Hate and the brain

[Zerbie]

Stumbled, quite accidentally, upon this book citation while surfing the internet for other reasons. . . .

I have only glanced through it, but I suspect this book will prove fascinating as an outline of the neuro-physiology of hate. I may very well be ordering this book.

It seems my idea that there is some important difference in brain function between individuals such as our forum regulars and those who promote things like Prop 8 out of an emotional basis of antipathy towards gay folks may in fact be quite real. We may all be functioning from different brain centers, creating entirely different interpretations of the world because our physiologies process information differently. I'm making a flying leap there, since I haven't read the book yet, but it's a suspicion I've had for a few years now.

Take a look, and if anyone here has read this book and can offer a review, that'd be great.

http://books.google.com/books?id=q_m...result#PPP1,M1

[Rick336]

Thanks Zerbie. Lately I've been fascinated in psychology and neuroscience and how the brain works. From what I've found so far, we humans have very little free will. Our past environment, our brain structure, and our memory all play a part in what causes all of us to think and behave the way that we do. The good news is, we can change a lot of it.

This book looks interesting. I might have to check into it.

Rick

[Zerbie]

Originally Posted by Rick336

Thanks Zerbie. Lately I've been fascinated in psychology and neuroscience and how the brain works. From what I've found so far, we humans have very little free will. Our past environment, our brain structure, and our memory all play a part in what causes all of us to think and behave the way that we do. The good news is, we can change a lot of it.

This book looks interesting. I might have to check into it.

Rick

One word: neuroplasticity

Yes, we do have free will, but it can be fooled with. The good news is also the bad news: we are highly programmable. That's bad news because we can be programmed rottenly, but it's also good news because we can be re-programmed. We can choose to re-program ourselves, and that is the ultimate in 'free will.'

[Rick336]

Originally Posted by Zerbie

We can choose to re-program ourselves, and that is the ultimate in 'free will.'

I agree. But many people have been programmed so "rottenly" for so long that it is nearly impossible to change. Their free will is severely limited because their brains have been programmed one way for their entire lives.

Think about Fred Phelps. Do you think he will ever say to himself, "Maybe I need to re-examine my position on gay rights. Maybe my thinking is flawed about homosexuality and equality for gay people is actually a good idea."

I don't think so. I think even if we gave Fred Phelps thousands of reasons why equality for LGBT people is completely rational, he will go to his grave saying, "God hates fags!"

Rick

[Zerbie]

Originally Posted by Rick336

I agree.


But many people have been programmed so "rottenly" for so long that it is nearly impossible to change. Their free will is severely limited because their brains have been programmed one way for their entire lives.

Think about Fred Phelps.
Rick

Rick,

Oh yes, true. Believe me, I know more than I would like to know about rotten programming.

But very few people have been pushed into that kind of extreme. It is exceedingly rare.

The problem seems to be, rather, that many people are programmed so subtly and with so little of the extreme surface insanity such as Phelps demonstrates, that they are less likely to have occasion to even OBSERVE their conditioning. They may not even know it's there.
And if they do, they do not perceive it as obstructing their life in any way. They funnel it away as part of the overall meaning of the world, or a philosophy or ideology which they believe determines reality. Or even IF they do perceive it as an impediment in their own life, they perceive the effort involved in re-programming their conditioning to be too much work.

The problems are as follows:

1. to recognize one has been programmed (which probably includes recognizing how it occurred, and learning to understand why)

2. to discover that one's conditioned responses can be changed

3. to determine that one wants to invest in the work to change conditioning.

4. to learn how to go about producing such a change and then implement it in step-wise (but not linear) ways over a long period of time.

Probably, most people are content to live with their discontents.

For those of us who have noticed this, that we are living in little Hells in our own minds, we can choose to re-pattern our own thoughts and emotions, piece by piece. We can create new emotional patterns that will be healthier for us, and which are ultimately healthier for those we come into contact with.

We can choose to take ourselves down a new road.
I say this for our own benefit, not for Fred's. We can make new choices. Every day, we can make new choices that will re-route our thoughts and emotions to places where we would rather be.

[Rick336]

Originally Posted by Zerbie

We can choose to take ourselves down a new road.

Yes. We can make choices.

I can choose to go to work tomorrow or I can choose to stay home and sleep all day. But my past experiences (that are nothing more than a collection of thousands of memories from the past 57 years) tell me that if I choose to stay home and sleep all day that the end result will not be to my best interests.

Fred Phelps can choose to keep picketing funerals as a protest to the acceptance of homosexuality in the US, or he can choose to stop doing that and accept homosexuality as a natural sexual orientation. But, his past experiences since his birth more than likely tell him that to stop protesting homosexuality will go against the will of God which would be a bad thing.

What many scientists now believe is that our choices and behavior are a result of everything we've learned since birth. I don't think that this means that Fred Phelps is not responsible for his actions just as I'm responsible for my actions. We all have to take responsibility for what we do. It also doesn't mean that we need to accept Fred Phelps' behavior.

However, I do think it may mean that we have little (if any) free will. If we choose to behave in a certain way it is a result of our past learned experiences, even if we choose to change our thinking. In other words, the mere act of changing our thinking is a result of past experiences.

We also have to take brain structure into consideration. Neuroscience is finding that not all brains are equal. They're discovering that some people who do "evil" things have different brains than normal people. Some of these people don't have the capacity to feel sympathy or compassion because the part of their brain that produces these feelings is much smaller than a normal brain.

I think that by his extreme behavior, there is a chance that Fred Phelps has a neurological disorder. However, my brain tells me that labeling him as a bigoted moron is a perfectly acceptable way in our society to express my anger and frustrations about his behavior. At least, that's what I've learned from my past experiences.

Rick