Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 2.
Internalized Beliefs II Part A
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En provenance du cours de Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems
133 notes
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
133 notes
À partir de la leçon
Internalized Beliefs II: The Evolution of Senses of Self in Childhood
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
This is a quote from Darwin that I revised.
He said, overlook the probability of the constant inculcation of a belief in God on
the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps inherited effect on their
brains not fully developed, that would be as difficult for them to throw off.
What it normally said, in fact, a belief in God, as for
a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear of snakes.
What I substituted here is the belief in soul and belief in afterlife of the soul.
It's difficult to shed that,
particularly if it's been part of your upbringing all along.
These kind of beliefs are candidates for being internalized,
become basic assumptions around other world views can evolve.
Okay.
The human brain has evolved, as you know, over millions of years.
And that brain is a brain-in-progress at infancy.
We are not born with a full stack of brain cells.
It continues to evolve particularly
rapidly in early childhood.
It continues to evolve until you're about the age of 30 for most people.
I don't like this echo.
For most people in this classroom, your brain is
not fully developed yet and particularly in some portions of
the frontal lobe there's still more development to take place.
Now I find it hard to talk about the brain development
in human beings, without bringing in the concept of the self.
The self, we all have a sense of self.
For years psychology tried to get rid of the concept of the self.
That it was a black box item but it wouldn't go away.
It's a meme that sticks.
You all know what a meme is?
M-E-M-E.
It's like a gene.
It spreads, and a good meme is a word or
a concept that continues to spread,
to be part of the vocabulary and
common words that we all recognize,
and are likely to use ourselves.
And that meme that I'm talking about is the self.
And I'll be talking about senses of self as they evolve
over time, particularly in early childhood.
So the question we'll be addressing,
how does someone become a feeling person who thinks?
Remember Damasio?
How do we become a feeling person who thinks?
And what does thinking, or what does believing
have to do with calming the internal milieu of the body?
So I made a strong connection between thinking and
feeling in one of my lectures.
They go hand to hand, and
you don't do very well with one as opposed to the other.
We have to bring them both into consideration when we talk about human
function.
How do beliefs regulate feelings and how do feelings alter beliefs?
Now this isn't terrible easy stuff to digest.
We all have a sense of what we know.
We're always trying to fit what new information comes our way
into what we already know.
That's basically how we operate.
It's sort of easier that way.
But I want you to think deeply about these.
How do beliefs regulate feelings?
And how do feelings alter beliefs?
And I hope to bring that point really home by the end of this lecture.
Here's a preview of the senses of self that we will cover.
There's a Protoself, the Core Self,
Subjective or Intersubjective Self.
Then we have Objective Self, Symbolic Self, Traveling Self, and
we have the babies.
Now I'm not calling them stupid this time.
>> [LAUGH] >> No, it's stupid, stupid, stupid.
No.
They're just babies, and they're cute.
This is a picture of me.
>> [LAUGH] >> That's my childhood picture.
And I was born, I've been pretty abrasive ever since then.
And that was very offensive to my mother, I think,
when I came out of the womb like that.
And I've been kind of that way all my life, and I get a big kick out of it.
At any rate, so why cute and adorable?
And well, it's part of nature's
way of enabling us to survive.
If you came out of the womb looking like a baby raccoon,
people would not want to pick you up and hold you, and
hug you, and kiss you and say good things about you.
We don't say to baby raccoons, I would like to eat you up.
You're so cute.
We are seekers of human objects.
Seekers of objects.
It's the only way we can survive.
We cannot survive outside of relationships with other people.
We need to be picked up and held and
stimulated and sung to and
know right away that you are a welcome person.
You are worthwhile.
Although an infant just born will not experience this sense of being worthwhile.
The best it can experience is a sense of being fed.
A sense of somebody willing to attend to its needs.
And it's not even particularly aware of its external environment at that point.
Sometimes when babies are first born, the mother and father compete with each other.
And I've seen it in hospital from time to time.
Give me the baby, I want to bond with it.
Bonding is a really big deal.
You want to bond with the baby.
Well the baby doesn't give a shit.
>> [LAUGH] >> It will eventually,
about four, five, six months.
When it has the greater capacity to kind of feel and be involved in a relationship.
Then it does matter.
So there's a need to be picked up, held.
Stimulated by movement, and words, singing works.
And this is not of just passing importance.
It's been demonstrated,
particularly in World War II in Great Britain, when there were a lot of orphans.
Because the adults were either off to war,
or killed during that horrible time in our history.
So orphanages were setup and just in rough comparison,
there's one orphanage that had all the amenities, it was kept clean and
babies were fed on a regular schedule, etc., etc.
Their diapers were changed.
Compared to another orphanage that was clean on a kind of
regular schedule but part of the routine was a nurse
would go around at regular times and pick up the baby.
Hold it.
Jiggle it.
Bounce it on a lap.
Rock it.
Sing to it.
And those babies who received that kind of treatment were healthier,
had more rapid cognitive development and were less likely
to die than the babies who were kept clean but lack of stimulation.
So this is real.
