Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology

From Human Minds to Divine Minds

Templeton Press

Contents

What Is Cognitive Science?

THE POINT IS ALMOST so obvious that it hardly needs stating: humans are distinctive because of their ability to think, reason, imagine, and learn—their cognitive abilities. When Hamlet trumpets the greatness of humans, it is the human mind that takes center stage:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2)

The words reason, faculty, action, and apprehension point to humans' ability to think and direct their actions apart from mere instincts. Shakespeare recognizes as well a tension between the marvels of the human mind and the less lofty biological ("paragon of animals") and physical ("quintessence of dust") nature. The great thinkers throughout the ages and the world's religious traditions have sought to embrace this tension in their treatments of human nature. In the Genesis creation story, humanity is presented as derived from the dust of the earth and yet above all animals, and ultimately separated from God by succumbing to the temptation of knowledge:

And the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. (Gen. 3:4–6, NKJV)

It is the gifts of the mind that separate humans from the other animals, and on the basis of mental prowess humans vie to "be like God." In Buddhism too we see ambivalence about thought: it distracts and enslaves us to worldly concerns, and yet it is through disciplining our thought (such as meditative practice, vipassan?) that genuine wisdom or insight (paññ?) can be achieved. Understanding how humans think, then, may be critical in understanding distinctive features of human nature, how we may relate to the transcendent, and the key to human thriving.

In a direct hand-to-hand combat with a wolf, leopard, bear, Tasmanian devil, or ape, an average human would fare poorly. Without natural weapons such as claws or powerful teeth and jaws, and lacking impressive quickness and power, humans are not terribly formidable foes. Human babies, in particular, are relatively helpless. A two-year-old human is known as a "toddler" because of its clumsiness, but the same aged chimpanzee can swing from tree to tree, and the two-year-old wildcat or canine is already an adult, able to catch an antelope on the run and tear it to bits. Lacking impressive physical attributes, human survival and thriving are critically dependent upon the power of our minds.

The obvious importance and distinctiveness of human thought do not mean its scientific study—cognitive science—is so obvious. In fact, very well educated people do not even realize that cognitive science exists. In this chapter I give a brief explanation of what cognitive science is and what it is cognitive scientists do, laying the groundwork for an exploration of cognitive science as it relates to religious expression and theological issues. After all, how the human mind handles religious information may provide insights into the nature of revelation, how people understand scripture, and how they "read" the natural world for messages from the divine. Understanding the prerequisite kind of mind for being religious could also amplify accounts of the origins of religion for humanity and in individual lives. For religious ideas and practices to spread and persist, they must ride on cognitive equipment. It may be, then, that just how cognition supports religious thought and action might have practical implications for religious communities—for instance, how to successfully teach children, what impact changing a ritual might have on participants, and identifying which points of doctrine might be most subject to distortion. On the other hand, perhaps religious thought and practices are not just informed and shaped by human cognition, but can also change our thought-producing equipment in important ways: religious practice might impact human cognition beyond merely filling in content. Before turning to these big questions, an introduction to cognitive science is required.

Surveying the Terrain of Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary area of scholarship that considers what the human mind is and how it functions; how people think. Thinking includes everything from perceiving what is in the world around us to reflectively and abstractly reasoning about hypothetical worlds that are not around us. I am not including all human behavior as the object of cognitive science. A psychologist or a physiologist may study sneezing, yawning, or sleeping, but that isn't cognitive science. Cognitive science concerns imagining, recalling, watching, wondering, pondering, and deciding. Without denying or affirming animal thought (another fascinating matter), my focus here is on human thought. That said, in some cases the study of nonhuman animals provides special insights into the character of the human mind.

