Professor Yeti

Recently I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, a wonderful pop science survey of recent research in psychology. While the book never addresses spirituality, it inspired much layman’s hypothesizing, which inevitably cross-pollinated with my habitually mystical musings. One of the resulting hybrid blossoms was this: I think, from a psychological perspective, that invoking deities or spiritual beings could actually influence reality.

Let’s rewind. The findings in Blink support the idea that what we think consciously and what we perceive unconsciously can significantly affect our actions. Scientists at New York University found that by sprinkling cue words in “scrambled-sentence tests,” they influenced test subjects’ behavior: after certain tests, for example, the subjects walked more slowly or acted more politely. Words can “prime” our subconscious toward acting in certain ways.

Prayers and religious verses likely work the same way. They immediately shift the “mode” in which the reader or listener is thinking, and, over time, the cumulative effect is to make that spiritual mode more the norm. In the much-publicized brain science conference in which the Dalai Lama took part, Richard Davidson proposed that monks’ years of meditating had actually changed the structure of their brains. The brains’ adaptability, both in the short term and the long term, could be influenced directly by spiritual practices.

But where do gods come in? One study in Blink found that a simple instruction caused one group of students to perform significantly better on Trivial Pursuit questions than the control group. The first group simply spent “five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind.” If what this suggests is true, it is a momentous discovery. If focusing your mind on a personification of a certain quality (such as a professor) can enhance that quality in yourself, this act could naturally include supernatural beings such as spirits, saints, and gods. If it could work with Einstein, why wouldn’t it work with Athena, goddess of wisdom? Or with Ares, while gearing up for a battle? Maybe “What Would Jesus Do?” is a powerful thing to keep in mind, despite being clichéd. Maybe poetic invocations of the Muse really do make poetry flow more freely from poets’ fingertips.

A question which quickly arises is: if praying and thinking about Jesus makes you more like Jesus, why are there so many people full of hate in Jesus’ name? My hunch is that chanting “God Hates Fags,” or dreaming eagerly of the Rapture’s storms of brimstone, will cause you to miss out on the effects of imagining a more loving Jesus. One might guess that George Bush summons the image of God the Almighty Potentate more than he does the image of Jesus the Guy Who Ate with Prostitutes.

What is perhaps more frightening to me than the thought that the religious might be right about the power of prayer — at least as concerns abilities and character — is that they might be right about the negative effects of pop culture. If imagining professors helps you on tests, what effect does imagining Beavis and Butthead have on your actions? Or Batman? Or the characters in Street Fighter 2?

I can remember vividly my middle school experience of reading Redwall for the first time: I dreamed so strongly about Matthias the warrior mouse that I felt differently. Just walking in the park with my family, I felt like I was in an epic story, that there were heroic things in store for me. No doubt such culture-inspired dreams have their impact, whether measurable or not. And if imagining warrior mice can shape your psyche, is it any different than being shaped by gods long present in the cultural imagination?

I leave the answer as an exercise for the scientists. But I believe this argument — that invoking deities has definite and potentially helpful psychological effects — is much more powerful than the dismissive “religion as delusional crutch” argument, in terms of accounting for why spirituality could have evolved in the first place.

And whether or not you think evolutionary psychology holds water, the idea is frankly magical. What we hold in our thoughts will bear fruit. Dreaming of Socrates brings us closer to embodying Socrates. When Edmund Spenser set out to write The Faerie Queene as an epic which would, by the very act of being read, transform the reader into a moral being, his scheme was not wholly crackpot. The thoughts we recieve could be as tangible as the molecules we breathe.

Jonathan Wichmann (jonathanwichmann@gmail.com) does his brain-rewiring at the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 4th, 2006 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.