This is something that we're born, we're wired to
need that kind of attention and stimulation.
So here are the guys that I follow.
This is Daniel Stern.
He's a child psychiatrist and infant researcher.
And one of the books that he wrote in 1985, so he's been around for awhile,
I found to be quite enlightening and very stimulating.
And then the other person you're familiar with is Antonio Damasio.
He's the neuroscientist.
And what's interesting to me, these researchers don't know each other or
at least they didn't at the time.
They didn't work with each other.
They didn't even cite each other's work, but
they came to the same terminology or very close to the same terminology.
With Stern looking at just observing babies and
inferring what was inside, whereas Damasio studied,
he's a neuroscientist and he studies it, life from the inside out.
So we got outside in, inside out and they tend to concur.
And we start with the Protoself.
Protoself.
The baby is born with a budding sense of self,
although it's beneath any kind of awareness.
Stern says, the infant operates with a non-reflective awareness that
is bounded entity, and shows preferences and makes choices.
There's no confusion in the child,
according to Stern, between what's out there and what's in here.
It's not just one whole kind of mess of confusion.
They are clear without knowing it that they are bounded and
they make choices and make decisions.
One thing that children are born with certain preferences.
One is that they like to stare at one form of picture as
opposed to another form of picture.
If you give them a picture of a smiley face and another picture,
of say a plaid or another kind of interesting, simple structure,
they will show their preference by staring at the face.
The picture with a face, and that's how you know they prefer it.
They can't say, I like that one, they just look at it more frequently,
a longer span of time.
So they have preferences.
They also have demonstration and preferences in other ways.
So you take the mother's milk and put it on a pad,
take the milk from some other mother and put it on a pad.
The infant will turn its face in the direction of the mother's milk.
So this has preferences.
So that's really interesting and it takes a kind of clever
setup to actually demonstrate that there are these inborn preferences.
So Damasio, he says that there's a coherent collection
of neural patterns that map moment by moment,
the state of the physical structure of the organism in all of its dimensions.
It monitors the internal state.
There's an aspect of automatically monitoring what's happening inside,
probably, well most likely through the brain stem and
whatever portion of the mid brain has developed at that point.
It's monitoring what's happening,
because it's gotta be monitored and automatically adjusted so
it won't go beyond the boundaries into a dangerous territory.
And he attributes that to something he calls the Protoself.
Protoself monitors and regulates the body's internal milieu.
We've talked about internal milieu.
It's like what's going on inside of the body.
It's going on inside of your body now.
It's beyond your awareness.
It just happens automatically.
What needs to do to maintain a condition of homeostasis.
So they agree on that.
And here, we've seen that picture before.
And this is the portion of the brain that regulates the internal milieu.
And the Protoself is turned inward monitoring what's
happening in the internal milieu of the body.
And we come to the core self, core self development.
See if you can follow this.
The core self is built upon the protoself.
It's an extension of the protoself.
And what the neat thing about the core self is it continues to monitor
the internal milieu of the body, moment to moment to moment to moment.
Continues monitoring what's happening.
But core self also looks out.
And increasingly as a child gets more mature, notices things happen out there.
It's no longer internally bound.
It notices things in its environment.
And it begins to notice that there's a coincidence between
the internal you and what it sees out there.
Okay?
So gradually it gets to recognize
that when somebody comes into its field of vision, let's say a mother,
and notices that the internal milieu calms down or
increases discomfort because, let's say it's hungry.
And then becomes associated that the mother is going to
take care of that hunger by feeding it.
And so now there you have a paired relationship between the appearance of
the mother, who typically will feed the child if that's the regular habit,
and a calming of the internal internal milieu.
This is very important because it continues on for the rest of our life.
That we notice something in the environment, the reason we notice it.
I mentioned the example of you're walking on campus.
Thousands of people go by you, or at least hundreds.
And then all of a sudden there's someone who changes
the internal milieu of your body, somebody you recognize.
Let's say it's somebody that you really like and haven't seen for awhile.
Or let's say it's somebody who you would just as soon avoid.
Well there's automatic, instantaneous feeling that there
is something in the environment that has altered the internal milieu of the body.
It feels good when mommy cuddles me.
I'm still uncomfortable with this thing.
And it feels bad when mommy has that expression on her face.
You know what that expression is?
It's just like, I would just as soon not be with you right now.
I'm more concerned about the carpet that's supposed to be coming from
Sears and they're late.
That kind of expression.
The Core Self and learning in humans and other animals.
Here we could get into a long discussion, I'm not going to,
for both animals and human beings in terms of early learning.
Early learning as some of you know if you've taken any courses in high school or
have read generally in psychology, there's something called reinforcement.
Contingencies of reinforcement.
And reinforcement is very powerful, because both kids and
animals will learn what feels good and what feels bad.
That's positive and negative.
And if it's positive, you do something and it leads to a positive outcome.
Guess what?
You're going to try it again.
You're going to do that again because it works.
If you do something and
it leads to a negative outcome, you're going to learn to avoid that.
It's called contingency as a reinforcement.
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