Recently my family and I had a Sunday supper with friends and afterward played a wonderful game that required each of us in turn to try to provide clues for everyone else to guess what was depicted on a card. The card could present a famous person, an occupation, a location, an object, an event, or any number of different things. A roll of a die determined the restricted range of clues that the player could provide. They could be a drawing, a wordless performance (think charades with sound effects), words all beginning with the same letter, or a comparison with two other things (for instance, one successful clue was "smaller than a swimming pool, bigger than a mattress" for the answer "waterbed"). This group effort was a race against time. Not only was the game a lot of fun, it was fascinating watching various types of human thought at work. The clue givers had to figure out what critical information would trigger the right association in the minds of at least one member of the audience within the constraints of the rule-types. The guessers had to try to infer a concept from the very strange and indirect clues—almost mind reading. One seemingly amazing instance was when my wife gave a two-second hula dance and then mimed opening a can with a pull-tab. The whole act lasted less than three seconds and in a heartbeat my daughter (correctly) answered, "Spam!" How? Cognitive scientists are interested in every step of interactions like these. How does a person (my daughter) perceive another person's body (my wife's)? Understand the movement of that person as an example of a known dance (hula)? Regard that dance as indicating a particular culture or place (Hawaii)? Recognize a cupped hand, first, as a hand and, next, as indicating holding something that isn't actually there? Recognize a movement as representing opening a familiar container type (a tin with a pull-tab) that isn't actually present? Put the concepts HAWAII and TIN-WITH-PULL-TAB together to trigger a memory that Hawaiians are inordinately fond of Spam and get the correct answer "Spam"? How did my daughter do all of this in a fraction of a second? And how did my wife suspect that someone would be able to rapidly piece all of this together and choose this performance strategy? And why did we all feel surprise and amusement at this exchange?

Cognitive Science Is Not Neuroscience

These questions are the sorts that animate cognitive scientists, questions about how human minds work, how we think. Notice, however, that few of us would be satisfied if we answered these questions by simple appeals to brains or biological structures. Consider: Question, "How did my daughter get from hula and can-opening motions to Spam?" Answer, "Her brain did it." Not terribly satisfying, right? Even if we narrow the scope a little, "This part of the brain and that part of the brain did it," we're still left with the wrong kind of answer. Though the brain sciences can and do make important contributions to cognitive science, cognitive science is not first and foremost about where things "happen" in the brain. It isn't really about brains at all. It is about minds.

If someone asks you how the United States federal government works, you wouldn't answer by saying that it is located in Washington, or even specifying that the White House is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol is about one-and-a-half miles ESE of there and the Supreme Court building is a bit over a quarter mile to the east of there. How the U.S. government works isn't (usually) answered by appeal to the physical structures involved. To use the familiar comparison with our office computers: cognitive science isn't about the "hardware" of human minds—silicon chips, circuit boards, and the like. Cognitive science is about the "software" of human minds: How does this word processor work? Why do I get an error message when I try to open this file? What can I do to import information from my spreadsheet to my presentation file? If my IT officer answered any of these sorts of questions by explaining how semiconductors work in my computer's microcircuits, I'd show him the door. It isn't that computer hardware isn't interesting; it just isn't the right level of explanation for the sorts of questions being asked. Similarly, I think brain science is fascinating, but that doesn't mean it is the right level of explanation for the questions that cognitive scientists are (usually) trying to answer.

You may have noticed that I keep putting "usually" in parentheses here and there. The reason is that in some small proportion of cases, the physical structures of the brain do play a role in illuminating why we think the way we do. The area of cognitive neuroscience considers these cases, and I will say more about it below. I am belaboring the brain-mind distinction here because so many people—academics and nonacademics alike—confuse cognitive science with brain sciences. Snazzy pictures of brain scans make for good television and print media, but that can lead to the misperception that brain science is the direction that all science of the mind and behavior is headed.

Brain sciences, neuroscience, and related areas pertaining to the anatomy and physiology of our nervous system contribute greatly to our understanding of human behavior and provide tools for medical solutions when things go wrong. My very first publication was a coauthored paper arguing that the failure of a subcellular structure in certain neurons could account for bipolar disorder and features of its treatment with lithium. A feature of neuron function arguably has an impact on the wide range of manic and depressive behaviors that characterize bipolar disorder. Understanding the biology of the brain and the rest of the nervous system matters, sometimes in surprising ways. But not all of neuroscience is cognitive science. The kind of neuroscience I dabbled in at the beginning of my academic career was not cognitive science. The identification of a subcellular neural structure failure might have helped explain episodes of mania, but it didn't explain anything about language use, analogical reasoning, or learning during manic episodes. Other areas of neuroscience are even further afield, concerned with the nuts-and-bolts of how neurons communicate with each other or how brain structures develop without meaningful reference to thoughts and feelings at all.

