Religion and Cognitive Adaptations of the Brain

Hello,I have been recently researching the sociobiology of religion in order to write a paper on the subject, as a requirement for a class on evolution. I wished to throw out some of my ideas on the subject for debate, to get some ideas and perhaps better formulate my arguments. Thank you in advance for your ideas and/or arguments and disagreements. What follows is a free-write of the main ideas presented in the rough draft of my paper.The division between what constitutes a cultural process or a biological process has been hard to establish both within evolutionary biology and sociology. Sociobiology has attempted to bridge those differences and is from what I have gathered most of my support for my arguments. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is undeniably a cultural creature and much of its complexity is due to the capacity of our brain for abstract thought. Integral to culture is language. Without some form of language or communication, culture would fail to be passed down, and without the ability to be passed down through generations, culture fails to be an adaptational process. Culture is a survival strategy that Homo Sapiens Sapiens specializes in. It is an important memory tool used by man to pass down knowledge and techniques to survive and adapt. The analogy between cultural and biological evolution is taken most seriously by Richard Dawkins, whose idea of memes as analogues to genes is presented in his book, The Extended Phenotype. (Dawkins, 1982, Oxford, Oxford University Press.) Robert McCauley and E. Lawson in their book Bringing Ritual to Mind. (R. McCauley, E. Lawson, 2002, Cambridge, Cambridge University press) state that Possessing memes can have an impact on biological evolution. The conduct memes inspire can affect the reproductive success of organisms. and offer as example the shakers discouragement of procreation on religious principles which lead to their extinction as a culturally distinct group.
It is my contention that religion or rather (the propensity for religiosity) is, like language, an evolutionary adaptation by the brain. The hardest separation to make will be in showing that this propensity is biological rather than cultural. Culture in fact, has some evolutionary roots. We and our ancestors have used culture in order to adapt to environmental conditions and for survival. Language, with its’ partitions in the brain is most definitely genetically defined and most definitely is linked with culture. The propensity for religiosity is a manifestation of our brains attempt to reconcile its world view with reality. Ritualistic burial of the dead, sacred art forms such as earth mother/Venus figurines, specially built centers for gatherings, have been shown to be prevalent as far back at least as 50 kya and recent evidence supports ritualistic burial as far back as ca. 150 kya. Rituals such as those in religion, like language, are a way of passing along and down information generationally and a way of providing social controls. Humans are habitual creatures. Rituals are infused with habitual/ritualistic behavioralisms. Our ancestors must have had some curiosity about the world around them and what happens after death. Curiosity is a hallmark of the brain and the brain strives to understand the unknown. The brain, encompassed within the protective barrier of the cranium, is fragile physically as well as mentally. Religion is one way the brain attempts to understand and protect itself mentally. The heartache of a lost loved one or hardships of an individual or community can have tragic and long term implications for mental stability. Rituals/religiosity provides the brain with protection from breakdowns, and thought cohesion. Supernatural ideas provide an escape for the brain when faced with the unknown and tragic events. Our species has not had time to develop a totally rational worldview intellectually. We are a young species still. Many of our adaptations, brought about through the hardships of environmental changes of a glacial era, are mal-adaptive in our present era. Fight or flight syndromes, with its large influx of adrenaline, though arguably adaptive in Compton or Harlem, has little to offer the average person. The dangers we face now in our cities and towns pale in comparison to those we faced during the younger dryas period of the last glaciation or any other period of profound environmental change.
The brain is quite capable of using ritualistic/habitual behavior as a memory aid. Parental admonishments toward dental hygiene can lead to habitual brushing of the teeth before heading to bed. Learning by rote is used as a teaching tool over periods of time. Spatial organization of your surroundings can lead to habitual pathways. Your brain uses these as pathways to forming long term memory. Religion invokes many forms of habitual/ritualistic behavior. It uses religion as a strategy for behavioral/social control and social cohesion. The emotionality of rituals themselves are great memory aids for cultural transmission.
Religion has a causal relationship with the brain. The brain is not adapted for say, Christianity or Islam, or Shintoism or Hinduism. Religion is just a manifestation of an adaptive strategy. The propensity for language like religion is inherent in the brain. I forget where I read the phrase The brain is a blank slate but I think it has some relevance to the discussion. The brain does not hold a certain language ready for use when it is born, but uses its propensity to develop its language skills to various degrees. The brains propensity for supernatural explanations and ritualistic behavior is inherent as well. Children manifest this well. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, is one I’ll not likely forget. This belief in a supernatural power or magical curse is hard to let go. In the absence of scientific rationalism, humans revert easily to magic and supernatural powers within themselves and about the natural surroundings.
In the interest of time and a coherent post I’ll cut my lengthy abstract here. I’d really appreciate any thoughts that this community might have on the subject and I’ll leave some references at the bottom for those interested in sociobiology and religion.Boyer P, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. 1994, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press.Rappaport R., Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. 1999, Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press.Pandian J., Culture, Religion, and the Sacred Self: A Critical Introduction to the Anthropological Study of Religion. 1991, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Relevant to this is the finding from behavioral psychology that the best way to condition a behavior is through a random reward schedule; for instance, instead of giving the rat a pellet every time he presses the bar, only giving it to him on random occasions when he presses the bar.Ergo, an explanation for the prevelance of supernatural ritual - it "works" at random. Also, addiction to gambling, or even buying Magic: The Gathering cards. Or why people stubbornly slam buttons on the remote and shake it, instead of replacing the batteries or just getting up and changing the channel on the tv. Basically, every time you've heard someone say something like "Come on! I know this works!" they've probably been conditioned through a random reward schedule.

