Spirit on the Brain

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (p. 5-6):

Our intestines are lined by a vast network of more than 100 million neurons; these handle all the computations needed to run the chemical refinery that processes and extracts nutrients from food. The gut brain is like a regional administrative center that handles stuff the head brain does not need to bother with. You might expect, then, that this gut brain takes its orders from the head brain and does as it is told. But the gut brain possesses a high degree of autonomy, and it continues to function well even if the vagus nerve, which connects the two brains together, is severed….

The gut brain makes its independence known in many ways: It causes irritable bowel syndrome when it “decides” to flush out the intestines. It triggers anxiety in the head brain when it detects infections in the gut, leading you to act in more cautious ways that are appropriate when you are sick. And it reacts in unexpected ways to anything that affects its main neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine and serotonin. Hence, many of the initial side effects of Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors involve nausea and changes in bowel function. Trying to improve the workings of the head brain can directly interfere with those of the gut brain. The independence of the gut brain, combined with the autonomic nature of changes to the genitals, probably contributed to ancient Indian theories in which the abdomen contains the lower three chakras—energy centers corresponding to the colon/anus, sexual organs, and gut. The gut chakra is even said to be the source of gut feelings and intuitions, that is, ideas that appear to come from somewhere outside one’s own mind.

p. 145-6, 171-2:

At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma, the Hindu notion that people reap what they sow. The psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can’t achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim….

[B]elief in postmortem justice shows two signs of primitive moral thinking. In the 1920s [Jean Piaget] found that, as children develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of right and wrong, they go through a phase in which many rules take on a kind of sacredness and unchangeability. During this phase, children believe in “immanent justice”—justice that is inherent in an act itself. In this stage, they think that if they break rules, even accidentally, something bad will happen to them.

Cf. taboos in hunter-gatherer societies, of course.

Immanent justice shows up in adults, too, particularly when it comes to explaining illness and grave misfortune…. [W]hen illness strikes and Westerners ask, “Why me?” one of the places they often look for answers is to their past trangressions. The belief that God or fate will dole out rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior seems on its face to be a cosmic extension of our childhood belief in immanent justice, which is itself a part of our obsession with [evolutionary psychology-based] reciprocity.

Biblio: Haidt, Jonathan (2006), The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books).

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Chakras, Neurology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.