DieChecker, on 23 May 2011 - 10:56 PM, said:
So the paper should be more properly called, "Religion induced stress may affect brain changes"??
Maybe, a better title would be about how the popularity of religious social group provides a protective factor against stress.
DieChecker, on 23 May 2011 - 10:56 PM, said:
I notice they don't seem to have excluded any other stressors in this short abstract/press release. Maybe simply Stress itself is what causes the increase atrophy, or rather a less stressful life may reduce the atrophy.
Correct, it is a very sloppy and tentative result. If you note, they actually didn't do participant recruitment on their own;
Quote
Participants were 268 men and women aged 58 and over, recruited for the NeuroCognitive Outcomes of Depression in the
Elderly (NCODE) study. Details of recruitment for this ongoing longitudinal study are described elsewhere [38]. Participants
included two groups, those meeting DSM-IV [51] criteria for major depressive disorder and never-depressed comparison participants. Exclusion criteria included concurrent diagnosis of other psychiatric or neurological illness, significant cognitive impairment, and substance abuse. Requirements for inclusion in the non-depressed group were no evidence of a diagnosis of depression or self-report of neurological or depressive illness.
If you actually look up their source 38: Steffens DC, Byrum CE, McQuoid DR, Greenberg DL, Payne ME, et al. (2000)
Hippocampal volume in geriatric depression. Biol Psychiatry 48: 301–309.
The patient population isn't corrected for confounding variables for stress, as that wasn't the initial investigation of the sample population.
To be honest, this is pretty shoddy all around academic work and its the reason its published in PLoS one, which if you are familiar with scientific literature, you'd know that PloS one is kind of bottom of the heap in terms of respectability before you get to crack-pottery and phony journals.
To be honest, because I can be somewhat cynical sometimes, I suspect if you looked into it the primary authors of this paper are "non-born again" protestants and these guys are simply trying to catch the eye of Templeton. As bad as that sounds, but unfortunately (especially in open access journals like PloS One) that kind of stuff happens. You want big, good science, you got to go to big-time science journals in their respective fields.
DieChecker, on 23 May 2011 - 10:56 PM, said:
Ah, so in England the same might apply to being Anglican, and in Italy - Catholic, and in Iran - Muslim, and in India - Hindu.
Yes, exactly. The effect is one of social groups--Not a specific religion. We do better, mentally and physically when we are the "popular ones", when we're at the "top" of the social hierarchy. There has been hundreds of articles published on this--From ranking in a company, to where you stand in a fraternity, to how well your football team does.
When we perceive ourselves at the top socially and in the top social groups, we lower our stress levels--Which means cortisol and other stress hormones levels decreases. We elevate good things, like HDL and good hormones. We tend to be happier, work better with peers, and apparently--Have a better looking hippocampus.
That again, isn't surprising if you think about it. Those stress hormones play havoc on our body. They do everything from lowering our immune system, making us sick more often to causing atherosclerosis and arteriosclerosis to reducing neural output from certain cell types in the brain (like dopaminergic cells in the pars compacta of the substania nigra--which can lead to earlier onset of Parkinson's).
DieChecker, on 23 May 2011 - 10:56 PM, said:
Wasn't work done to determine if humans are hard wired for religion and needing something to believe in? Could it be that Atheists are actually living a less-healthy lifestyle?
No people aren't hardwired for religion. This has been successfully put out into the public sphere over and over by religious apologists. What we are "hardwired" for is beliefs in superstitious type things. It has to do with the way that we learn and how our brains evolved to function in complex social groups.
On learning, our "base" type of learning (outside of the modern era) is associative learning and establishing casual relationships. Its what made our ancestors such great problem-solvers.
Silly example to explain; you observe that when you flipped over a rock on accident, down by the river there was easy to get food. The easy food, reinforced the behavior and now you flip over more rocks. You find food and thus the behavior is further reinforced. You've learned a new way to gather food.
But, because its so easy to establish casual relationships for you this can "get out of control". Suppose you notice that the last 3 rocks you flipped you got food, and that you were also wearing your tiger skin loin-cloth instead of your goat one. You now establish that not only that do you get food by flipping rocks, but that you get more food by having the tiger-skin loin cloth.
Silly examples aside, you hear people do it all the time; "these are my luck socks", "that's my lucky number" etc.
On social groups, we communicate extremely diversely as a species. Through a plethora of verbal and non-verbal ways. Ancestors who were better at figuring out the intent and will of their group mates were better at surviving in the group. You can observe the same thing in other modern social animals. Animals which are "in tune" with the other members of the group and good at observing and avoiding conflict do better than ones that don't, on average.
So we have a propensity to ascribe intent to things, whether their human or not and to find "human" in non-human things. This gives us such sweet skills as finding the Virgin's face in toast, "faces" on Mars, etc. It also makes us suspicious etc.
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