User:Daask/sandbox/The "God" Part of the Brain

The "God" Part of the Brain is a book by Matthew Alper published in 2008.

Reception
"The modular theory of brain organization and function (Fodor 1983; but see Fodor 2000) is too often taken for granted by many cognitive neuroscientists— indeed, it has to be in order to get very far in localization studies because of the coarseness of lesion-correlation techniques and existing imaging techniques. Th e role of the modularity hypothesis in such research leads to colorful claims that a link has been discovered between an observable change in brain function and a phenomenological feature of the state of mind reported by the experimental subject. But such claims are inevitably strained, and we would feel much more comfortable with something other than gross regional correlations. A given region of the brain is potentially involved in many functions, and most interesting behaviors and states of consciousness have complex neural realizations. Thus, there is slender basis for unequivocally assigning an interesting phenomenological feature of an experience to one function in one brain region. The classic example of such hasty associations is talk of a God part of the brain (Alper 2001; and see the discussion in Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1999) or a God gene (Hamer 2005)—as if all religious people are interested in God, and as if the neural embedding of the vast variety of RBBEs can be localized to a single brain region. Neither premise is remotely sound."