Belief and the brain
"Until sometime between their third and fourth birthdays," writes Rebecca Saxe in the Boston Review, "young children seem not to understand that the relationship between a person's goals and her actions depends on the person's beliefs about the current state of the world."It's this capacity to believe (and attribute belief to others), she says, that "enables us to predict one another's conduct, coordinate for the common good, and suffer the sorrows of Romeo and Juliet when we get things wrong."
Although she doesn't refer specifically to religious belief, Saxe's article has interesting implications for those of us who work with narrative approaches to meaning-making (including the meanings we make of religious/spiritual experience) and constructionist ideas about social interaction and religious experience.
This brief article provides an interesting summary of recent research into the brain and its contributions to "human nature," concluding that the ability to believe/attribute belief is innate, univeral, and unique to Homo sapiens.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
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