Will your paper have more than one paragraph?--Percy

yes, percipient, the thesis requirement for the class is for a paper of 12-15 pages. The above was just a rough draft outlining some of my reasoning for ritualistic behavior having an evolutionary benefit.
Ritualistic/religiosity, even in this period of scientific advance, is still prevalent. Obviously it must confer some advantage (is not totally useless) for those who hold to those belief's recieve some form of gratification of wants and/or needs. Rationalizing a chaotic/ seemingly random world into a coherent, simple, orderly universe.I apologize if it is difficult to read in "one" paragraph. I just wished to present for preview some of my main arguments for my thesis. It wasn't meant to be the totality of my argument. I felt it would have been harder to read and presenting the ideas in a shorter format is more easily digestable and easier for others to formulate arguments for or against. Thank you in advance for any criticisms/ supports you might have. [This message has been edited by DBlevins, 06-17-2003]

Hi DBlevins: You have a fascinating topic. For what it's worth, I'd like to repost an essay I wrote awhile back (and which I can't remember whether it was posted here or on another forum), that might help your thesis - or at least give a slightly different take.quoting myself:Most complex organisms are able, at least at a fundamental level, to "learn". By this I mean through experience they are able to associate two temporally-linked significant events or stimuli. Whether there is in reality a cause-effect relationship between the two events is utterly immaterial. This ability - no doubt the end result of millions of years of natural selection - has distinct survival benefit. It doesn't matter to the tasty bunny whether the rustle in the grass is a predator or just the wind. It flees. Hence the ability to positively correlate "rustle" with "predator" confers a survival advantage.However, a problem arises when you start dealing with organisms who have more complex brains than our poor deluded bunny. Whereas humans (and I presume our close cousins) still retain this survival-based learning (consider the instant association of a child who touches a hot stove "touch stove" = "pain"), with us the assymetry inherent in this instant association leads to a lot of mistakes, especially when we think about events that occur together from time to time. Humans are really lousy at accurately judging the relationship between events that only sometimes co-occur. Because we are so heavily influenced by pairings of significant events, we can come to infer an association - even a causal one - between two events even if there isn't one. For example: prayers may correspond with subsequent events only every so often by chance, and yet this pairing may have a dramatic effect on belief in the efficacy of prayer. Worse still, the world around us is full of coincidental occurrences, some of which are meaningful but the vast majority of which are not. This provides a fertile ground for the growth of fallacious beliefs. We readily learn that associations exist between events, even when they do not. We are often led by co-occurring events to infer that the one that occurred first somehow caused the one that succeeded it. We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved. We are always looking for causal explanations, and we tend to infer causality even when none exists.The second aspect that leads to mistakes is our perceptual system. Humans are incredible at detecting patterns. Unfortunately, not all the patterns we detect are meaningful ones. Our perceptual processes work in such a way as to make sense of the environment around us. Perception is not a passive gathering of information, it's an active construction of a representation of what is going on around us, built from information received by our senses. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment. Since perception is highly filtered by this "pattern recognition software", it's all too easy to infer pattern from the same mis-association of paired events that leads to mistakes in causality. The adaptive value of pattern recognition is fairly obvious - fight-or-flight responses are often subconscious even in humans and their ilk. Consider:

