Can you see my belief? The growing use of fMRI technology in understanding how beliefs show up on the brain.

Our understanding of beliefs has taken a step forward in the past fortnight with the release of a new paper that looked into where in the brain belief, disbelief and uncertainty show up. A team of scientists and a well known author Sam Harris released a paper entitled "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty" where they used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of 14 adults while they evaluated varoius statements to be true, unture or undecideable.

The seven page paper, while not exactly light easy reading gives a fascinating view into what happens in the brain when someone believes, disbelieves and is uncertain.

Harris and two co-authors ran 360 statements on 14 adults while their brain activities were scanned to look for patterns – to help the scientists identify what parts of the brain “light up” during a consistent run of “true”, “untrue, and “unsure” statements.

The kind of statements, across seven categories were of the format such as

(2 + 6) +8 = 16
“Devious means friendly”
“A personal God exists, just as the bible describes it”

The goal of the study was to "to differentiate belief, disbelief and uncertainly at the level of the brain” and no doubt will be a valuable contribution to the ongoing brain mapping studies. (Brain mapping refers to the study of the relationship between the structure and function of the brain and has been incremental in understanding the different roles that are handled by different parts of the brain.)

A number of leading people in the NLP field are exploring the role of brain technology and enhanced cognition and I suspect many more NLPers get involved in this area aswell in the future. For those of you who may not be aware enhanced cognition deals with how one can enhance the cognitive abilities of another through influencing how the brain naturally prunes and creates new neural pathways. In a simplistic sence think of the Matrix and the way "Tank" the operator could upload a program (advanced skillset) to Neo who quickly learnt Kung Fu. Except in enhanced cognition we are unlocking to a certain degree the "brain code" in terms of how through specific external sensory input we can alter the neural structure of the brain.

From an NLP perspective this is very exciting as what we have been finding out is that by manipulating specific external sensory inputs (for example how we use our voice) we can alter and influence the pruning and neural pathway creation process. In effect new brain technologies are allowing us to understand more of what brilliant change work is doing “under the hood” and leading pioneers in the NLP field are working with some universities in assisting in these studies.

So are different sections of the brain activated when we evaluate something as true vs. unture? Harris report highlights that indeed different areas of the brain are activated when a subject considered something as "true"(belief) vs. "not true" (disbelief) vs. "uncertain" and what’s more is the response times to evaluate and decide this varied markedly also.

For example on average it took participants 3.26 seconds to judge a statement as true but 3.7 seconds to regard a statement as false. This  significant difference matches with a study carried out at Stanford Unversity by Herbert Clark that showed that people take a longer timeframe to process negative statements, on average in their study two tenths of a seconds longer to confirm if a statement as false.

Try this for yourself, answer the following as quickly as possible:

                                                        *
The star is above the cross
                                                        +

                                                        +
The star is above the cross
                                                        *

Were you aware if you had a difference in response times?

The explanation by Clark at the time was that when we seek to verify a statement, we instinctively assume it to be true and fit the facts around it. Negitive statements take us longer to process which from an NLP and Hypnosis perspective can be useful as when we use negative statement and double negatives to induce trance.

For example try out the experience of reading the sentences below:

The time is not yet now to make the changes that have already happened

Vs.

The time is now to make the changes happen.

Vs.

The double negitive statement of:
 
The time is not yet now for you to not realise that the problem isn’t present anymore as the changes you want have happened easily and cascade into the unfolding days of your life.

The negitve statements can be difficult to comprehend initially and for most will take longer to process. In addition they overload the conscious mind and when you use your tone elegantly can have the suggestions you want marked out to create the change you desire. Try some more out for yourself.

Overall Harris’s paper highlighted that while more complex statements may get analyzed in "higher" areas of the brain, all evaluations seem to get their final stamp of "belief" or disbelief in "primitive" locales of the lower brain - traditionally associated with emotions or taste and odor.

The study in one sense highlights that the statement "that just doesn't smell right to me" may be more literal than we ever thought!

If you want to read the full report you can download the entire report by right clicking on the URL below.

http://www.samharris.org/images/uploads/Harris_Sheth_Cohen_AON_2008.pdf