Topics of study

The cognitive science umbrella covers a wide range of topics—as broad as the innumerable domains of human thought. In just one issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences (December 2004), a leading professional journal in the area, you can find essays on:

: How value and probability are represented by brain structures such that they can be used to make decisions

: Immediate, "working" memory in sign language versus spoken language

: Children's developing understanding of other's mental states

: Understanding the unspoken implications of conversation

: Why certain muscular actions become rhythmical when they are learned

: What it would mean for a robot to have emotions

In just this sample of topics we can see a range from very general thought activities such as decision-making to very specific problems such as keeping sign language in memory as one uses it.

Grouping the various topics that cognitive scientists consider can be done in many different ways. Commonly, however, problems are grouped by the general cognitive process or activity that seems most critical. These processes include:

: Perception—how do we use our senses to identify patterns and objects in the environment? How do we recognize the furniture of the world? How much is perception influenced by situation, personal history, and cultural context?

: Attention—how do we focus on some ideas or incoming information as opposed to others? What are the limits on human attention? How much can it be divided among tasks? Can attention be expanded through practice?

: Memory—how is memory structured? Do we have different types of memory? How can we put ideas, images, events, or action-sequences into memory? How do we retrieve information from memory? Why do we forget? Are there techniques that can be used to improve memory?

: Conceptualization—where do our concepts come from? How do we categorize ideas? How do collections of ideas or experiences of events become knowledge structures? How do we form stereotypes and think with them?

: Communication—how do we communicate with others? How do we use language, gestures, facial expressions, and other actions to convey ideas or feelings? How do we understand the messages others try to send? How do we acquire language, including grammar and vocabulary? What role does language play in thought?

: Reasoning—reasoning overlaps with decision-making and conceptualization, but places an emphasis on conscious, careful reflection on ideas, on what we know and don't know, and on how to solve problems. How do we come up with answers to questions? When are we able to reason using the rules of logic or probability?

: Learning—we reason from something we know to something else (inference). We make decisions regarding ideas we have acquired somehow. Before cognitive science was born, the scientific study of learning principally concerned how animals (including human animals) acquire behaviors that are not simply instinctual. The cognitive science of learning emphasizes how new information, ideas, concepts, and words are acquired.

: Decision-making—how do we form judgments? What thought strategies do we use automatically to decide whether something is or isn't the case? How do we decide to do one thing as opposed to another? How do we string many decisions together to make complex plans?

: Imagination—just as we can form percepts (impressions from perceptual systems) through all of our senses, perhaps we can form all of these kinds of images "in our heads," from images of what a cat's fur feels like to what baking bread smells like to what a sunrise looks like. How accurate are these mental representations? How do we use them in thought? How does this sort of image-based imagination compare to language-based imagination? How are we able to think about things that are not necessarily so?

These processes are not discretely partitioned from each other but interact in most real-world thought and action. Cognitive scientists also consider how these various processes interact. For instance, how does attention impact memory? Does language modify perception and concept formation? Can forming visual images improve memory or problem-solving? How do concepts impact communication or imagination?

Another category of cognition deserves mention here even though it does not really constitute a different process parallel to the categories above. Our feelings or emotions can be considered in any of these general processes. For this reason, I consider emotions a dimension of cognition rather than a separate process or activity. A cognitive scientist might be interested in why certain types of thought might get infused with certain emotional qualities and how different physiological states can acquire meaningful content that lead to the rich diversity of feelings people report experiencing. Do particulars of language change our feelings? How does intensity of emotion impact memory, attention, or perception? What role does emotion play in reasoning or decision-making?

Similarly, across all of these categories we might consider how consciously accessible dynamics differ from nonconscious dynamics. Is there more going on in our thoughts than we can introspectively become aware of? If so, how do these nonconscious cognitive processes impact conscious ones?