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An individual is walking through the woods when she picks up information -- either auditory, such as rustling leaves, or visual, such as the sight of a slender curved object on the ground -- which triggers a fear response. This information, even before it reaches the cortex, is processed in the amygdala, which arouses the body to an alarm footing. Somewhat later, when the cortex has had enough time to decide whether or not the object really is a snake, this cognitive information processing will either augment the fear response and corresponding evasive behaviour, or will serve to bring that response to a halt. (LeDoux, R., 1994, Sci Am 270, pp. 50-57)

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A third element that causes us to make mistakes, again based on the structure of our brains and central nervous system, is the way in which experience and perceptions are retained. As with preception, memory is a constructive process, not simply data storage as on a computer. Through our own experience, we come to believe in the reliability of our memories and in our ability to judge whether a given memory is reliable or not. Memories are subject to serious biases and distortions, often filtered through or compared with similar memories. It is very difficult for an individual to reject the products of his or her own memory process, for memory can seem to be so "real." Once again, the simple adaptive value of this system is obvious. From location of appropriate fruits to a hawk's shadow and kin recognition, memory serves to increase survival IF you can compare and contrast memories of past experience with current situations. Once you get beyond the "rustle = predator" stage of complexity, the ability to associate experience/memory provides a crucial advantage. However, memory will also include all of the fallacies of perception and cause-effect mis-association.Humans (and I guess our kin), also have a marvelous facility for assigning emotional content to specific memories. This emotion is, in essence, an environmental feedback mechanism based (probably) initially on the relative significance of the event or perception that triggered it. However this arose, it is apparent that the stronger the emotional content, the more intense the memory, and the more likely the individual will seek to either avoid subsequent iterations of the situation - or conversely seek out repetitions. When you start talking about humans, this emotional content can be assigned to highly abstract memories. For example, if our perceptions show an event that is highly improbable, our brains, filtering the event through the memory, pattern recognition, and learned response systems, may assign a high emotional loading to the memory. (One possible explanation is that the more important a memory in terms of survival, the higher the emotional load - but that's speculation). A really strong coincidence can produce the same result. In fact, humans are SO susceptible to loading peak experience with strong emotion, that we're even more likely than our less "developed" relatives to jump to a completely wrong conclusion inre causation. Once the emotion is assigned to a memory, then later thinking may well be dominated by the awareness that the emotional reaction was intense, leading to the conclusion that something unusual really did happen. And emotion in turn may directly influence both perception and learning - i.e., an event may be interpreted as bizarre or unusual because of the emotional responses triggered when we compare the event to previously retained experiences and this provides an additional filter to both future experience and learning!Taking all of this into consideration, it's fairly easy to see how the very physiology of our brains and perception system can easily lead to what we now call "belief". For our "primitive", leopard-haunted forebears, these systems provided a net survival advantage. In our highly complex, modern society, beliefs help us function. They guide our actions and increase or reduce our anxieties. If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it "works" for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience. It didn't matter to our pre-cognitive ancestors whether a belief was rational or not.We haven't gotten all that far from our prey ancestors. We now live in a highly complex, for all practical purposes incomprehensible society. We are anxiety laden in ways our evolutionary ancestors never had to face. So how did we end up with religion? Remember, we aren't passive receivers of information. We actively seek out information to satisfy our many needs. We may yearn to find meaning in life. We may yearn for a sense of identity. We may yearn for recovery from disease. We may yearn to be in touch with deceased loved ones. In general we yearn to reduce anxiety. Beliefs, be they correct or false, can assuage these yearnings. Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing these yearnings. Rationality and scientific truth have little to offer for most people as remedies for existential anxiety. However, belief in reincarnation, supernatural intervention, and everlasting life can overcome such anxiety to some extent.Religions don't exist because of someone wanting to take unfair advantage of the banana distribution or a non-dominant male wanting to achieve some form of dominance. Rather, religious thinking existed as an outgrowth of the way our brains adapted and developed. At a certain point, religious thinking arose as an expressed need to explain the mistakes in our perceptual, learning, and memory processes. The banana thief version that we call modern religion arose later when the cheaters realized they could obtain personal advantage from the need. Since humans were already "programmed" gregarious and hierarchical (like all our closest relatives except perhaps the bonobo - which may likely be an anomoly whose environment allowed them to take a different path than the rest of the primates), it was fairly easy to substitute the high priest for the high male. We're programmed for obedience. If the high priest can relieve our anxiety, we're programmed to seek it out.The antidote to our hard-wired past is a relatively new phenomenon. Reason and science are terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. Science accepts what few people ever accept - that you can't routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality.And there are a lot of unscrupulous wannabe alphas that are ready and willing to take advantage of the situation.
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Further reading - although not specifically associated with religion: An Evolutionary Psychology PrimerE.O Wilson, "Sociobiology", Harvard University Press, 2000 (newest ed).Paul Ehrlich, "Human Natures: Genes, Culture and the Human Prospect", Island Press, 2000
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The following is a journal article (abstract) that you might find useful for your thesis:C Soeling, E Voland, 2002, "Toward an evolutionary psychology of religiosity." Neuroendocrinol Lett, 23 Suppl 4: 98-104 Hope this helps.

