanic usage of neurotropic fungi has been widely documented in Mexico, Siberia and elsewhere in the world, the authors suggest that the Selva Pascuala mural represents hunting and mushroom magic. The close proximity of the mushrooms with the bull, which are often depicted in cave paintings that are many thousands of years older than the mural at Selva Pascuala, is fairly convincing proof that these images were created by shamans experiencing altered states of consciousness.

It is worth noting that the majority of these depictions are located in difficult to access places (“dark zones”) and may only have been visited by shamans. If this is the case, it suggests that the earliest forms of supernaturalism may not have been group oriented but instead were the private domain of ritual specialists or shamans.

Reference:

Akers, B., Ruiz, J., Piper, A., & Ruck, C. (2011). A Prehistoric Mural in Spain Depicting Neurotropic Psilocybe Mushrooms? Economic Botany DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5

The artifact will be described in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. Polish archaeologist Tomasz Plonka talked to Viegas about the find:

“The ornament is composed of groups of zigzag lines and a human representation, probably a woman with spread legs with a short zigzag nearby,” lead author Tomasz Płonka told Discovery News. “The woman may be nude, but the geometrical style of representation does not allow us to answer (this question).”

At first the scientists believed the geometrical figure carved onto the antler could have been either the mentioned woman, or a nude man raising his arms. Measurements to determine the ratio of the stick figure limbs, in addition to comparisons with other early human representations, lead the researchers to support the woman interpretation.

Zigzags are very popular motifs on artifacts from many cultures throughout the world, with many possible meanings, but Płonka said, “I think our zigzag lines are connected with water and life symbolism.”

Zigzags are indeed very popular motifs across time and space, especially among hunter-gatherers. The South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has documented zigzags on rock art from around the world and interprets them as entoptic images or forms. Such images are commonly generated by humans who are experiencing altered states of consciousness and are a specific, predictable result of a universal cognitive architecture.

The zigzag motif was extensively used by North American Plains Indians tribes to decorate many things, including tipis, moccasins, parfleche bags, quivers, rattles, and clothing. In his classic Indians of the Plains, Robert Lowie cataloged these geometric patterns (see Chapter 5) and noted that although each tribe tended toward a distinctive style, there was little agreement on their meaning. Many natives claimed that such patterns (including zigzags) had no meaning — they were simply traditional and merely decorative. Others claimed that such patterns had meaning, but that such meaning was idiosyncratic — the meaning varying according to the person producing it.

Because zigzags are so common and their meaning so slippery, I have difficulty with Plonka’s claim that the incised antler represents a woman spreading her legs, and is a fertility object related to “water and life symbolism.” Although this seems like a classic case of overinterpretation or speculation, I will reserve judgment until the full article appears next month.

This new interpretation revolves around an older interpretation focusing on stars and constellations:

[A]rchaeoastronomer Michael A. Rappenglück of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Gilching, Germany, began addressing the possible astronomical significance of the cave imagery. He noticed a group of six spots painted above the back of one of the aurochs in a part of the cave known as the Hall of the Bulls. Charcoal freckles surround the creature’s eye, which Rappenglück thought could represent the eye of the Taurus constellation embedded in the Hyades cluster.

Although Capelo is not entirely clear on this point, it seems Rappengluck is suggesting these dots — found in more than one cave — are stars that we know today as the Taurus constellation and were actually seen by the paleolithic painters as such.  If so, this would have been the earliest representation of Auroch or bull symbolism.

This is a bit hard to swallow, given that it unabashedly projects historical understandings of this constellation backwards in time some tens of thousands of years, and imputes a modern understanding of the Taurus constellation to Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Capelo has similar reservations and offers an alternative explanation, framed as a hypothetical:

If the Lascaux cave-painters really had a precise time-keeping system, then these people actually scheduled their hunting…much as their descendants eventually planned their agrarian affairs according to celestial cycles. The in-heat, rutting season of the Magdalenian aurochs may have coincided with a celestial cue, allowing ancient peoples to track the gestation of these animals as the bovine with six bright spots rose high in the spring sky.

I think there can little doubt that the Lascaux cave painters had a precise time-keeping system and scheduled their hunting accordingly.  I doubt, however, that this time keeping was based primarily on stars.

