Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-5-2009
Dec. 5th, 2009 11:02 am-
I rather like the Michael Chabon one.
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The team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian. In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.
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I laughed a _lot_.
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Date: 2009-12-05 12:09 pm (UTC)He looks a bit like Gaius Baltar!
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Date: 2009-12-05 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 02:55 pm (UTC)