Hmm. I don't quite take this approach; I don;t think that religion is an evolved behaviour at all, but a socio-politically imposed one.An excursion which attempts to explain the origin of "belief" is IMO unecessary. Sure there have been procedural attempts to supercede and overcome uncertainty - but this is "thought" not "belief", IMO.It only gets to the point of FAITH as a social dynamic. An appeal to Faith is the assertion that the individual should NOT speculate on their own. That is a claim to others behaviour, not a personal thought process... and that claim must be mediated through a social structure. Necessarily so in that the claim can only be formulated as a social transaction.Thus I disagree that there is a "natural" predeliction to religion, or that there is some "primitively pure" form of religion. IMO, the only valid model is the banana thief model although perhaps on a grand scale; I feel that religion as a property of a social organisation is the institution of heirarchical redistributive systems.

Hmmm, I think we need to make a distinction between what Sagan (IIRC), f'rinstance called "magical thinking", which I take to mean a propensity to ascribe non-natural or supernatural explanations to unexplained, unusual, or emotionally-laden phenomena, and "religion". I agree with you that religion has been primarily "a property of a social organisation [that supports] the institution of heirarchical redistributive systems". However, this doesn't explain the cognitive adaptation - derived from the way our brains and central nervous systems evolved - which permitted this form of coercive hierarchical structure to ultimately exist. I think that's where DBlevins was originally headed.I agree that there's probably no such thing as a "primitively pure" form of religion. I WOULD argue, however, that there is very much a primitive form of "magical thinking" that allows religion to gain its coercive power over the group once a certin level of social complexity is achieved.As far as faith goes, I'd say what you've described is accurate, but is more an aspect of the coercive element of religion (the proscription against questioning the tenets of the religion), rather than an aspect of the adaptive function of "belief" (or better said, a "capacity to believe").Hope this is clearer. I don't really disagree with you, but I think you may have misunderstood my intent.

Yes I will allow a form of "magical thinking" although I have severe reservations about this too. Frex, it is oft argued that China exhibits "correlative thought" as a direct descendant of an initially shamanistic magical praxis. But, it can and has been argued that in fact correlative thought emerges from a much later critique of theological and ritual practices, and is in no way derived from shamanism.So in part my argument is aimed at cautioning against a simple linkage between "magical thought" with "religious thought". Whereas I may (with caveats) accept the existance of "magical thought", this is still analytical and exploratory thought. I think the advent of Faith, of non-thought, requires a separate explanation.[This message has been edited by contracycle, 06-17-2003]

