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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (70742)	7/16/2003 7:22:38 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Delusion and religion linked 14jul03 STUDYING the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better insight into the minds of people with delusions. An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs -- including that a virgin gave birth to the son of god -- qualify as delusions. In his presentation to the Cognitive Science Conference today, Macquarie University PhD student Ryan McKay will outline the latest thinking on how religious belief relates to delusion. "The line between psychosis and intense religiosity is a difficult one to draw," he said. He said many beliefs were triggered by a bizarre or unexplained "religious experience", often produced by changes in brain activity. For example, it had been shown that when Buddhist monks went into deep mediation and experienced a sense of "being at one with the world", they also experienced decreased blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for concepts of the "self". The crux of delusion lay in why these experiences trigger religious belief in some people but not in others, Mr McKay said. "The idea is that you need some sort of second deficit which means you're unable to discard the impossible experience," he said. dailytelegraph.news.com.au