Halloween

This is the week during which we usually celebrate the supernatural. Halloween originated from the Pagan festival, Samhain, celebrated among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain to mark the end of the fertile period of the Celtic Goddess Eiseria. It was believed that when the goddess reached the end of her fertile cycle, the worlds of the dead and the living overlapped. Wearing masks originated because the goddess, like most Celtic deities, did not wish to be seen with human eyes. Today, Halloween is the 6th most profitable holiday of the year in the US.

In the Buddha Field, the only concession to the Halloween tradition was that we would dress up in costume one night. Usually, the guys would be encouraged to dress as women (to combat gender stereotypes). During the years when we dressed up the same night we had class, some people would dress up in a "theme" or do skits. And the introspection that night always centered around, "How do you play this character in your every-day life?" or "How is the mask you normally wear like the one you think you put on tonight?" Those classes were always hilarious. It was hilarious to see what people would dress as. VERY creative people coming up with VERY creative costumes. Or sometimes the costumes seemed minimal, but when they ACTED as the character, THAT was the hilarious bit. Those classes were usually videotaped but I don't remember ever seeing those tapes. I suppose they're lost forever now.

But again, when I think of Halloween, I am reminded of BELIEF. Belief in the supernatural. Belief in things that supposedly don't exist and yet there is that question, "well, maybe?" Like ghosts, or vampires, or spiritual masters. Things for which I have NO BASIS for belief and yet there is that in me which is unwilling to state categorically they DON'T exist. Well, ghosts and vampires anyway... Why is that?

This week there is an article in Newsweek that addresses some of the ways our brain is wired and how they contribute to what we believe. The job of the brain's neurons is to fill in blanks for us. That can cause us to see something that may not actually be there:

The brain takes messy, incomplete input and turns it into a meaningful, complete picture. Visualize four Pac-Man-like black shapes arranged so that the wedge removed from each seems to form a corner of a white square. Neurons in the brain's visual regions, whose job is to fire when the eyes see a square's edges, do fire—even though there are no edges to see. The mind also sees patterns in random data, which is why the sky is speckled with bears and big dippers. This drive to perceive patterns—which is very useful in interpreting experimental data as well as understanding people's behavior—can also underlie such supernatural beliefs as seeing Jesus in the scorch marks and flecks of grain on a grilled-cheese sandwich. "If a stain looks like the Virgin Mary," says Hood, "then it is a divine sign and not a coincidence. If the wind in the cave sounds like a voice, then it is a voice."

And of SPECIAL interest, was the part of the article that dealt with "confirmatory bias." The idea being that people remember things that confirm what you want to believe and forget those things that don't confirm it. Also, there seems to be a biochemical element involved:

As scientists probe deeper into the brain for what underlies superstition, they have found a surprising suspect: dopamine, which usually fuels the brain's sense of reward. In one study, two groups of people, either believers in the supernatural or skeptics, looked at quickly displayed images of faces and scrambled faces, real words and nonwords. The goal was to pick out the real ones. Skeptics called more real faces nonfaces, and real words nonwords, than did believers, who happily saw faces and words even in gibberish. But after the skeptics were given L-dopa, a drug that increases dopamine, their skeptical threshold fell, and they ID'd more faces and words as real. That suggests that dopamine inclines the brain to see patterns even in random noise.

So, maybe we all just have elevated levels of dopamine -- to see something that wasn't there. I guess that could be another name for our group -- the Elevated Dopamine Subjects. Or just Dopes for short.

Happy Halloween!