I have definitely asked the question of where religion comes from. Now, of course, since I believe in God, I could simply leave it at, "God spoke to the first group of men," or some such idea. That's not really what I think, though.I have wondered what would provoke humans--Homo sapiens--to postulate powerful, unseen beings. Religion is obviously very old, but what survival benefit could religion confer?To be a little brutal, I didn't like any of the ideas suggested in DBLevins original post. As someone who has only recently even given thought to the subject, I'm sort of an open slate, but nothing he said was satisfying.Your post, OTOH, Quetzal, gave me some ideas, although I hate wading through such a long post. It was interesting enough to be worth it, though.So here's a couple thoughts, in real simple language. Let me know if I'm missing something.It seems to me that explanatory power might be important to a leader of a group that talks. Power might be the end all in a group of grunters, but the ability to say "this is why it's so" and to arouse fear and compliance with words, would seem of great benefit to a leader.I say that, because you mention that our "pattern recognition" abilities are for the purpose of explanation. I'm suggesting a purpose to explanation. Whereas "cause I said so and I'm the boss," could get you in a fight for supremacy, "the gods will destroy us if you try that" could get an opponent to cower. Thus, the need to answer the "why's" of a leader's decision could lead to the leader using his "patter recognition" abilities to postulate unseen beings and purposes.As for your comments about the reliability of pattern recognition, I do have a test I put to my own conclusions. Being a religious person, I tend to draw conclusions about things that have happened to me that I believe are divinely controlled. The question I put to myself is, "Do I really believe I could say this will happen the next time, or do I doubt it would really happen?"For example, let's say I prayed for a roommate who couldn't get to a chiropractor because of where he lived, and his neck began feeling better (this really happened). Let's say a couple more things like that happened. For example, I offered to pray for a sick co-worker, who looked at me like I was out of my mind, then left without even answering me. He came back to work the next workday saying I should go into the faith healing business, because his sickness went away within ten minutes of my offer.Now, I ask myself, if this happened due to my prayers, do I have any confidence that I could promise the next sick person that came along that he would be made well? The answer is no. Really, I'd much more expect that they wouldn't be healed. I probably wouldn't argue much with a skeptic who said the healings I've seen had nothing to do with my prayers; just coincidence. (Not that I think they're coincidence, I just don't think I can conclude yet they're not coincidence.)On the other hand, if I was looking for something and suddenly was struck with a thought that I should look somewhere unexpected, I wouldn't be afraid to tell a skeptic that we're going to go look in that place and find what we're looking for, because those hunches have been accurate enough for me to want to feel comfortable putting them to the test.That's possibly a silly side thought, but I wanted to add it.

Thanks Quetzal and everyone for all of your replies. I'd like to take the time to formulate a more comprehensive response (very busy this week) but for now I'll just limit myself to saying that pattern recognition is something that I am considering placing within the supporting arguments for my thesis. Specifically the false recognition of non-random images appearing as "random" for human's. Also, though tying it in would be interesting , the false idea of sports star's having "hot streaks". Though a sport's star may have a greater number of hot streak's than say an amateur, hot streak's are just manifestation's of random events. Though making 5 3-point shots in a row would seem miraculous, you would "expect" to have instances of reacuurence in random events. slightly off the subject but interesting in that human's have a predication to match occurences to preconcieved idea's about the world. IE. human's tend to remember the hit's but forget the misses.

Hmm, well I have a little more time, and I thought I'd just add something else to think over. As far as "today's" world is concerned there isn't really a need for religion or religiocity. It is essentially useless from a technological standpoint, yet it still exists. Praying for the tele to be fixed doesn't cause it to magically repair itself. Though individulas may try to contend that prayer heal's the sick, if you have an infection you go to the doctor and he prescribes penicillin or some other derivative that kills the bacteria. Double-blind tests of the power of prayer are totally inconclusive and science and doctor's don't place much weight on inconclusive evidence. It just isn't practical. Belief in magic or the supernatural must fulfill then some need that humans have. I feel that prayer "makes" you feel less anxious but i have just recently been reading a book that says it is also contradictory. Look how anxious and scared people are about the prospect of "hell".

From a purely evolutionary point of view religious thought need not serve a purpose today, if it ever did, to still be around. All it would need to do is not be detrimental to fitness. This is obviously hugely simplistic and thinking of religious thought as if it were a genetic factor.