If we examine the ethnohistoric and ethnographic record of known hunter-gatherer groups, nearly all of them tracked time using a cyclical lunar system which was sometimes supplemented by a linear winter count.  There are much easier ways to keep track of bovid rutting, gestation, birthing, and migration than star gazing.  Moon watching seems to have done the trick just fine.

Given this fact, we might expect Upper Paleolithic cave paintings to contain a plethora of lunar imagery and symbolism.  The lack of such imagery calls into question any time-keeping hypotheses grounded in more complicated astronomical observations and symbols.

A more parsimonious explanation for six clustered spots would be they are entoptic images arising from altered states of consciousness.  But without doing a statistical analysis of all the spots in the caves, not just cluster arrays of six, I would not be confident venturing even this hypothesis.  The most parsimonious explanation may be that the spots are entirely random, the paleolithic equivalent of graffiti.

Dennis’ article espouses a theory of consciousness that is being explored by a small number of researchers.  This theory is that consciousness exists at the intersection of the classical (visible/macroscopic) and quantum (invisible/microscopic) worlds, and is at least partially constituted by quantum processes.  The savant Stuart Kauffman goes further and argues that biological life is itself the product of this intersection.

While the scientific details of quantum consciousness theory are quite complex, Dennis does a nice job of explaining them in terms that can be understood by non-experts:

The human body is a constant flux of thousands of inter-reactions and processes connecting molecules, cells, organs and fluids throughout the brain, body and nervous system. Up until recently it was thought that all these countless interactions operated in a linear sequence, passing on information much like a runner passing the baton to the next runner.

However, the latest findings in quantum biology and biophysics have discovered that there is in fact a tremendous degree of coherence within all living systems. It has been found through extensive scientific investigation that a form of quantum coherence operates within living biological systems through what is known as biological excitations and biophoton emission.

What this means is that metabolic energy is stored as a form of electromechanical and electromagnetic excitations. It is these coherent excitations that are considered responsible for generating and maintaining long-range order via the transformation of energy and very weak electromagnetic signals.

After nearly 20 years of experimental research, Fritz-Albert Popp put forward the hypothesis that biophotons are emitted from a coherent electrodynamic field within the living system. What this effectively means is that each living cell is giving off, and resonating with, a biophoton field of coherent energy.

If each cell is emitting this field, then the whole living system is, in effect, a resonating field — a ubiquitous non-local field. And since it is by the means of biophotons that the living system communicates, then there is near instantaneous intercommunication throughout. And this, claims Popp, is the basis for coherent biological organization — referred to as quantum coherence.

Biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho has described how the living organism, including the human body, is “coherent beyond our wildest dreams” in that our bodies are constituted by a form of liquid crystal, which is an ideal transmitter of communication, resonance, and coherence. All living biological organisms continuously emit radiations of light that form a field of coherence and communication.

We cannot simply accept these statements as true; biophotons apparently do exist, but measuring them and ascertaining their function has a long and controversial history.  Measuring quantum effects in the physical world is a science still in its infancy, though some remarkable tests are being conducted and advances made.

One thing is certain: biological metabolism involves chemical reactions that produce and reduce energy in all sorts of amazing ways.  These processes entail and are sensitive to various forces or fields, including electricity, radiation, magnetism, light, sound, gravity, temperature, and pressure.  Our understanding of these forces-fields and their relationship to human biology is quite limited, despite the many outlandish, unproven, untested, and authoritative claims made by the New Age faithful.

For a less credulous and more scientific view of quantum consciousness, the best work has been done by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose.  Hameroff has published numerous articles — all creative, some convincing, and a few compelling — which you can find on his website.  Like Stuart Kauffman, Hameroff’s training is in medicine and his work, while thoroughly grounded in science, is cutting edge.

So where does quantum consciousness, if it exists (and I think it probably does, given that our bodies consist of atoms and subatomic particles, all of which flow in the weird world of quantum waves), leave us?  This is how Dennis puts it:

[B]iophysicists have discovered that living organisms are permeated by quantum wave forms. In her 1998 book The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms, Mae-Wan Ho informs us that “the visible body just happens to be where the wave function of the organism is most dense. Invisible quantum waves are spreading out from each of us and permeating into all other organisms. At the same time, each of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up.”