Hi TL: Thanks for your reply. Sorry the essay was so long ( ), but it was an attempt to make a compressed, non-jargony explanation for a very complex subject in something less than the length of "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". Naturally, that means a lot of detail is left out, to say the least. I'm glad you read it - hope it was interesting. This may be a bit further than I'd like to go down this particular road, since we're dealing with language rather than cognitive adaptation. Language - the ability to communicate abstract concepts - is probably an emergent property of the way our brains and central nervous systems evolved. As such, it is a capability that would have been co-opted to the socialization affects and behaviors we're discussing. IOW, language in this context is more or less simply an additional tool in the arsenal of dominance.The other difficulty I have with what you wrote is it appears you intend that language must be pre-existing (the explanatory power) in order for "someone" to take advantage of unusual events - even to fabricate unusual events - in an effort to control a group. Goodall, in "In the Shadow of Man" (Houghton Mifflin 2000, ppg 112-114), describes an occasion where one of the subordinate chimps in a troop she was observing used two empty kerosene cans to completely upset the dominance hierarchy of the group. The chimp ran several times through the troop banging the cans together, utterly terrifying all of the males (and everybody else for that matter). He then stopped banging, sat down in the middle of the troop, and "accepted" the grooming and other behaviors indicative of submission from the other males. IOW, the chimp fabricated a frightening "supernatural event", showed that only he could provide comfort ("explain" or at the minimum mitigate the "supernatural" activity) if propitiated, and usurped the normal - physical - dominance hierarchy of the troop. So from one of the weakest of the group who almost never got any respect, he moved to a dominant (or nearly) position within the troop. All without language. I think it's fairly easy to see in this example a very primitive form of the use of the supernatural - or non-natural - as a control/dominance technique. IOW, the earliest form of "religion". I agree that verbal communication would certainly make this type of behavior more effective - but isn't strictly necessary. I agree, and this certainly parallels my thinking. Consider how religions operate, usually. Without getting into too much detail on memes and cultural selection (which is interesting but way off topic), most religions provide the following:

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Bait
This is a promised benefit that make the meme complex look attractive to potential new hosts. For example the promise of a better life. Often the bait involves button pushing to get the attention of the potential host. The bait may be a trojan horse.

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Hook
This is the part of a meme complex that urges replication. In the case of religion this is typically a command to evangelize. In the case of a pyramid scheme business or chain letter the hook is an economical incentive to recruit new members.

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Indoctrination
Making sure that the host acquires all the memes in the meme complex. This may involve frequent repetition or brain washing. Rituals, songs, prayers, and oaths are typical examples.

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Protection against rival meme complexes
This could be the meme that blind faith is a virtue and that heresy is a sin.

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Reward and punishment
Obviously, rewards or punishments are often needed to make the host obey the instructions of the meme complex and its organization. A typical immediate reward is the belonging to a supportive social group. Sometimes the meme complex serves all the basic needs of the host. But the most powerful promised rewards and punishments are often due in a distant future or in the afterlife so that it is too late for the host to change his mind if the promises are not effectuated. Obvious examples are Hell and Paradise.

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Taxation
The demand that the host contribute time, energy, or money to the meme complex and its organization. These resources are needed by the organization for the purpose of competition against rival meme complexes.

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from Cultural Selection, chap 3, A. Fogg, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999

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My question then, would be, "Is your 'test' a valid, objective one?" IOW, is it replicatable by others, or are you alone the judge of the results? You have inferred, based on your perceptual and memory filters (i.e., your belief in the divine), a causative relationship between two events (you prayed, a co-worker "felt better") which may have nothing more than a temporal correlation connecting them. Have there ever been occasions when your prayer for someone's health didn't succeed (and note - if the person used some other method, like medication, this would obscure the validity of your inferred relationship)? How much time can elapse between the prayer and the result before you're willing to consider that the two events may not be related? And as you noted, there isn't apparently any predictive capability - you admit that you wouldn't want to bet that the next time would work as well as the most recent "hit". To me, the absence of predictive power or replicability indicates that we are dealing with coincidence vice causation.As to the hunch part you mentioned, well, as I tried to explain in my essay, we are not passive receptors of information from our environment. Our brains actively seek out and store information to form a coherent picture of our surroundings. In addition, intuition ("hunch") is actually based on probablistic reasoning - even unconsciously processed - the foundation of inductive reasoning. See, for example, Parsons LM and Osherson D, 2001, "New Evidence for Distinct Right and Left Brain Systems for Deductive versus Probabilistic Reasoning", Cerebral Cortex, 11:954-965, for a good description of the neuropsychology of intuition. IOW, you know more than you think you know, because your brain stores and instantly associates a lot of memories, etc, that you may not be completely aware of (not the so-called subliminal perceptions, but rather the ability to form associations between disparate patterns and memories). Next time you have a hunch, it might be interesting to sit down and analyze exactly how much you really "knew" about the location or whatever before you made the guess to "go look in that place and find what we're looking for". Oh, and just to make yourself feel better, people who are able to "intuit" the answer to a problem better than chance are generally more intelligent - their brains are better at probabalistic reasoning. On a final note, and to drag this back a bit onto topic, try thinking about what adaptive value the ability to intuit accurately - to take incomplete and/or ambiguous information and form accurate probability-based decisions - might have...