This incredible new discovery actually positions each living being within a non-local quantum field consisting of wave interferences (where bodies meet). Each person is thus not only in an emphatic relationship with each other but is also entangled with one another.

Neuroscience, quantum biology, and quantum physics are now beginning to converge to reveal that our bodies are not only biochemical systems but also sophisticated resonating quantum systems.

Assuming this to be true, it would mean that humans are subject to many more influences than those of which we are currently aware and can measure.  It would also mean that humans exist in a field matrix where everything is connected in one way or another; think of it as the Butterfly Effect writ large.

Dennis and Hameroff believe this to be the case, but take this idea one step further — they connect this field matrix to “universal consciousness,” which is the darling of spiritualists around the world.   Dennis puts it this way:  “These new discoveries show that a form of nonlocal connected consciousness has a physical-scientific basis. Further, it demonstrates that certain spiritual or transcendental states of collective Oneness have a valid basis within the new scientific paradigm.” And this is how Hameroff (1998) puts it in a peer reviewed article titled “Funda-Mentality” Is the Conscious Mind Subtly Linked to a Basic Level of the Universe?:

Perhaps panpsychists are in some way correct and components of mental processes are fundamental, like mass, spin or charge. Following the ancient Greek panpsychists, Spinoza (1677) saw some form of consciousness in all matter. Leibniz (1766) portrayed the universe as an infinite number of fundamental units (“monads”) each having a primitive psychological being. Whitehead (e.g. 1929) was a process philosopher who viewed reality as a collection of events occurring in a basic field of proto­conscious experience (“occasions of experience”). Abner Shimony observed that Whitehead’s occasions were comparable to quantum state reductions-actual events in physical reality.

It is possible, in other words, that we are connected to a field matrix and that individual consciousness participates in and contributes to this matrix.  There are some metaphysical traditions, particularly eastern ones, that have long made similar assertions and actively encourage adherents to engage with this field matrix, whatever it may be (we currently have only a hypothetical understanding of this proposed field).  This may also be what shamans are seeking when they deliberately induce altered states of consciousness to experience what David Lewis-Williams calls “absolute unitary being.”

Let us suppose, however, that two centuries from now we arrive at an understanding of these hypothetical concepts (i.e., quantum consciousness embedded within a universal field matrix), and that we can actually measure, test, and manipulate these things.  At this point, would we call this understanding “spiritual” or would it simply be yet another finding of science?

I would tend toward the latter characterization.  Why?  Not so long ago, all humans believed that weather was a spiritual or supernatural force.  Over time, we have come to understand how weather works and why it occurs.  Weather has therefore become a matter of science and is called meteorology — it is no longer a supernatural matter for spiritualists.  If and when we arrive at an understanding of quantum-universal consciousness, I do not think we will be calling it “spiritual.”

With these things in mind, Pam Belluck’s recent article in the New York Times — “Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly” — offers some additional insight and research possibilities.  These are not simply drug induced hallucinations that afflict the frail of mind:

No one who knows Justin Kaplan would ever have expected this. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian with a razor intellect, Mr. Kaplan, 84, became profoundly delirious while hospitalized for pneumonia last year. For hours in the hospital, he said, he imagined despotic aliens, and he struck a nurse and threatened to kill his wife and daughter.

“Thousands of tiny little creatures,” he said, “some on horseback, waving arms, carrying weapons like some grand Renaissance battle,” were trying to turn people “into zombies.” Their leader was a woman “with no mouth but a very precisely cut hole in her throat.”

Attacking the group’s “television production studio,” Mr. Kaplan fell from his hospital bed, cutting himself and “sliding across the floor on my own blood,” he said. The hospital called security because “a nurse was trying to restrain me and I repaid her with a kick.”

Mr. Kaplan’s hallucinations lifted as doctors treated his pneumonia. But hospitals say many patients are experiencing such inexplicable disorienting episodes. Doctors call it “hospital delirium,” and are increasingly trying to prevent or treat it.

Mr. Kaplan’s hallucinations sound awful, but have a familiar feel to them.  Shamans, prophets, and mystics throughout history report similar experiences.  It would be interesting to know how many of the elderly who experience hospital delirium interpret those experiences in spiritual or religious terms.

I often wonder why these normal human emotions and feelings — which admittedly may be difficult to attain in the modern world, are glossed as “spiritual.”  I have these emotions and feelings more often than not but do not consider them spiritual.  This state of being, at least for me, flows from the way I have arranged my life and what I decide to do (or not do) on a daily basis.  Moreover, I do not derive my sense of meaning, orientation, or purpose — all of which I have — from any form of spirituality.

A sense of mystery, connection, and tranquility — when combined, often passes for “spiritual.”  This is most frequently reported by those who meditate, which is a deliberate exercise that can focus the mind on something (or nothing) and clear it of the clutter or chatter which is characteristic of wakeful consciousness.  The geneticist Dean Hamer, author of the excellent but unfortunately named book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes, calls this ability and feeling “self-transcendence.”  Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili studied this meditative phenomenon in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

Fluctuations and alterations of consciousness are, however, a normal part of cognition.  David Lewis-Williams contends that these fluctuations give rise to belief in the supernatural and a sense of the spiritual.  Those who meditate, in particular, often report that their sense of self dissolves and that the boundaries between the individual and the world disappear.  In this state, they experience an ethereal connection to something larger and more mysterious than themselves.  Others use intoxicants, isolation, and deprivation to induce this state, which in popular discourse is sometimes called “cosmic consciousness” and in academic parlance is referred to as “absolute unitary being.”

Unless such exercises result in contact with “spirits” or imaginary agents, I am not sure why these states or feelings would be called “spiritual.”  Deliberately altering normal, day-to-day and wakeful consciousness to experience a different kind of consciousness seems like a sensible thing to do if it increases one’s sense of contentment, connection, and calm.  This does not make the experience, however, “spiritual.”  It is a brain (and body) state.  No spirits necessary.

Something similar occurs when it comes to supernatural thinking.  At an early age, before children are taught anything about spirits, gods or religions, they naturally develop ideas that could easily be characterized as teleological and supernatural.  This is a fairly strong indication that various aspects of human brain evolution have resulted in a mind that spontaneously generates belief in the supernatural.

I was reminded of this by a recent study on language from a team of researchers at the University of Rochester.  The study team’s press release makes some excellent points about the brain and language:

A new study [appearing in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences] from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.

Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence. Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task.

“We’re using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains,” said study coauthor Aaron Newman. “Obviously we’re doing something different [from other animals], because we’re able to learn language unlike any other species. But it’s not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else.”

These observations are particularly poignant in today’s world.  The current rage is the use of brain imagining studies to look for localized areas where certain types of thinking occur.  The resulting images mislead us into believing that the red/orange “hot spots” are the only parts of the brain working on whatever issue is put before the test subject whose brain is being imaged during various test tasks.  These images mislead because while certain brain regions may show increased activity or blood flow under certain test conditions, the entire brain is active and contributing to cognitive processing and outputs.  Those “dark” regions in such images should not be interpreted as areas of the brain that are shut down or inactive.  These darker areas are at work and contributing to whatever is occurring in the hot spots.

Although certain areas of the brain have received the most attention when it comes to language — most notably Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area — language is not localized to these regions.  The entire brain is involved in language.  Lesions to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas rarely result in total language loss, whereas lesions to subcortical areas — sometimes called the limbic system — often result in total language loss.  This is particularly interesting because the limbic system is an evolutionarily older area of the brain that is usually associated with emotions.  The subcortical amygdala, for instance, can in a limited sense be called the seat of fear.

What does this have to do with the supernatural thinking on which all religions are constructed?  As is the case with language, supernatural thinking arises from whole brain function and from many regions working together.  Although we can parse these functions into discrete operations, when these functions are combined the result is supernatural thinking.  There is not, in other words, any specific region or area of the brain that in isolation is responsible for supernatural thinking.  This means of course that there is no one part of the brain that can be called the seat of the supernatural or religious.  By the same token, there is no such thing as a “God gene.”

This also means that supernatural thinking arises from more than just fluctuations in consciousness, as David Lewis-Williams claims in his new book Conceiving God.  While consciousness certainly accounts for certain aspects of supernatural thinking, it is only a partial explanation.