I'm not very good at this type of communication yet. I was trying to say this when I wrote what I wrote.What I meant by "I have a test" is not that I have a test that proves accuracy. I mentioned the prayer and healing in order to say, "If I find that I am not comfortable using past events to predict future behavior, then I am admitting at the outset that even I don't trust my conclusions about those past events." Thus, I was basically saying there is a lot I can comfortably tell myself, "This is simply your human nature at work drawing conclusions that are not reliable."When I am comfortable about my ability to predict future results based on past experience, I'm not saying I am therefore right. I am saying, though, that those results are worth exploring, which brings me to: I have done that. The answers are remarkably elusive. Since we don't tend to know we are accumulating information that will lead to a future "hunch," we don't take notes to examine after the "hunch."One night I was on my way to a friend's bus (several of the families here live in buses converted to RV's, normally with a couple other small out-buildings for an additional bedroom or home office or sewing room or whatever) when I passed another friend's bus. Something inside told me the friend I was looking for would be in the bus I was walking by. I shrugged it off, walked the additional hundred yards to the first friend's bus, only to be told by his kids he was at the bus I passed. (When I got back to the bus I had passed, one of my friends told me, "What good is intuition if you don't pay attention to it?")Anyway, that one's easy. Who knows what I might have heard subconsciously approaching the first bus that would let me know my friend was in there? Could be anything. Perfectly easy to explain.But one day I was about to drive the long but scenic way to the bank, and felt I shouldn't. I turned to go the long way, anyway, but felt even stronger I shouldn't, so I cut back towards the short way, did my business at the bank, then thought, "Wow, I might need a key for the place I'm going to." I then called a friend's cell phone as I was leaving the bank, and I was about 200 yards from my friend's car, who was also driving, both of us five miles from his office, that I needed the key to.In that situation I cannot imagine what information I might have had to know he'd be at the intersection of Buena Vista and Hwy 45 at that exact moment. If I'd gone the long way, he'd have been at least five miles up the highway when I crossed the highway, rather than turning onto it one country block away.So, I do consider, but I have no answers, except to say that people ought not to write off hunches.On your natural explanation side, everything you described about how
"hunches" are formed was written up in a book on psychology I read once. For the life of me I can't remember the book's name, but the guy focused on intuitive thinking versus logical reasoning (is that inductive versus deductive?). He said that our subconscious would process a lot of information for us and feed us answers if we'd let it, but westerners tend to be very logical. We want certain, concrete answers, while life mostly offers us only enough information to determine probabilities. He called them two different modes of thinking, and he suggested that our peace of mind has great need of that intuitive mode of thinking that requires us not to let go of the hard, logical drive for concrete answers (which basically translates to worry).Anyway, in the end, his recommendations for how a person should live their life were frighteningly similar to the suggestions we would make here at our community, and his recommendations were purely naturally based.Having said that, I was going to comment on the following quote from you, anyway, but I didn't realize how similar your wording was to the wording I just used until I went to cut and paste it just now: Life hands us enough information to guess (i.e.; probability-based decisions). That book I read, which the author said had spawned a whole new branch of psychology, said that's better done with reliance on intuition than with diligent conscious thought. I can definitely
see the adaptive value of the ability to intuit accurately.Um, I've made a lot of concessions here to "natural" thinking, and I tend to be a pretty "spiritual" person. "This life," as we tend to call the life in our community, tends to work on really deep parts of us, and closeness and intimacy (please don't anyone put any sexual connotation on the word "intimacy") are more frightening than almost anyone realizes. Sometimes, there's nothing but Yeshua's or Paul's words to hold onto when you feel things ripping apart inside, but you know that the result of pressing through what you don't want to do will be friendship, trust, and a security with one another that is normally reserved for only the closest of friends. Things like "He who hates his own soul will gain it" are sage bits of advice when you find yourself unreasonably panicked by honesty and closeness.I said that, because it frightens me a little to give to much place to "natural" explanations, but since I actually believe that Yeshua is the Truth, it seems rather absurd to be less than honest with what I see as though I were frightened of the Truth.

Gosh, that was a long response. Sorry.It does seem on topic to me, though.